FALL RIVER, Mass. — There is a weariness in her eyes and voice, the first hints of a woman worn down by the decades.

“I’m beat,” she said. “Done.”

Marcia Frederick, America’s first world champion female gymnast, is haunted.

By the naïve, vulnerable teenage girl she can never save.

By the coach she said preyed on her.

By the adults who she said didn’t stand up for her.

By all those early mornings and middle of the nights in her bedroom, all those times in hotel rooms and cars and secluded hallways.

By that day at the 1979 World Championships in Fort Worth when Frederick, the reigning uneven bars world champion, walked onto the competition floor for the all around event overwhelmed by a sense of dread.

“I had no brain left,” Frederick said. “I couldn’t think of gymnastics.”

No, Frederick said she couldn’t stop thinking about whether the same thing was going to happen that night after the competition that had taken place that very morning.

Two hours before then 16-year-old Frederick was to represent the United States against the world’s top gymnasts, she said her coach, Richard Carlson, had her perform oral sex on him.

Frederick, in an exclusive interview with the Southern California News Group, alleged that Carlson had her engage in sex acts for two years starting in 1979, just weeks after she turned 16 and only months after she won the uneven bars gold medal at the 1978 Worlds. Carlson continued to have sexual relations with her while she competed for Team USA in major international competitions and trained for the 1980 Olympic Games, Frederick said, until she was 18.

“Two years,” she said. “For me it seemed like 10 years.”

More than two years since Frederick filed a formal complaint with USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body, alleging sexual misconduct by Carlson the organization still hasn’t taken action against the coach.

Frederick’s frustration with USA Gymnastics’ failure to sanction Carlson more than two years after then-USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny confirmed that the organization was investigating Carlson led her to make what she characterized as the difficult and painful decision to go public with her allegations. USA Gymnastics’ failure to discipline Carlson mirrors the inaction of her coaches and other adults in her life when Frederick first told them of Carlson’s alleged sexual misconduct in 1980, she said.

“I’m tired of living with ghosts,” Frederick said.

Frederick’s allegations come as USA Gymnastics finds itself in the midst of the worst sex abuse scandal in American sports history. More than 140 former gymnasts and young athletes allege that former U.S. Olympic and USA Gymnastics national team physician Larry Nassar sexually abused them as teenagers and even younger. McKayla Maroney, Gabby Douglas and Aly Raisman, members of the “Fierce Five,” record-shattering 2012 Olympic gold medal-winning gymnastics team, said Nassar sexually assaulted them while they competed for the U.S. at major international competitions like the Olympic Games and World Championships as well at Team USA training camps at the Karolyi ranch in Texas. Jamie Dantzscher, another Olympic medalist, told the SCNG last August year that Nassar sexually assaulted her and some of her U.S. teammates on an almost daily basis at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.

Maggie Nichols was the first known former U.S. national team member to alert USA Gymnastics officials of Nassar’s alleged sexual abuse, confirming the charges to Penny and other top officials in June 2015. USA Gymanstics kept the allegations private for 15 months, allowing Nassar to retire from his USA Gymnastics and U.S. Olymmpic Committee duties to retire in without disclosing the real reason and to continue to see young patients at Michigan State and Michigan-area gymnastics clubs.

Nassar was sentenced last month to 60 years in prison after pleading guilty to three federal child pornography charges. He has also pled guilty to 10 sexual assault charges in state court in Michigan. Nassar is scheduled to be sentenced on those charges later this month.

Former gymnasts and female athletes have filed civil lawsuits in several states including California against Nassar, USA Gymnastics, three of its former top executives and former U.S. national team directors Bela and Martha Karolyi. The suits allege that USA Gymnastics, its top officials and coaches, and the Karolyis created a culture of abuse within American gymnastics that enabled Nassar’s abuse and then ignored warning signs of his predatory behavior.

The USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal became public in 2011 when three women told the Orange County Register that former U.S. national team coach Don Peters had sex with three teenage gymnasts in the 1980s. Peters was banned for life by USA Gymnastics in November 2011 and removed from the sport’s Hall of Fame. Peters did not contest the ban.

