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The first thing you notice when you walk backstage is how many people are hugging. The room is swarming with female activists, politicians and actresses. Most of them have never met, but they're embracing one another like old friends, displaying a level of intimacy that's rarely found among strangers in mixed company. In one corner, Jane Fonda, who is wearing an olive pantsuit with a Time's Up pin, is chatting with a pair of young organizers; Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, holds court down the hall. Amid the frenzy at the conference, called The United State of Women, it takes me a minute to find Aly Raisman, who is sitting in a folding chair near the back of the room, deep in conversation.

She's speaking with Tiffany Thomas Lopez. Like Raisman, who barely tops 5 feet, Thomas Lopez is small and strong, radiating coiled energy. Otherwise, they're very different. Raisman, 24, has won multiple gold medals competing in two Olympics; she now lives with her parents outside Boston and flew to Los Angeles for this event. Thomas Lopez, who played softball for two years at Michigan State before leaving the program and returning home to California, is 37 and married. Their paths probably would not have crossed if they didn't share the deep, terrible bond of having been sexually abused by Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State doctor who in January was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison for molesting hundreds of young women.

“I know that I'm one of the few that are being heard, so I just want to do right by people.” Aly Raisman

Raisman, whose stick-straight posture betrays her years of training, sits with her legs crossed, eyes narrowing as she listens to Thomas Lopez recount her story. The former softball player arrived at Michigan State in 1998 and first saw Nassar that year. Raisman does the mental math about how old she was at the time, then glances at me and shakes her head. "I was 4. Jordyn [Wieber] was 3," she says later. "We never should've met him."

Wieber, her teammate at the 2012 Olympics, is standing a few feet away next to Jeanette Antolin, another former elite gymnast (and fellow Nassar survivor). In a few minutes, all four women will go onstage, stand in front of about 1,000 people and talk about their abuse. For Raisman, such work -- and it is work, difficult, draining work that exhausts her physical and emotional resources -- is now routine. Over the past few months, she has traveled across the country, giving interviews and speaking at college campuses and conferences like this one. She listens and shakes hands and poses for pictures, smiling beatifically as she rips the stitches of her wounds. She recounts what happened, then tells us what she wants to happen next.

While Raisman is younger than most of the event's speakers, she exudes a level of composure that can register as stoicism. When she talks, her voice is smooth and as steady as a drumbeat, building only when she wants it to. But Thomas Lopez seems anxious. She pulls out a pen and scribbles in purple ink on her notes, then shuffles the cards. Her hands are shaking. Raisman reaches out, steadying Thomas Lopez's arm, and looks squarely at her. "You're being heard now," she says.

When the two women start walking toward the stage, Thomas Lopez practices one of her lines, and Raisman nods. "Do it slowly, so people can be horrified," she says. She pauses, then adds, "Because they should be."

OVER THE COURSE of seven days in January, 156 women testified in a Lansing, Michigan, courtroom, telling a judge -- and, by proxy, the world -- how Nassar had abused them. Survivors like former youth gymnast Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to publicly accuse the doctor of sexual misconduct, in 2016, and Jamie Dantzscher, a gymnast on the 2000 Olympic team, spoke at Nassar's sentencing hearing about how he penetrated their bodies with his hands, using the guise of medical treatment as cover. Raisman wasn't planning on attending. But after watching Kyle Stephens, whose family was friends with Nassar, testify about how her parents didn't believe her when she told them what he had done to her when she was a child, Raisman booked a flight to Michigan the next day.

Her statement began quietly. Raisman walked to the podium, smiled at the judge, spelled her name, then rocked back on her heels for a moment, steadying her face. (She often made the same expression before her floor routines, right before the music kicked in.) Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail, and she wore a hot-pink blazer that matched her blush and lipstick; the effect was one of glowing, unapologetic femininity.

"Larry," she said, reading from a piece of paper, "you do realize now that we, this group of women you so heartlessly abused over such a long period of time, are now a force" -- she paused and lifted her eyes, then turned and faced Nassar, looking at him the way a person might gaze at the bottom of her shoe after realizing she had stepped on a piece of gum -- "and you are nothing."

The video went viral. How could it not? Raisman was channeling an emotion that female celebrities are rarely allowed or encouraged to display: rage. Raw, unfiltered, incandescent rage, the sort of rage that's uncomfortable to look at, like pictures of a crime scene. Women were exhilarated. They shared the speech online and posted clips and painted quotes on signs, some of which Raisman saw afterward. When she realized how many women could relate to her story -- how many women understood her story because it had happened to them too -- she was moved. "It was nice," she says, before correcting herself. "Not nice -- I want to use the word 'nice' wisely, because it's horrible. But to have so much support, and to know you're not alone ..." she trails off a little. "Because sometimes, you feel alone."

