Sitting in a hotel’s dark bar, Raisman went into something of a trance as she recalled entering the Lansing courtroom and seeing Nassar, clad in a gray prison jumpsuit, in the witness box. When she walked to the lectern, she was surprised to feel his eyes following her. In fact he had gazed at each woman as she spoke. His expression shifted with each individual: sometimes he exhibited fear, disgust, or intense anger; with others, he was woeful, even weeping uncontrollably.

Nassar watched Raisman with a vacant stare. “The first second, when he looked back at me, I felt a little shaky,” she recalled. But hearing the quiet sobs of other victims sitting in rows behind her, she remembered that she was a leader. “I thought, I have to be strong, because this is bigger than myself,” she said. “Then I looked down at my paper, and I realized Larry has no power.” In a loud voice that projected across the courtroom, she said, “I am no longer that little girl you met in Australia where you first began grooming and manipulating. . . . Imagine feeling like you have no power and no voice. Well, you know what, Larry, I have both power and voice, and I am only beginning to just use them.”

In recent months, Raisman has also assumed the role of captain in this fight. Along with a small army of former Olympians, including Jamie Dantzscher and Jordyn Wieber, she hopes that by speaking out about the factors that led to Nassar’s abuse they will ultimately engineer a vast redesign of her sport’s culture. They are a new kind of American hero.

When I asked if she would compete in the 2020 Games, Raisman waved away the question. The win she wanted now was not Olympic gold but an eradication of sexual abuse and also of the sport’s psychologically and physically abusive aspects. “Right now the most important thing is doing as much as I can to make change,” she explained. “What I can say is that what I’m doing is taking every ounce of energy I have. It’s been empowering, and I’m proud to be in this position, but it’s very exhausting. I still feel like I’m in training, almost.” She gave me a firm stare and issued what seemed like a proclamation: “We are on a roll.”

The institutions that Nassar was involved with have announced mass resignations, including USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny and its entire board of directors; the president of the United States Olympic Committee, Scott Blackmun; and the president, athletic director, and other employees of Michigan State University, where Nassar was an assistant professor of osteopathy and practiced at a sports-medicine clinic. Olympic sponsors such as AT&T, Hershey, Kellogg, and Procter & Gamble have withdrawn their support of USA Gymnastics.

And yet we are still in the early days of accountability for this tragedy. Congress is asking those in positions of authority to come forward with information about who knew what when. The Olympic Committee has hired an outside law firm to conduct an investigation, but Raisman has been loudly questioning whether this investigation, which will allow employees to withhold information on advice of their lawyers, is enough. Settlement talks between Michigan State and the victims—most of whom are represented by John Manly, an attorney who fought the Catholic Church on behalf of young parishioners molested by priests—have concluded. Michigan State will settle with victims for $500 million. U.S.A.G. and the U.S.O.C. may ultimately settle as well, making the total sum much more than Penn State paid to resolve cases involving coach and serial pedophile Jerry Sandusky.

A jumble of legal issues will determine how the Nassar cases are resolved: medical-malpractice liability, and whether insurance companies will try to revoke coverage of U.S.A.G. on the basis of negligence. “Honestly, the Nassar situation may be more complicated than the Kennedy assassination,” says Peter Lake, the director of Stetson University’s Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy. “You could end up with something like the Warren Commission report—it’s that complex.” He elucidates that “the issue is ‘When do you come to consciousness that there is a pattern and something needs to be done?’ I have a feeling we are going to end up with a fairly controversial narrative over exactly when things congealed in a way that someone should have done something.”

But Raisman’s and her teammates’ crusade could have another impact: What if the changes they want mean that the U.S. won’t win medals? “I think there’s a way to make Olympic champions that’s not abusive,” said Wieber, in an interview in the days before she testified in Congress. “Maybe we will go down a little bit in the rankings before we go up just because of the lack of organization and all the things that are going on. The next couple years are going to be stressful for USA Gymnastics and the athletes. . . . But I cannot believe that you have to be sexually, emotionally, and verbally abused to win Olympic medals. I just cannot believe that.”

