USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar has been sentenced to up to 175 years in prison, after years of abusing his position and molesting more than 100 young female gymnasts in his care, including Olympic gold winner Simone Biles.
Nassar pled guilty to multiple sexual assault charges and is already serving a 60-year sentence for possessing child pornography, the ABC reports.
Judge Rosemarie Aquilina declared, “I just signed your death warrant,” as she handed Nassar his sentence, following a harrowing seven-day hearing in which more than 150 women read victim statements about their experiences with the disgraced physician.
“It is my honour and privilege to sentence you,” the judge told Nassar. “You do not deserve to walk outside a prison ever again. You have done nothing to control those urges and anywhere you walk, destruction will occur to those most vulnerable.”
Nassar made a brief statement following his sentence, saying hearing his victims’ statements had “shaken me to my core.”
“I will carry your words with me for the rest of my days,” he said to the court.
He faces a minimum prison term of 25 to 40 years, the New York Times reports.
While working as the USA Gymnastics team doctor, Nassar molested the girls in his care when they presented to him with hip and back pain. He would digitally penetrate them, often while their parents were in the room, behind a sheet or using his body to obscure his movements.
“I … learned a few weeks ago from my daughter that at the world championships in Tokyo, (Nassar) drugged her, made her lay nude on a treatment table, straddled her and digitally penetrated her while rubbing his erect penis against her. She was only 15-years-old. She said to me, ‘Mum I thought I was going to die,”’ Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney’s mother, Erin Maroney, wrote.
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