Raisman is sitting in a studio not far from her parents' house in the Boston suburbs in a robe, waiting patiently as a stylist curls her hair before a photographer takes her picture for this story. Raisman first told reporters in November that she had been abused; by then, a number of women had already come forward. But despite the enormous number of survivors -- to date, the Nassar scandal is the biggest case of sexual abuse in the history of American sports -- the story didn't attract widespread attention until the hearing this year. "There were a lot of gymnasts who had spoken up before the sentencing, but everyone kind of didn't get it," Raisman says. "I feel like the media didn't really get it either."

After Lansing, people got it -- sort of. While the story finally dented the national consciousness, the complexity of the scandal made it difficult for the public to grasp in full. For many, the easiest way to reckon with such a massive catastrophe is to focus on the wickedness of the perpetrator, so that when he's finally purged from society, his ousting gives the story a natural ending -- a sense of closure for everyone who teared up at home as the survivors gave their testimonies. But that's not what Raisman wanted when she spoke in court that day. She began her statement by ethering her abuser, but she finished it by pointing a blowtorch at every institution that enabled him, including USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee. "I think a lot of people don't understand that this is so much bigger than Larry Nassar," she says. "He thrived for decades. If someone thrives for decades, there are people who knew about it and did nothing. There were so many people who let us down."

Some of those people have been pushed out. When Steve Penny was president and CEO of USAG, the organization waited five weeks while conducting its own investigation before reporting Nassar's abuse to the FBI; he resigned in March 2017, about a month after Dantzscher, Antolin and gymnast Jessica Howard spoke about their abuse on "60 Minutes." (Penny reportedly received a severance package of around $1 million.) Lou Anna K. Simon, the president of Michigan State, which agreed to pay $500 million to Nassar's victims as part of a settlement, stepped down. But there are still adults who haven't been held accountable, says Raisman, whose inclination to hold her transgressors' feet to the fire calls to mind a real-world Arya Stark. At the rescheduled U.S. Senate hearing in June, it was revealed that more than a dozen USAG staffers knew about the allegations against Nassar before USAG went to the authorities on July 27, 2015 ("which is absolutely disgusting," Raisman says). None of them alerted the police.

The USOC hired a law firm to investigate what happened, but as of mid-July no details had emerged. While USAG has formed an Athlete Task Force, Raisman -- who, like many Nassar victims, has filed a civil suit against him, USAG and the USOC -- says she hasn't been asked to participate. (A spokeswoman for USAG said in an email that the task force will grow in the coming months, adding: "We hope that once the legal situation is resolved that Ms. Raisman and other athlete survivors will want to partner with USA Gymnastics on our path forward.")

Raisman is skeptical of the USOC-commissioned inquiry. "We need an independent investigation," she says. "If someone knew about Nassar or should have known, they need to be gone."

Whenever Raisman stresses accountability, she deliberately uses those words: should have known. Nassar had countless enablers, the majority of whom probably had no idea, or didn't want to know, what he was doing behind closed doors. But their inability to notice the ways in which he groomed targets, Raisman says, is what created a preventable tragedy. In March, she launched a campaign called Flip the Switch, partnering with the nonprofit Darkness to Light to offer online courses that train adults to spot signs of sexual abuse.

Raisman, who signs a certificate when someone completes a free class (1,600 and counting so far), knows many of these signals from experience. For example, she says, Nassar took "obsessive photos" of the young girls he treated, which should've concerned other adults. When the gymnasts traveled overseas for tournaments, he'd treat them at night, sometimes without supervision. "He would come into our rooms and work on us alone -- literally on top of our beds," she explains, disgust creeping into her voice. "When I look back, it's such a red flag."

Raisman's first encounter with the doctor took place abroad, when she traveled to Australia to compete at the age of 15. The national team staff insisted that she allow Nassar to treat her in her room, and while the massage left her uneasy, she was too intimidated to voice her concern. "I always thought he was weird, and he annoyed me and he definitely made me uncomfortable, but I almost felt guilty -- like I was the problem," she says. It wasn't until 2015, when Penny sent an investigator to her house to interview her about Nassar (USAG was tipped off by a coach who had overheard a conversation about Nassar between gymnast Maggie Nichols and another teammate), that she realized what she had endured.

"I sat up thinking about it all night," she wrote in her memoir, "Fierce," published last year. "It was like a stopper had been lifted in my mind, and the memories came flooding back clear as day: Larry. The hotel rooms. And afterward, the treats he would give us. Those little treats that planted the idea that he was looking out for us. Oh my god." After the meeting, Raisman called a USAG official and asked to speak to investigators again. A few hours later, she writes, she received a text from someone there (she doesn't reveal the texter's identity in the book) that told her to stop talking.