Frederick said she first told USA Gymnastics investigators that the sport’s sex abuse issue extended beyond Peters during an interview for the organization’s 2011 investigation following the Register report. Peters was Frederick’s coach when she won her world title. Frederick said she was not sexually abused by Peters. During the 2011 interview a USA Gymnastics investigator told Frederick that the organization was only focused on Peters at that time.

Carlson continued to coach young female gymnasts until at least 2015 and instruct at USA Gymnastics-sanctioned clinics for promising young female athletes until at least 2012, according to USA Gymnastics reports and interviews.

Frederick, 54, filed a formal complaint about Carlson with USA Gymnastics on September 12, 2015. The complaint came two days after Penny was informed that Nassar was retiring from his position with the organization.

Penny confirmed Frederick’s complaint about Carlson in a December 17, 2015 letter obtained by SCNG.

“USA Gymnastics takes complaints of this nature very seriously and will investigate this matter,” Penny wrote.

“We anticipate that the investigation will be completed in approximately 90 days,” Penny added in the letter. Penny was forced to resign in March under pressure from the U.S. Olympic Committee.

More two years later the matter remains unresolved.

“To me they’re dragging their heels,” said Frederick, who turned 55 earlier this month and works as a rehabilitative therapist and coaches young gymnasts.

When SCNG first attempted to reach Carlson at the Elite Gymnastics Center in Amityville, New York, where he has coached in recent years, an employee asked to take a message, saying he was expected at the gym later that day. An employee later contacted the SCNG and said Carlson had not worked at the gym in two years.

Attorney Anthony Colleluori contacted SCNG the following day on Carlson’s behalf and confirmed that Carlson has been interviewed by USA Gymnastics investigators.

“I guess he would deny any of her allegations dealing with impropriety,” Colleluori said.

Asked if Carlson denied having sex with Frederick, Colleluori said “there was no physical relationship between the two of them. There was nothing of a sexual nature.”

“Rick just wants to live a nice, quiet life,” Colleluori said of Carlson, who owns a Long Island plumbing business.

Colleluori added that Carlson has considered suing Frederick for defamation but “he won’t do it. He’s too good of guy.”

Carlson was later reached by SCNG. He gave a brief response, saying he was on his way to an appointment and citing that the matter was under investigation.

“USA Gymnastics is investigating all that,” Carlson said when asked if he had sexual contact with Frederick. “Yeah, I deny it.”

USA Gymnastics did not respond to a request for comment on the Carlson investigation.

THE FIRST GOLDEN GIRL

Before Mary Lou and Gabby and Simone there was Marcia, America’s first golden girl, the New England 15-year-old who shocked the gymnastics world in 1978 by upsetting Nadia Comaneci, the personification of perfection, among others for the U.S.’ first woman’s global title.

“I went into their world and broke it down,” Frederick said.

Frederick’s victory at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France, was the first tear in the Iron Curtain that had been tightly wrapped around a sport dominated by Soviet bloc women for 30 years. The Strasbourg triumph was a pivotal moment for U.S. gymnastics, changing overnight the mindset by infusing a confidence into the American sport; the first significant step in the U.S. women’s emergence as a global superpower in the coming years, a rise that elevated gymnastics to a place alongside track and field and swimming as the marquee sports at the Olympic Games.

“You know how Americans love to win,” said Kathy Johnson-Clarke, an Olympic medalist. “To finally break through. She was by far the best and it was such a spectacular moment. It just raised the possibility, like, ‘Hey, we’re onto something!’ It’s like getting your foot in the door. It raised everybody’s, not just their expectations, but their belief that we could do this.”

Nearly 40 years after the emergence of the first U.S. world-beater, the expectations for American women are golden. In the nine Olympic Games that the U.S. has participated in since Strasbourg, American women have won 46 medals, 14 of them gold, including the last two team titles and the last four individual all-around crowns. The international success of the American women has turned USA Gymnastics into one of the most recognized and lucrative brands in Olympic sports, attracting corporate sponsors like NBC, AT&T, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s, Hersheys and Under Armour. USA Gymnastics, a non-profit organization with tax exempt status based in Indianapolis, reported revenues of $34.3 million in 2016, according to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

(SCNG reported in December that several corporate partners, including Procter & Gamble and Kellogg’s, decided not to continue sponsoring USA Gymnastics in the wake of the sex abuse scandal.)