As recently as a few years ago, American women knew the path to power was straight if they refused to overturn the established order. “Leaning in” was the best they could do. But the Me Too movement takes its strength from women, and girls, declaring a coup d’état. From the perspective of Nassar’s victims, USA Gymnastics failed to support them, so now they will support one another, thank you very much. In this way, gymnasts share much in common with the college date-rape survivors who fought against universities in 2014 and the actresses who upended the Hollywood system in 2017. Though their milieus differ, all these women, and girls, are part of a new cultural force that could be dubbed “institutional-accountability feminism.” Raisman sums up their ultimate goal: “My dream is that one day everyone will know what the words ‘me too’ signify, but they will be educated and able to protect themselves from predators like Larry, so they will never, ever, ever have to say the words ‘me too.’”

Nassar disguised himself well. The youngest of five siblings in a Catholic family, he took a shine to sports therapy when he was a student in high school. He loved devising new ways to help athletes reach peak performance; after watching a ballet troupe rehearse The Nutcracker, he instructed the football team to include dancers’ stretches to warm up. By the time he was in college, he was volunteering at women’s national gymnastics competitions, and he continued to do so while earning his doctor-of-osteopathy degree. After marrying, he fathered three children, including a daughter with autism. He was a pillar of the community, counseling young married couples at church and shoveling snow off neighbors’ driveways. To honor his autistic daughter, he started a foundation to help children with special needs learn gymnastics.

Nassar wasn’t Herr Doktor sweeping into a procedure room carrying a bundle of scalpels in one hand and bottles of oxycodone in the other. He was a hands-on healer, a manipulator of bones and deep ligaments who eschewed the current fixations with juicing and surgery. He asked girls to call him Larry. He set up a room in his basement to treat gymnasts over the weekend. He was a “bubbly, friendly nerd,” a gymnast told me. He and the girls were peers partnering in health, even if the sport required only one of them to endure extreme forms of bodily discomfort and control her pain.

Nassar may have truly believed that an intravaginal-massage procedure called “pelvic-floor manipulation” fixed female gymnasts’ back problems, hamstring pulls, and gait issues. European osteopaths perform P.F.M. on postpartum women with incontinence and diastasis recti (separation of the abdominal muscles during pregnancy). The American Osteopathic Association has approved the procedure, though it is used far less often in the U.S. Isa Herrera, the author of two books on pelvic pain, says it can be life-changing for some women.

Stacey Futterman Tauriello, a physical therapist and the founder of 5 Point Physical Therapy, in Manhattan, explains that P.F.M. is, in fact, a helpful treatment for the same problems in some cases that Nassar claimed. “As pelvic therapists, we really want to get away from the word ‘massage,’” explains Tauriello. “Our techniques lengthen muscles and release trigger points that are tight and tender. It’s very muscle-specific. It’s manual therapy, not massage, and the release of these muscles can sometimes be painful.”

Over the years, a handful of gymnasts raised their voices about Nassar’s treatment methods. The earliest known instance of abuse occurred in 1992, when he invited an adolescent gymnast to his apartment. In 1997, a 12-year-old complained about his behavior to her mother. The mom wanted to go to the police, but the child refused, fearful that this would negatively impact her status in the gym. That same year, a 16-year-old gymnast reported Nassar to her coach. The coach asked a scrum of gymnasts if they’d experienced abuse, and when only one said yes, she dropped the matter.

Nine more girls reported Nassar to coaches over the next 20 years. They were told they had misunderstood his intent: he was only trying to heal them, to help make them fly higher through the air. In 2004, when one gymnast’s parents took her to the police station, Nassar quickly delivered a copy of a PowerPoint presentation on the sacrotuberous ligament, which runs through the pelvic region and can be manipulated by fingers to relieve lower-back and hamstring pain. The police declined to press charges. A 2014 case ended much the same way.

On the most superficial level, the Nassar case is merely about the psychopathy of one of the most prolific known serial predators in the history of sports—or one bad doctor, as John Engler, the interim president of Michigan State, allegedly told one accuser. Nassar simply took advantage of the kind of position that research has consistently demonstrated pedophiles seek: one giving him the chance to develop trusting relationships with children in an atmosphere of privacy and secrecy. The problem, goes this line of thinking, is one of individuals. To fix it, gymnastics merely needs to remove other identified predators like Nassar.

