Nassar molested Maroney during one of her first training camps, she said. Afterward, he told her that “to be a great athlete, we sometimes have to do things that other people wouldn’t do,” she said. “Basically, he was silencing me and saying, ‘This is what it takes to be great.'”
She told Elle how she and her teammates would react to the abuse: “We would be like, ‘No, don’t do that. We just want you to work on our backs, our shins, our feet,” she said. “We’d be annoyed. We’d be mad. We all hated it.”
According to Maroney, the gymnasts “all talked about it in little ways” and were candid about what was happening to them.
“We never said, ‘We’re being molested,’ but we would say, ‘It’s like we’re being fingered.’ We’d even say it was time to go get fingered by Larry. But we were 13 and didn’t even know what being fingered was at the time. We were really young and naive from living in a gym,” she told the magazine.
But she found someone that would listen when she received a call from the FBI in 2015, asking about Nassar, per Elle.