But Frederick also has more in common with Douglas, Maroney and Raisman then just athletic excellence. The U.S. rise to the top of the sport triggered by Frederick’s World title has been tracked along the way by a parallel and decades-long undercurrent of sexual abuse sometimes lurking just beneath the surface, sometimes visible in plain sight and now washed up upon American gymanstics’ golden shore.

“This didn’t just start with Larry Nassar,” said Jennifer Sey, a former U.S. champion and author of “Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics’ Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams.” “This was going on before Bela and Martha.”

Which is why Olympic veterans like Johnson-Clarke sees Frederick’s story as important to U.S. gymnastics today as it was in 1978. To understand the culture of abuse that Nassar exploited, they said, you have examine the environment that shaped it, you have to expose its roots.

“If we don’t at some point connect the dots to say, ‘You know what, this goes so far back,’ it’s going to keep going on in the future,” Johnson-Clarke said.

A LIFE UPSIDE DOWN

Growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts, Frederick was always looking for a game of some sort.

“I was a very competitive little thing,” she said. “I was good at dodge-ball because I was small and fast. I couldn’t hit anybody but nobody could hit me either and the job is to be the last one standing.”

When she was 9 years old, Frederick rolled her ankle, running across a neighbor’s lawn late for a dodge-ball game.

“So I decided to walk on my hands,” Frederick said. “And that’s how I became a gymnast. I was a gymnast that day. That’s how I started gymnastics.

“I never really made it to the dodge-ball game. I never cared. I spent my life upside down from that day forward.”

She started sneaking into gymnastics classes on the other side of a curtain from her father’s adult league basketball games.

“I went into that class and joined it for a month before they caught me,” Frederick said. “I just walked right in. (The coaches asked) ‘Who are you and where are your parents and how did you get here?’”

Before long she was spending nearly every free moment in a gym that moved to an abandoned hotel, sometimes staying until 10 or 11 p.m.

Frederick’s victory as a 12-year-old at the Massachusetts state championships caught the eye of Muriel Davis Grossfeld, a three-time Olympian and then the U.S. national team coach who ran the Muriel Grossfeld School of Gymnastics Inc. Grossfeld opened her operation in a former A&P grocery store, later moving to a Masonic Temple. By the time Frederick’s original coach Leo Leger turned her over to Grossfeld in 1977, agreeing he had taken her as far as he could, Grossfeld’s academy was working out of a cinder block gym in Milford, Connecticut. Fifty feet away was the three-story farmhouse she used as a dorm for the girls.

“It was the first real program (in the U.S.),” Johnson Clarke said. “There were only handful of places back then.”

Christine Frederick (now Gaetano), Marcia’s mother, told the New York Times in 1978 “Mrs. Grossfeld is an excellent role model.”

Grossfeld oversaw a staff that included a Russian pianist who played the girls’ floor exercise music, a trainer, a housekeeper and Peters, then a young up and coming coach.

“Don Peters never liked me. He didn’t like me in the beginning, kind of made it clear,” Frederick said. “He just found me ugly and little. They all kind of found me not eye candy, you might say, and I was aware of that.”

Frederick, however, was undeterred. She woke up each morning to a poster on her bedroom wall of Nadia Comaneci, who left the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal with three gold medals and seven perfect 10.0 scores.

“That was the gymnast I had to beat, that’s her,” Frederick recalled. “My attitude was, ‘I’m coming for you.’”

But first Frederick had to navigate the tension between the equally strong willed Grossfeld and Peters.

“Don and Muriel were always volatile,” Frederick said. “Very different views on sport. Very different views on coaching it. Her and Don would have explosive arguments. Don is a very, very technical coach. Very technical. This is how he coaches: he stares at you, and he can look at it and go, ‘If you do this and this, this will happen.’ He’s very technical. Muriel had a huge emotional aspect to it. ‘Marcia take these feelings’ and Don says, ‘Well Marcia put your arm in this position.’

