LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne appeared in a TikTok post to describe the camp where former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar abused the team’s athletes as an asylum.
More than a hundred athletes, including gold medalists Simone Biles and Aly Raisman, say they were sexually assaulted by Nassar at the Karolyi Ranch in Huntsville, Texas.
Dunne was a member of the junior national team that trained at the Texas camp under the USA Gymnastics program.
The collegiate gymnast, who has eight million followers on TikTok, referred to the ranch in a recent post, calling it a “shelter.”
Using a TikTok trend set to Taylor Swift’s song, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?, from the singer’s latest album, Dunne shared a series of photos from the Karolyis camp.
LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne shared a TikTok about the camp where former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar abused the team’s athletes
Dunne used a TikTok trend of using a Taylor Swift song to share photos of the Karolyi Ranch
More than a hundred athletes say they were sexually abused by Nassar at the Karolyi Ranch
The trend, which has been circulating on the platform in the two weeks since the album’s release, uses the lyrics, “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.”
Dunne has previously spoken about the USA Gymnastics training camp and the scandals that occurred at the ranch.
“Every year I left my family for a week to go to the training camp in the US, where obviously there were terrible scandals and the whole environment was not so good,” she said in an interview on the Full Send Podcast last year.
‘I was on the US national team there. I decided when I was 16… USA Gymnastics fell apart while I was in that program and I thought, ‘I’ll just be happy to keep my full ride at LSU.'”
More than 150 gymnasts were abused by Nassar, the former national team doctor, during his 30-year career.
Nassar admitted to sexually assaulting the athletes while he worked at Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics.
The doctor also admitted to possessing child pornography, and more than a hundred women demanded more than $1 billion from the federal government after the FBI failed to stop him.
He was sentenced in federal court in 2017 to 60 years in prison on charges of possessing child sexual abuse material. The following year, Nassar was sentenced in two separate courts in Michigan to 175 and 125 years respectively for harassing female gymnasts under his care.
Simone Biles is one of the athletes who were abused by the former team doctor
Biles, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, trains at the Karolyi Ranch in 2015
In 2018, USA Gymnastics terminated its agreement with the Karolyi coaching camp after the abuse was uncovered during an investigation.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday a $138.7 million settlement with more than 100 people who accused the FBI of grossly mishandling sexual assault allegations against Nassar in 2015 and 2016, a critical time lag that left the sports doctor was able to continue preying on victims before his arrest.
Combined with other settlements, $1 billion has now been set aside by several organizations to compensate hundreds of women who said Nassar attacked them under the guise of treatment for sports injuries.
Simone Biles publicly broke her silence in January 2018, revealing in a powerful tweet that she was one of Nassar’s victims.
Pictured are Martha and Bela Karolyi, after whom the Karolyi Ranch is named
Gymnast training during a morning workout at Karolyi Ranch in 2011
In her statement, she also shared her sadness at having to continue training at Karolyi Ranch, USA Gymnastics’ former national training center, where she and other gymnasts were abused by the disgraced doctor.
“It took me a long time to write that, probably a few days, because every time I went to write I would start to get bummed, and I couldn’t get through it,” she said.
Shortly after Simone’s tweet, USA Gymnastics closed the Central Texas ranch owned by former coaches Bela and Martha Karolyi, and the gymnast realized she could use her platform to advocate for others.
During the #MeToo campaign, McKayla Maroney shared her story, claiming that Nassar began abusing her when she was 13, and that the attacks only stopped when she left the sport in 2017 at the age of 20.