The 80,000 American girls who pursue competitive gymnastics in their hometowns each year are not necessarily going to come into contact with predators. This is a sport that requires adults to stretch, touch, spot, and establish trust with children, and most of those adults do so without malicious intent. The problem that arose in the highest ranks of U.S.A.G.—among the 20 American girls who compete for the Olympic team—stemmed from a confluence of factors, only some of which are relevant to lower-ranked gymnasts throughout the country.

As a result, gymnasts and their coaches began to hide injuries while there, often compounding the girls’ problems. Nor were gymnasts afforded a chance to rest and restore after their hours of daily practice. At the ranch, Raisman says they slept on uncomfortable bunk beds in primitive rooms, with bugs underfoot and showers that sometimes lacked hot water. The Karolyi ranch did not employ a nutritionist or possess rehabilitation equipment beyond an ice bath. Raisman also explains that gymnasts were served nutritionless food, such as powdered eggs and instant coffee. Because they dined at the same time as their coaches, they also felt pressure to undereat. They certainly did not want to be seen “pigging out” in front of coaches. (The Karolyis did not respond to questions.)

At night, while the coaches sometimes gathered at the Karolyis’ home to play canasta, Nassar treated girls in their rooms, even though he didn’t have a license to practice medicine in Texas. He brought the gymnasts candy, a tactic that worked particularly well because the girls were very hungry.

Nassar told the girls that they could talk to him honestly about their injuries. He positioned himself as the one adult at the ranch whom they could trust, a moral authority who would shield them from other uncaring adults. And, it is important to note, Nassar was the only doctor whom U.S.A.G. allowed top gymnasts to see.

Parents were not invited to the ranch, and cell-phone service was so poor that the girls rarely called home. Nor were parents allowed to stay in the same hotels as their children during their busy travel schedule of elite meets. One mom told me parents were also instructed not to create a distraction before competitions by hugging their children or wishing them good luck.

From time to time, gymnasts whispered to each other about Nassar. They’d call him “crotch doc” or “butt doc.” Wasn’t he weird? Was what he did to them on the massage table all right? On the Olympic team, the whispers began in 2011, when McKayla Maroney, who would go on to win a silver medal in the vault at the 2012 Games, broke down after a particularly brutal “massage” session. The other girls talked with her about what had happened, but they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t trust the adults at the ranch enough to tell them a secret; maybe they would get kicked off the team for being complainers.

In 2015, Raisman, by this point a 20-year-old Olympic gold medalist, was in the ranch’s gym with Maggie Nichols, a young gymnast from Minnesota who was Biles’s best friend. They were talking about Nassar when Nichols’s coach, Sarah Jantzi, overheard their chatter. The coach sat Nichols down for a talk. Then, she phoned Nichols’s mother, Gina, to tell her what she’d learned. “I almost died,” Gina Nichols told me, about hearing that Nassar could have been molesting her child.

Jantzi reported Nassar’s abuse to Rhonda Faehn, a former elite gymnast turned U.S.A.G. executive, who gave the information to Steve Penny, the organization’s president. Penny, the father of triplet adolescent girls, is a canny sports marketer who turned American cycling into a powerhouse in the 1990s, and received kudos for similar success with gymnastics after he landed at U.S.A.G., in 1999. Penny and Gina spoke, but Penny did not call the police as might be expected with an accusation of sexual abuse of a minor. His attorney Edith Matthai says that Penny didn’t call because he did not think “there was sufficient information at that point to believe that molestation occurred.”

Instead, Penny hired an Indianapolis-based human-resources investigator to interview Nichols and Raisman. Five weeks later, when the report was complete, Penny reported the abuse to the F.B.I.’s Indianapolis office. He also forced Nassar out. When Nassar announced his departure on Facebook as a voluntary resignation in advance of plans to run for his local school board, Penny did not publicly object. Nor did Penny call Michigan State to inform officials there of what he knew. He says that the F.B.I., concerned about compromising its investigation, asked him not to speak to others about Nassar. Nassar continued his medical practice at the college and a Michigan gymnastics gym called Twistars for nearly a year, until the story of his abuse finally leaked to The Indianapolis Star, which launched an investigation. Forty Michigan athletes have come forward to say that Nassar abused them in the year between Gina’s initial complaint to Penny and Nassar’s arrest.