“Muriel was the reason I got to World Championships. She got me there. The reason why I won was because of Don Peters.”

Said Johnson-Clarke, “Don was a genius as a bars coach. He made Marcia.”

Frederick posted her own perfect 10.0 on the uneven bars at the U.S. Championships, a performance so impressive that meet officials gave Grossfeld the bars. Even so Frederick wasn’t among the favorites when she arrived at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France.

“I was really unknown to everybody,” she said.

Before the 1978 Worlds the sport had no reason to pay attention to women gymnasts outside Eastern Europe. The individual events and the all-around were added to the Olympic program in 1952. Of the 105 individual women medalists in the seven Olympic Games between 1952 and 1976, 104 were won by women from the Soviet bloc. In the uneven bars only one non-Eastern European woman had even placed in the top six at the Olympics.

The uneven bars competition in Strasbourg was expected to be decided by the Soviet Union’s Elena Mukhina, the World all-around champion, and Comaneci, whose bars routine in Montreal produced the first 10.0 score in Olympic history.

“She was the queen,” Frederick said.

But not for long.

Frederick, her training severely limited in the weeks leading up to Worlds by an ankle injury, led off the final round.

“She went up first, this unknown American with ice water in her veins,” said Johnson-Clarke, a bronze medalist in the floor exercise at the 1978 Worlds.

Frederick delivered a routine that earned a 9.95 score that gave her an overall total of 19.80 that held up for the gold medal. Mukhina finished second with Comaneci, the Olympic champion, slipping to fifth.

“I don’t think (Comaneci) could have touched her,” Johnson-Clarke said. “Marcia elevated it to a place where the others just couldn’t go.”

Frederick returned to the U.S. with the world title but without her coach. Peters left the Connecticut gym following a dispute with Grossfeld shortly after the World Championships, Frederick said. Within a few months he landed at SCATS, a gym in Huntington Beach he soon built into a global powerhouse. Peters coached two SCATS gymnasts onto the 1980 Olympic team and then four years later Team USA, again coached by Peters, won the team silver medal and eight overall medals at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, a total not surpassed by a U.S. Olympic women’s gymnastics team until the Simone Biles-led squad won nine medals at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Yet in the same decade in which Peters led the U.S. to Olympic glory, he was also having sex with teenage gymnasts, three women said. Former U.S. national team gymnast Doe Yamashiro and another former SCATS gymnast told the Register Peters had sex with them when they were teenagers. A former SCATS assistant director also told the Register that Peters confessed to her in the 1990s to having sex Yamashiro, the second SCATS gymnast and a third teenage gymnast.

Frederick said in 1977 when she was 14 she “walked in on Don and one of the gymnasts.”

“I always went to the gym early and if you went down these stairs and took a right, there was a team room and we had a grip bag, take my grip bag and put it in there and go out,” Frederick recalled. “Well I opened up the team room door and there was Don with a gymnast and she was putting on her leotard and she was bending over and he was standing behind her. And I took that grip bag and went out. And in my mind it was odd.”

Said Gaetano “there was a pattern there” at Grossfeld’s.

Frederick said Peters never acted inappropriately toward her.

“I almost wondered if Don hadn’t left would that have happened to me?” she said. “Because Don really didn’t like me. He just thought I was the ugliest thing. So I felt safe.

“When he left that’s when my hell began,” Frederick continued. “When Don left that’s when Richie began.”

“NO IDEA WHAT WAS IN STORE”

Grossfeld assigned Carlson to work with Frederick after Peters’ departure. Carlson was tall, athletic, handsome with a thick dark hair and mustache.

Carlson began working with Frederick at a time when she was depressed about Peters leaving and struggling with her body image and appearance.

“I was mourning Don, I really was,” she said. “When he left I thought to myself how am I get to the Olympics? How am I going to win without him?”

Frederick’s spirits lifted when Carlson began complimenting her appearance.

