Olympic gymnast Jamie Dantzscher, who was a part of the bronze-medal-winning American team at the Sydney Games, wrote the foreword for the 2018 reprint of "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes." Dantzscher was one of the first women to file a civil lawsuit alleging that Larry Nassar, the former U.S. Gymnastics and Michigan State team doctor, assaulted her while seeing her for athletic injuries. She filed the suit in 2016 and has told her story publicly several times. The below is excerpted from Dantzcher's contribution to the book:

My coaches weighed me every day, called me fat, and told me I needed to lose weight. At fifteen years old, I started making myself throw up after meals. When I told someone at USA Gymnastics that I was starving myself and throwing up meals, their only response was, "I don't care how you do it, just get the weight off." When I started my period at sixteen years old, my coach said it was because I had too much body fat and ordered me to lose weight so I wouldn't menstruate anymore. I remember once having the flu and throwing up for five days straight. When it came time for my weigh-in afterwards, I had lost seven pounds; my coach said I needed to figure out how to keep it off. At another point, my coaches made me take ephedrine for weight loss, before such usage was banned. And this was all part of my typical daily routine. Like elite gymnast Karen Reid (Chapter 4, "Do It for America: Pressure"), I hated my days off, because it meant my horrible life would be starting all over again the next day.

When my routine was interrupted due to an all-too-common injury, the challenges of training became even more insurmountable. In the aptly named chapter "If It Isn't Bleeding, Don't Worry About It: Injuries," former gymnast and Olympic medalist Betty Okino discusses training with a knee injury under the controversial coach Bela Karolyi: "He thought I was faking." Similarly, every time I told my coaches something on my body hurt, they didn't believe me. I took Advil twice a day to try to dull the pain and, like former Olympic gymnast Wendy Bruce, had many cortisone shots over the years just to be able to compete. I learned how to work through my injuries because I felt like I had no choice. After all, I wasn't a quitter. I was tougher than that, right? I trained and competed on stone bruises on my heels; with plantar fasciitis so painful that I couldn't even stand on carpet; with my hips going out of alignment on a daily basis; with sprained ankles, broken toes, fractures in my back, and torn cartilage in my wrist and ankle, just to name some of my many health issues. I remember practicing my round-off triple full dismount on beam one day when the pain in my wrist got so bad that my body simply wouldn't allow me to work through it anymore. Every time I did my round-off my hand would automatically make a fist on the beam instead of lying flat. I was terrified this would make me miss my footing and injure myself even more badly than I already had. I finally told my coaches, who refused to believe me. They shouted at me for what seemed like hours: I didn't want to work hard enough; I was acting like a spoiled brat; I was a quitter. A couple months later, I had surgery on my wrist to clean out the torn cartilage.

After enduring years of emotional, physical, and mental abuse, I couldn't get the main character of the "Little Girls" movie (the film adaptation of "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes" released in 1997) out of my head. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be free. I quit gymnastics about a year before the Olympics. During that time, I was able to think and reflect on what I really wanted. I realized that more than anything I wanted to go to college, and a gymnastics scholarship was my best opportunity to get there. After taking only three weeks off, I returned to the gym to train for the chance at a scholarship to UCLA. If training my best meant making the Olympics, all the better. I had to accept that my coaches would yell and belittle me on a daily basis. I wouldn't be allowed to have friends at school or go to school dances because they were "distractions." I would never go on family vacations and rarely see my siblings perform in their sports. I wouldn't be allowed to talk to my teammates at the gym because that meant I wasn't focused. I couldn't feel like a person anymore if I wanted to reach my dream. I felt like a robot. This became my "normal."

I made the Olympic team in 2000. I was ecstatic when they announced my name, and in that moment, I did feel as though my dream had come true. Unfortunately, that feeling was short lived. My Olympic experience was nothing like the dream I had harbored my whole life; it was just a continuation of the same nightmare. We placed fourth overall as a team but nevertheless were made to feel like complete failures. Ultimately, I was happy when the Olympics -- the goal I had worked toward my entire life -- was over, and I could smile freely again as I headed off to enjoy college.

My college experience in gymnastics was drastically different. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was treated like a person instead of a robot. Knowing that my coaches and teammates actually cared about me brought back my love for the sport. After graduating from UCLA with a degree in psychology, I coached gymnastics at various summer camps and gyms. I enjoyed being a positive coach and wanted to inspire young gymnasts no matter what level they were going to achieve. I was determined to never be a coach who took their love for gymnastics away from them. I wanted them to never experience the twisted, harmful world I grew up in.

Grand Central Publishing

While I was finding a renewed sense of purpose through coaching young girls, I struggled in my personal life. In college, I began therapy for my eating disorders and the overwhelming abuse I suffered from my elite career. I felt lost for most of my twenties, engaged in a pattern of self-destructive behaviors. My threshold for pain and abuse had been built up so high that I would stay in relationships with men who abused me physically and emotionally. The feeling was all too familiar. Once again, I lost my personality. I felt like a robot, eager to please and ready to do whatever it took to get through each day, hoping there was light at the end of the tunnel. Once again, that became my new normal. I watched my friends and family members settle into their careers and get married and start families, and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get my life together. I became so severely depressed that I wanted to take my own life. Thanks to good friends and family, I was able to come out of my depression and discover the determination to get my life on track and never fall back into the same self-destructive patterns. I moved to San Diego to pursue my new dream of becoming a motivational speaker, though I still coached young gymnasts. I stopped dating for years because I didn't want anyone else controlling my life. I thought I was heading in the right direction to live a normal, quiet life.