When Maggie was overheard at the ranch, she was ranked second in the country behind Biles. But four months before the Olympics, she tore her meniscus while training for her Amânar—a vault that incorporates two and a half twists. Raisman told me Maggie came back strong before the Olympic trials and was still thought by many to be a contender for the team. But when Maggie’s parents showed up at the Olympic trials in San Jose, California, the NBC production team, which normally reserved seats for relatives and friends of the gymnasts in order for their cameramen to get good audience shots, had failed to get seats for them, according to Gina. “All the other girls’ parents’ seats were numbered off, and even before the trials started ours weren’t included,” Gina said.

Maggie was off the Olympic team. Martha said Maggie’s scores and specialty disqualified her for the team. But Gina believes Penny may have intervened. “He was afraid about us saying something [about the abuse]—I truly believe that, when I look back,” Gina told me. (Penny denies this.) She says that Penny called her multiple times that year. And when Biles asked Maggie to visit her at home in Texas to film a Hershey’s commercial, Gina and Maggie traveled to the state for the day. When they returned, Gina received a call from Penny, who was angry that Maggie had filmed the commercial without his consent. “He was screaming and swearing at me on the phone,” Gina told me, quietly sobbing. “I knew right then if that’s the way he was talking to me that he wasn’t even considering her [for the Olympics].” (Penny’s attorney denies Gina’s characterization of these events, and says that Penny was simply trying to make sure Maggie did not violate N.C.A.A. rules about filming commercials.)

I asked Jennifer Sey, a former national champion and the author of Chalked Up, a 2008 book about her childhood in gymnastics, whether she believed Maggie had been unfairly sidelined. “He [Penny] ran U.S.A.G. like a Third World dictatorship,” Sey said. “The girls were just inventory. If you did anything you weren’t supposed to do or say, you would be ostracized, swept aside, and another girl was chosen. That’s what happened to Maggie, sadly.”

Penny’s attorney disputes this: “At no time did Mr. Penny ever say a negative word about Maggie, and in fact made sure that she was among the athletes considered by the selection committee.” More generally, she rejected the notion that Penny treated the girls as inventory. “All of the athletes mattered to Steve,” she says.

Maggie retired from elite competition shortly after those Olympic trials, and is now a sophomore at the University of Oklahoma studying sports broadcasting. For the past two years, she has been a No. 1 ranked gymnast in the N.C.A.A.

When I spoke to her recently, she had just returned from a sports massage—a real one. She doesn’t like conducting interviews about Nassar and rarely talks to journalists. Thinking about him, she said, “makes me very upset, and sad, and puts me in a bad mood. When I think about it or talk about it, I kind of just want to be by myself and close myself from everything.” She did not travel to Aquilina’s courtroom in Lansing to deliver a victim-impact statement. She told me she had too much to do at school.

Maggie still loves gymnastics. She was eager to tell me about the life lessons she had learned from the sport. “It’s helped me with time management, and to be very independent, because in gymnastics you’re traveling all the time,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “It’s taught me to be confident. You have to go out there and do your best routine under the highest amount of pressure. I feel like I grew up at a very young age with gymnastics.” She said she was trying to look at life in a positive light these days. She wanted to enjoy gymnastics, and she believed that enjoying herself is making her better at her sport, too.

When Maggie decided to retire, she wrote an essay for her fans that told how, as a little girl, she would go to the mall with her mom and stand at a wishing well. Each time she threw a penny in the water, she wished that someday she would make it to the Olympics. The stars didn’t align for her, though, and that was all right. She had tried as hard as she could. She had done her best. “I think I made that little girl proud, that little Maggie proud,” she wrote.

Not to be overly dramatic, but what is the price of little girls’ dreams? Nichols, Raisman, and the rest gave themselves over to our national gymnastics system—body, mind, and soul. They didn’t do it for the money, and, in fact, the only way to make significant money in gymnastics is through sponsorships around making the Olympic team.

When told to obey, they obeyed. “The gymnasts had no institutional voice in the sport at all,” said Sey. “It’s almost like they were gaslit. Think of this: you’re a kid with your ankle broken. They [some coaches] say, ‘You’re lazy, get back out there.’ You’re hungry. They tell you, ‘You’re fat.’ It’s so disorienting that you don’t trust your perception of the world anymore.”