“To have Richie do it, a good looking man, I’d been called somewhat not good looking all my life. I was always called a boy,” Frederick said. “I was very tomboyish. I was always called the boy. And I was just under the impression that I wasn’t very likable or a good looking girl. I was used to that. Even as a child outside of the sport I was always known as the tomboy, the athlete, you know. I wasn’t asked to dances. I rarely wore dresses. I knew to Muriel and Don, I was a gymnast in the rough.

“So when Richie began to notice me over all the other girls, I was flabbergasted, enthralled and I had quite a crush on him, I really did because he noticed me…He made comments about my lips and then he would make comments about how I’m starting to fill up my leotard and how my hair is starting to grow from short to a little bit longer now.

“And all these things, for this person to notice me not in a gymnastic way was quite a pull. All the girls had crushes on him. He was charming to everybody. But when he noticed me it was, to me that changed things for me and I smiled more, said, ‘Wow, maybe I am not that ugly ducking, maybe I’m not the ugliest world champion out there.’ And I had this thing about this body, this body image and then things went from there and Richie took it to another level.”

Carlson began talking to Frederick about steps they could take to improve her chances of defending her world title and winning at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

“Richie had conversations with me, separately, about being closer to your coaches,” Frederick said. “(Carlson said) ‘Gymnasts should get very close to (their coach) so they have a good bond and a good relationship.’ So I said ‘Ok, alright.’ I had no idea what was in store for me. And when I look back I was so easy (to be manipulated). I was so easy. It kills me. I feel sorry for her. That Marcia. Because I was so easy. I was right there. I was being groomed. Easily being groomed from the lipstick (comment). When I look back I can see it.

“He made a comment about how pretty my lips were. Odd, that’s an odd comment. But for me ‘pretty,’ there’s that word. Because he knew I was a loner. He knew I was a little on the outside of all the other girls and I was easy. So Richie had conversations (about getting closer).

“And my abuse with Richie was oral sex. ‘This is what we’re going to do and this is how you get closer to me.’”

Under Connecticut law in 1979 the age of consent was 16. The current Connecticut law making sex between a coach and athlete under 18 second degree sexual assault wasn’t passed until 2002.

Frederick said the married Carlson insisted oral sex wasn’t “cheating” in trying to convince her to be intimate with him the first time in an area between the farmhouse kitchen and living room.

“It seemed to happen so quick. ..,” she said.

“Then it was sometimes every day, twice a day, could be once a week, could be in the bedroom. If we traveled to competitions. In cars, at competitions, in hotels, everywhere, all the time. And for me it was just this is how this person wants us to be so we’re closer and I just did it.”

Carlson’s abuse of Frederick took place at a time when relationships between young female gymnasts and their male coaches were commonplace. It was even evident in her own gym. Grossfeld married — and later divorced — her coach Abie Grossfeld.

“Back in my day gymnasts married their coaches,” Frederick said. “So I thought this is what you’re supposed to do. I really thought that. This is natural and normal.

“I didn’t like any of this but I just thought this was what Muriel did with Abie. This is what (another coach/former gymnast married couple) did. This is just what we do. So I didn’t…” Frederick paused, “I just did that. I just went on with that.”

Said Johnson-Clarke “Did (Frederick) see it as horrible? No. Because people did that back then. Did she want to do it? No, because even back then that age difference was seen as no good.”

Frederick was like many young elite athletes, whose drive and focus prevented them from fully grasping the peril of the situation they’re entering into with their coach, said Katherine Starr, a former Olympic swimmer and founder of Safe4Athletes, a athlete welfare advocacy organization.

Young elite athletes have, Starr said, “so much passion that they don’t think about this tidal wave coming ashore. Then it comes to shore and then you’re going to ask this person to pull up? You can’t pull up. You’re with them. So the sad thing is that your passion and your focus doesn’t allow you to connect with what’s wrong and what’s danger.”

Gaetano recalled a change in her daughter’s personality after she began working with Carlson. Marcia Frederick began insisting that her family make the hour drive from Springfield to Milford to pick her up for the weekend

“She was very anxious to get out of there,” Gaetano said. “I just didn’t know why.”

Gaetano recalled one 1979 weekend in particular. A massive snow storm hit New England, closing down major freeways. Gaetano stopped at roadside restaurant to call her daughter with the news should wouldn’t be able to make it to Milford.

