Olympic gold medalist McKayla Maroney added her voice to the #MeToo movement — saying she was among the more than 125 women whom a former USA Gymnastics doctor was accused of sexually assaulting.
Maroney, 21, who won a team gold in London in 2012, named convicted sex offender Dr. Larry Nassar as her repeat abuser, saying he molested her from the age of 13 until she left the sport last year.
“Dr. Nassar told me that I was receiving ‘medically necessary treatment that he had been performing on patients for over 30 years,’” she posted Tuesday in a statement on Twitter.
“It seemed whenever and wherever this man could find the chance, I was ‘treated.’ It happened in London before my team and I won the gold medal, and it happened before I won my Silver,” she wrote.
She said the worst abuse happened during the 2011 world championships in Tokyo when she was 15.
“I had flown all day and all night with the team to get to Tokyo,” she wrote. “He’d given me a sleeping pill for the flight, and the next thing I know, I was all alone with him in his hotel room getting a ‘treatment’. I thought I was going to die that night.”
The former Olympian alluded to the scandal swirling around disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
“People should know it’s not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening everywhere. Wherever there is a position of power, there seems to be potential for abuse,” she said “I had a dream to go to the Olympics, and the things that I had to endure to get there, were unnecessary, and disgusting.”
The “Me Too” movement — which encourages women to identify themselves as victims of sexual harassment or assault — gained momentum after Weinstein’s case exploded.
“Our silence has given the wrong people power for too long, and it’s time to take our power back. And remember, it’s never too late to speak up,” Maroney said in her statement.
Nassar spent nearly 30 years as an osteopath with the USA Gymnastics program and is now in prison in Michigan after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography.
He is expected to stand trial on charges of sexually assaulting nine girls, to which he has pleaded not guilty, and is being sued by more than 125 women who claim he sexually assaulted them under the guise of treatment.
USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body and Nassar’s former employer, has said it was not aware of the allegations against Nassar until July 2015, at which point he was fired, Time magazine reported.
Maroney also won the silver medal in the individual vault, but her disgust with coming in second was famously captured in an image in which she pursed her lips.
Fellow Olympian Aly Raisman also spoke out recently about Nassar.
The six-time Olympic medal-winning gymnast declined to talk about whether she was treated improperly by Nassar — but called him “a monster.”
She blamed USA Gymnastics for failing to stop him and spending too much of the fallout attempting to “sweep it under the rug.”