Judge Aquilina Demands Gymnastics Safeguarding Reforms

A decade after former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar's sexual abuse crimes came to light, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina and survivors are demanding stronger protections for athletes. At the World Gymnastics Championships in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, they criticized sports organizations for failing to implement meaningful reforms and prioritizing competitive success over children's safety.

Nassar received a prison sentence of up to 175 years in 2018 for sexually abusing more than 250 women and girls. According to The Guardian, Aquilina insisted that all 169 victim impact statements be heard after Nassar pleaded guilty. She has since criticized the limited progress in preventing abuse across sports and other institutions.

Aquilina said the continuing failures reflect a broader problem in how institutions approach athlete protection.

"Nassar was 10 years ago and there have been very few changes that are meaningful," said Aquilina, the judge who sentenced Nassar.

She called for substantial reforms extending beyond small policy adjustments, arguing that existing efforts had not adequately addressed the problem.

"I’m not looking for little changes that a lot of people get credit for, I want meaningful change, a lot of meaningful changes, and we’re just not there yet, not in sports, not in life, not in the courtroom, not in the classroom or in the legislature.

I have to ask why? It’s the same answer: it’s money, medals and notoriety over the safety of children and safety is a human right."

Aquilina made the remarks alongside activists, survivors and advocates from Gymnasts for Change International (G4CI), who gathered in Rotterdam to press for stronger accountability within the sport.

Claire Heafford, a survivor of abuse in gymnastics and chief executive of G4CI, said the response from governing bodies had not matched the scale of the revelations about abuse.

"We’re still in a place where survivors aren’t being listened to and where the scale of the reform hasn’t met the scale of the revelations."

Heafford attributed resistance to institutional fear, rigid hierarchies and a lack of willingness to reconsider established practices. She said people seeking change within sports organizations often lack the authority to overcome opposition from senior leadership.

"It’s incredibly difficult for anybody in the system who wants to create change to do so if there’s resistance above them. It’s incredibly difficult for people in the system to feel empowered as change makers when you’re in such fixed hierarchies."

The gathering coincided with an upcoming leadership transition at World Gymnastics, where secretary general Nicolas Buompane is scheduled to step down at the end of the year.

Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch said sports organizations had introduced some protective measures since the Nassar scandal, including safeguarding rules and certain protections for whistleblowers. However, she said implementation remained a major weakness.

"On the one hand, you can measure progress in athlete voice and advocacy, in some whistleblower protections, in safeguarding rules across sport – though the rules are there, but the implementation is not," Worden said.

Worden said the revelations had prompted a reckoning across numerous sports, but institutions had often responded defensively rather than confronting structural failures.

"Then, on the other hand, you can measure it in the impact gymnastics had in all other sports. I’ve interviewed hundreds of survivors in about 50 sports, winter and summer. Ten years on, just the scale and the severity and the duration of the abuses by the so-called Olympic doctor Larry Nassar caused a reckoning across sport. But the reckoning often took the wrong shape, it took the shape of defence.

Except, this is not a small problem, it is a severe problem and any fair assessment would have to say that sport, broadly speaking, including gymnastics, retains the exceptionalism the Catholic church and schools once had.

There was a time when it was really hard to get rid of the abusive priest or teacher because they were moved around to different jurisdictions and continued abusing. That is why the scale and the duration of those abuse catastrophes was so great. Sports still has the same problem."

Former elite acrobatic gymnast Eloise Jotischky, who won a civil case against British Gymnastics over abuse she experienced between 2016 and 2018, said written policies cannot protect athletes without effective oversight. Her case involved inappropriate weight-management practices and verbal abuse.

"There’s still a lot to be done. For example, British Gymnastics have come out with a number of policies, they’ve got their hydration policies, they’ve got their weight management policies. That’s brilliant, but let’s implement them.

It’s the implementation that matters because if you don’t implement them and if you’re not monitoring them then what’s the point?" Jotischky said.

Kim Shore of Gymnasts for Change Canada, a survivor and independent safe-sport advocate, called on World Gymnastics to establish stronger cultural standards and encourage national federations to enforce them.

"There’s a crisis of abuse across sport in Canada and yet we’ve seen really no reform and I would say that same lack of action, that same apathy is happening at World Gymnastics," Shore said.

Shore proposed measures including ending gymnast weigh-ins, requiring medical clearance before athletes return to competition and preventing coaches barred in one country from continuing to work elsewhere. She argued that international rules could influence national federations and local clubs even where governing bodies lack legislative authority.

"Sure, they’ve taken some steps, but they could post new rules anywhere that say: ‘No more weighing of gymnasts. No more gymnasts returning to competition without a doctor’s note. No more coaches moving from one country to another country, if you’re banned in the US, you can’t just take a gymnast from Mexico to the Olympics.’

They could have a whole list of rules and regulations, even if they don’t have any sort of legislative jurisdiction in an area, that’s still going to influence the culture because as soon as the leading body says we’re not weighing gymnasts any more, then when the weighing gets done those coaches know they’re breaking the rules.

If World Gymnastics would come out with a whole list of cultural reforms and started to normalise those within the national federations and then give them backing so that the national federations can go to the clubs all the way down to grassroots, I think we would see faster reform and less resistance."

The Guardian said World Gymnastics, USA Gymnastics, Gymnastics Canada and British Gymnastics had been contacted for comment.