“And she said ‘no,no, no, you’ve got to come,'” Gaetano recalled Marcia saying. “‘I don’t want to be alone.'”

Gaetano said she missed another red flag during a trip Frederick took to a European competition with Carlson.

“I called her in hotel room and she said she couldn’t talk because Richie was massaging her,” Gaetano said. “I found that strange so I called Murial and Murial said ‘they do it all the time.'”

By the time Frederick was to defend her world title in Fort Worth in December 1979 she was overwhelmed by the situation with Carlson, desperate to find a way out yet unable to ask for help. As part of their preparation for the competition, U.S. coach Bill Sands had the team go through a visualization exercise.

“We had to lay on the mat and visualize and close our eyes,” Frederick said. “And I kept opening my eyes because I was really uncomfortable laying there with my eyes closed and a man (walking around).

“That ’79 whole situation was a horrid, horrid competition. The competition itself wasn’t great but all the background things. All the time I had to be with Richie. The day of the competition. That morning before we competed. That night after we competed. This was awful. I’m not surprised I lost my title.”

Gaetano remembered Frederick being especially rattled in Fort Worth.

“In those days the gymnasts weren’t allowed to be with the parents,” Gaetano said. “But you could wave at them from the stands and Marica and I would make a signal to meet in the bathroom. So I met her in the bathroom and she said ‘Mommy, I don’t want to stay here anymore.'”

Frederick finished sixth on the uneven bars, 23rd in the all-around.

“I couldn’t think of gymnastics,” she said. “I thought of how many ways I could get away from this person. Literally two hours before this I was (having oral sex). I was just beat. Done.”

Frederick said she considered telling Sands in Fort Worth about the situation with Carlson

“And I wasn’t strong enough to go Mr. Sands and say ‘This happened just now, right before I got here and I know I’m competing in two hours. And I don’t want to go back to my hotel because it will happen again so I’m just going to stay here. Is that OK?’ I just never asked.”

Frederick began leaving a trail of evidence hoping someone would discover Carlson’s sexual involvement with her.

“I left so many clues as a little girl. Underwear in strange places,” she said. “I left so many clues for people and no one (found them).”

At one point a housekeeper working for Grossfeld in the farmhouse confronted Carlson about a condom she found in a strange place.

“And he made up some stupid story and I’m right there behind that wall and I’m going, ‘It’s finally going to happen, finally’ and nothing,” Frederick said. “I was so upset.”

Frederick’s inability to speak up is not uncommon among young elite athletes who have been sexually abused by their coach, Starr said.

“You are harmed and the fact is that you need to suppress this so far because you have to continue to perform in your sport, you’ve had to continue to show up,” said Starr, who was sexually abused by a coach. “It has nothing to do with age. You’ve been silenced. And your voice has been shoved so far down and I don’t care if this person’s 40, you’re asking a person to speak out and be the strength in a weakening situation. The power differential. This person had talent. This person took away their soul to get to that talent, right? So the coach takes away the soul which athletes have the talent. So you’re asking the person who has lost something to show up again and be her own advocate in this situation that has broken them in so many ways. That’s a tall order.”

And so the situation with Carlson continued, Frederick telling herself it was price she had to pay to chase a gold medal at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

“At the time I had one goal I wanted to be the best in the world and I wanted to go to the Olympics and nothing superseded that,” she said. “I think it was a way for me to rationalize. If I keep my goal I can forget everything else. And you know what so the morning went by, all right maybe the night will have to go by. That was my rationale.

“I still had the goal.”

And then Jimmy Carter took it away.

NOT WORTH IT

Initially Frederick, like many likely U.S. Olympians, dismissed talk of a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow because the Soviet Union’s December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

“We had heard (about) the boycott as a threat,” she recalled. “I honestly really didn’t think It was going to happen. I was just like there’s no way this person is going to do this. No way.”

Frederick was visiting her parents, who had moved from Springfield to Connecticut, when President Carter on March 21, 1980 formally announced his decision to boycott the Moscow Games.