In summer 2016, I was working at a gymnastics camp in Concord, California, when my good friend and former elite gymnast Melissa Genovese asked me to have a conversation with Mike Lynch, a coach who was working at the camp with me. For years, Melissa had been sexually abused by her personal coach, Keith Willette, but she had not yet spoken out against him. Melissa wanted me to ask Mike -- who also knew Keith -- if he had heard of any other allegations of sexual abuse about Keith. When I started talking to Mike that morning in July, I told him some of the things Keith had done to Melissa. As I described some of his disgusting violations out loud for the first time, I suddenly realized that these were very similar to what the USAG head team physician, Larry Nassar, had done to me while I was training for the U.S. national team. At first, I couldn't fully believe he was the same as Keith Willette. As far as I knew, everyone in gymnastics loved Larry Nassar -- including me. I didn't think that he could have hurt me. I trusted him. It was a privilege to work with a doctor who treated so many Olympians and national team members. Among all our screaming coaches when I was training, Larry was the only nice adult, and he was always on my side. He helped me with all of my injuries, snuck me food and candy when I was starving, and made me laugh and feel okay when every day in the gym and at training camps was so awful. No way he was abusive. He was supposed to be the good guy.

I went to the Olympic Trials that weekend in San Jose to hang out with some of my old gymnast friends, and I confided to Dominique Moceanu what Larry had done to me. Her response gave me the confidence and courage to act: she said she believed me and that I needed to report Nassar. Dominique put me in contact with former Olympic swimmer Katherine Starr. Katherine had been sexually abused by her coach and later started an advocacy and educational nonprofit organization called Safe4Athletes, a website where athletes could report instances of sexual abuse safely and anonymously. When I told her about Larry, she recommended I see an attorney she had worked with on sexual abuse cases. I was still filled with confusion and doubt; I didn't know what to feel or think about Larry's actions, and I didn't necessarily feel like a sexual abuse victim. But I understood that if Larry was really a child molester, then there were possibly other victims. During this time, I found out that Larry had resigned from gymnastics because of other allegations of child sexual abuse -- and then saw on his Facebook page that he was running for a position on a school board, where he would be working with children again. I thought about Larry Nassar doing the same thing he did to me, but to one of my nieces or the little girls I coached.

It was time to speak up.

With my attorney, I led a civil suit against Nassar and USA Gymnastics. Fearful of brutal blowback from the gymnastics community -- I was accusing a popular, influential, trusted doctor of sex crimes -- I led as "Jane Doe." Soon I learned I wasn't alone in trying to hold Larry accountable. Weeks earlier, another former gymnast named Rachael Denhollander had led a criminal complaint against him with Michigan State University, where Larry was also a team physician.

Former Olympic gymnasts Rachael Denhollander, left, and Jamie Dantzscher in a news conference after filing lawsuits against USA Gymnastics and Larry Nassar. AP Photo/Chris Carlson

Together, Rachael and I did an interview with the Indianapolis Star, which had published a story about USAG ignoring sexual abuse allegations against at least fifty gymnastics coaches. I still insisted on anonymity in the Star story. But there was enough biographical information for gymnastics people to figure out it was me. Just as I feared, many didn't believe me. Some of the comments on social media were incredibly hurtful. I was accused of making the entire thing up for attention. The most disappointing part was that many of the people saying these negative things were those I had considered friends. One former gymnast outed me in a private message on Facebook, which she sent to several other gymnasts and coaches in order to collect positive Larry stories. It was sickening how quickly so many people took his side over mine. In short, I faced the same public response that many women who speak up about abuse receive: I was dismissed, discredited, and ostracized.

Then that all changed.

Every day after my article came out, my attorney would call to say another victim came forward until finally -- as of January 2018 -- an unimaginable total of 265 women had joined the ranks, and I felt secure knowing I had done the right thing.

Even now, I still feel strangely disconnected from what happened to me. I can only comprehend the heinousness of what Larry did to me through other survivors' stories. But I finally understand that I subconsciously registered his abuse, along with the emotional abuse of my coaches, because it seeped into other areas of my life and echoed through my relationships, self-destructive behavior, anxiety, and depression.

People often ask how Larry Nassar could get away with this for so long. "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes" answered this question back in 1995. It's all here in these pages. Only in an environment in which abuse of all kinds is normalized could sexual abuse on this scale happen. It required the gymnasts' well-practiced silence and the adults' dereliction of responsibility. It required a culture that prized Olympic medals over the well-being of the young athletes striving to win them.

Rachael Denhollander delivered the last of 156 victim impact statements in Larry Nassar's sentencing hearing in early 2018. "How much is a little girl worth?" she asked. "How much is a young woman worth?"

It is the question that Joan Ryan asked two decades ago, and the question that must be answered still.

Excerpted from LITTLE GIRLS IN PRETTY BOXES: THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF ELITE GYMNASTS AND FIGURE SKATERS. Copyright ©1995, 2000 By Joan Ryan. Foreword copyright Jamie Dantzscher. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.