“It really shocked me and I was sitting in a big green chair and I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s over,’” she said. “And I became so enraged at everything I did just to get this Olympics, to have the highest person in the world take it away from me. But then I got so angry, I hadn’t been that angry before. I was so upset and everything I did for this, with him and all that training. I was beyond angry. I was vengeful.”

It was that March day that Frederick, jolted and devastated by the confirmation of the boycott, decided she would no longer let Carlson have sex with her.

“That day, that boycott, never again,” Frederick recalled thinking. “That day it is over. I knew I was beat. I was beat. No gymnastics. No Olympics.”

Frederick said she confided to Grossfeld about Carlson.

“I told her what happened,” Frederick said. “I was 18 (at the time). I told her in the parking lot at Grossfelds. I went to my father, I told them all within a couple of days.

“I went and told my mother and the reactions I got were none,” she continued, running her hand in front of her face to demonstrate a blank look. “None. Murial had no reaction whatsoever. No emotion, no reaction, didn’t say a word to me. I just stood there when I told her. She was in her car and I told her, ‘Murial, I have to talk to you there’s something so wrong.’ And I was always sort of a quiet person anyway, so when I told her she just, there was nothing, zero, she just drove off.

She received similar reactions from her father, Frederick said.

“I went and told my father in the house and my father, the look on his face was disgust, just disgust for me, for me. This is how I viewed it,” she said. “My father and I are so estranged. My father has nothing to do with me, wants nothing to do with me, can’t even look at me. He’s just, I don’t know, I don’t know why. The look on his face, I was again, it was a like an electric shock and then there was nothing. Zero.”

Said Gaetano, “my husband just shut down.” The couple later divorced.

“When all that happened and there was no reaction, I expected something, I expected my father, who was my idol, to go break his legs, my Dad would at least go to his house, something, something, pull his hair out,” Frederick said.”And he did nothing and the look, that look changed my life that day. And I was so enraged. How could these people do nothing? It’s not like they didn’t believe me. They probably did, but I wasn’t worth any effort, nothing, not even a conversation, not even a hug, nothing. I was really taken aback by that. I realized I wasn’t worth it. I was world champion but I wasn’t worth it.”

Charles Frederick did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Gaetano said she was stunned when Frederick told her of Carlson’s alleged sexual misconduct.

“We were in the car,” Gaetano said. “I was driving the car and I had my daughter tell me something that I I wouldn’t have imagined.

“I said ‘how long?’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And she said you would have pulled me out and I knew I could be the best in the world.”

Carlson denied the allegations to Grossfeld, Frederick and Gaetano said.

Gaetano said she confronted Grossfeld but not Carlson. “If I had it would have been with a gun,” she said.

Grossfeld did not respond to numerous requests for comment over a more than month long period.

“The reason Murial won’t call you back is because she continues to deny what happened,” Gaetano said. “Murial knows what happened.

“Murial will never admit that she knew he was lying about what happened with my daughter. She knew.”

Devastated and frustrated by the reaction of those closest to her, Frederick said she felt that she had no choice but to have sex with Carlson in a situation where she knew they would be caught.

“I regret it to this day,” she said. “(But) if they didn’t believe me then I was going to prove this.

Shortly after Carter’s announcement Frederick said she and Carlson were caught in bed by his wife.

“To me I had no choice,” Frederick said. “I didn’t want to do this to her. But I had no choice, how was anyone going to see me?”

This time Grossfeld fired Carlson, Frederick said. Three months later she hired him back.

“When Richie was brought back into the gym,” Frederick said, “I had that same thing of ‘well, I’m not worth it.’”

Frederick made the 1980 Olympic team, the team going nowhere. Unwilling to work with Carlson, unable to find a female coach to train under with Grossfeld focusing more on the business side of the academy, Frederick slowly faded from the sport.

“All I could see was this going back to the way it was,” she said. “So I was unable to work with a male coach anymore. I didn’t trust anybody, couldn’t trust anybody.

“It was all of it. It was all of it. Obviously the boycott was huge. Richie was huge. But it was the actions or the inactions of the people. That was still prominent to me. I couldn’t believe these people who were supposed to love me, my Mom, my Dad. They were supposed to love me. How could they let me go like this?”

Two years later Mary Lou Retton, not Frederick, would be the 1984 Olympic Games’ cover girl, joining Peters and Johnson-Clarke in leading Team USA to its Olympic breakthrough in Los Angeles. Gymnastics fans would see one final glimpse of Frederick that year in “Nadia,” a made for television biopic on her former rival. Frederick performed the Comaneci character’s gymnastics stunts in the film.

“I was a better gymnast after the boycott as far as maturity, experience and health,” Frederick said. “My body was healthy. I was in a great spot physically. All I needed was a female coach. Honestly I couldn’t spread my legs anymore. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t look at a man and listen to him objectively as a coach. I gave up. I just gave up.

“I had so many people tell me, ‘Marcia just hang on, just hang on. None of them knew what had happened. That all stayed with the Grossfeld family. And again I just didn’t say anything.

“I was quiet.”

NOTHING IS DONE

She fell in love, got married, started a family, got divorced and all along she was building walls.

“Really this whole thing, it’s not what happened between Richie and I that changed my life,” she said. “It’s everybody’s reaction or non-reaction for lack of a better word. That’s what’s changed my life. I don’t trust anybody. Everybody’s at an arm length. Everybody.

“And a lot of my decisions have been based on protecting myself even if I didn’t know it at the time.”

Frederick remains estranged from her father.

“He doesn’t know my children,” Frederick said of her father. “He doesn’t know me. He literally wants nothing to do with me. He’s a rather cool person if I do see him.

A few years ago Charles Frederick attended a ceremony honoring her daughter and the 1980 U.S. Olympic team in Hartford and left without speaking with Marcia, she said.

“To this day I don’t know that face that he gave is it because that happened to him in his life and he didn’t protect his daughter?” she said referring to his reaction when she first told him about Carlson. “Or is it that she’s just a disgusting slut? I still don’t know. And I struggle with that a little but I’ve gotten through it.

“I think I’ve reached the point where I just can’t get any lower. I’m already there. I just can’t get any lower so I’ve gotten to that place where I don’t care. I’m numb because I can’t fix it. I can’t change it.”

But she could help push Carlson out of gymnastics. A few years ago Frederick was shocked when she saw a photograph of Carlson at an age group gymnastics meet on a friend’s Facebook page.

“All these years I was under the impression that he was gone” from gymnastics, Frederick said. In fact, in addition to running a plumbing business on Long Island. Carlson coached at Elite Gymnastics, which offers classes and teams for children from 18 months to late teens. Carlson was worked alongside USA Gymnastics national staff as an instructor for several years at USA Gymnastics-sanctioned “Rising Stars” for young, high level female gymnasts until at least October 2012, a year after Frederick first warned USA Gymnastics investigators there other coaches in the sport besides Peters who acted inappropriately.

Frederick confided to Johnson-Clarke in 2015 about Carlson’s alleged abuse and filed the formal complaint with USA Gymnastics.

“The complaint was made and it’s been sitting for two years,” she said.

She has had a series of interviews with USA Gymnastics officials over the past two years.

“Again nothing is done,” she said.

And so she waits. She lives in a remote part of southern Massachusetts with her longtime boyfriend and 40 years of ghosts. Coming forward about Carlson was hard, Frederick said, and the drawn out investigation has worn on her. Yet the ordeal, she said, has given her a chance for the closure on her gymnastics career denied her by Carter’s boycott and the inaction to her initial allegations against Carlson.

“I’m going to go down fighting,” she said. “On my terms.

“I want peace in my life. I don’t care about myself but if coming forward can prevent some little girl from going through what I went through it was worth it.”

Yet there will always be one young girl she knows she can never save. Frederick doesn’t sleep much and her nights are frequently interrupted by a reoccurring dream in which she tries unsuccessfully to save her 16-year-old self from Carlson.

“It’s a completely different person,” she said. “What goes through my mind I feel so sorry for that little girl. I feel so bad for her. I wish that didn’t happen to her. And she was so easy (to manipulate), and so little and so naïve. Just so little. Such a sweet thing.

“Every day I have to deal with this girl.”