In the past few months, U.S.A.G. has implemented some changes. It has closed the ranch. It is also working with SafeSport, a new Denver-based center that will process any future abuse claims on Olympic teams. Most important, they have expanded the list of banned coaching behaviors to include not only sexual abuse but also verbal and emotional abuse. It now not only permits parents or another chaperone to travel to camps and competitions with their daughters—it requires it.

Some gymnastic meets are streamed online, and when I watched this year’s American Cup, in Chicago, on YouTube with my six-year-old daughter, we recoiled in horror as Mao Yi, a Chinese gymnast (and Olympic bronze medalist), crumpled to the ground as she dismounted the vault. After falling, she propped herself up on a forearm and put one hand to her forehead, in a gesture of agonized disappointment. Then the screen abruptly switched to the U.S.A.G. logo. No one needed to see a gymnast wheeled away. My daughter sat on my lap, staring at the screen. “They’re trying to fix her so they’re waiting a little,” she said. Then she added, “I feel sad for that girl. They will give her a rest and then her next turn will come up.”

Would I sign up my daughter for gymnastics today, knowing what I know? I would have answered “no” on the day that we watched Mao Yi collapse. The heartbreak isn’t worth it; the potential for harm, both physical and psychological, isn’t worth it. Mao was 18 and had just broken her left femur. Her chance of another “turn” at the Olympics is slender.

Raisman has also been impressively unafraid of provocation and of exhibiting her own mature sexuality. American culture may have long regarded the phrase “sexy gymnast” as taboo—gymnasts are supposed to remain eternally sexless, eternally girls—but she is changing this sad old game. This winter, she posed for Sports Illustrated without clothes. Black capital letters ran down her torso and on to one toned leg, forming the sentence: WOMEN DO NOT HAVE TO BE MODEST TO BE RESPECTED.

Simone Biles is focused on 2020 but supportive of the public activism Raisman, Nichols, and Wieber have been engaged in. Because of the commitment to change of all these women, there’s reason to be optimistic. In Los Angeles, I met with Jordyn Wieber, one of Raisman’s Olympic teammates. She grew up in Lansing and began gymnastics as a four-year-old after a scout identified her as “a freakish-looking child with weird muscles.” Her mother gave her a solemn pledge that when Jordyn began the sport she would never miss any of her meets, and aside from one that conflicted with her “godmother obligations,” she never did. Nassar knew Wieber when she was a toddler and began abusing her when she was 14. When Wieber took the lectern in Aquilina’s courtroom, Nassar began to weep.

Wieber is now a gymnastics coach at U.C.L.A. We met in the university gym, which has a large window overlooking the area where the college team practices, but since they had left for the day to attend classes, a local kids’ program had taken over. We peered down to watch girls as young as my daughter somersaulting and unsteadily balancing on beams.

Wieber told me she had been motivated by fear throughout her career: “We just developed a weird relationship to authority where we listened to whatever they said.”

She has sworn she won’t treat anyone the way she was treated. She tries to understand each girl and what she needs in the moment. If what she needs is rest, the girl gets it. Her team also talks openly about sexual and emotional abuse. “From what I’ve heard, a lot of college programs aren’t even talking about [Nassar], and at U.C.L.A. we have decided that we need to talk about it,” Wieber says. When I asked her what she’d say to a mom who, post-Nassar, won’t sign her daughter up for gymnastics, she said, “I think the sport is so amazing. I think it’s so amazing that I’m coaching it. And hopefully when kids are a little older, it will be a safer sport, too.”

A few days after I talked to Wieber, I attended a U.C.L.A. meet against Oregon State. Several subjects of this story told me I needed to watch a collegiate competition because they were so much more fun than elite meets. And this one didn’t disappoint. The stands were crammed with moms and pre-teen daughters in Bruin blue, even some with blue-painted fingernails. I sat next to a “gym mom,” who ran a janitorial company. She told me about her sacrifices to pay for her daughter’s gymnastics training and the bingo night she ran at a local restaurant to raise money. “Except for the girls who go to the Olympics and can get sponsors and all that, this isn’t a moneymaking sport,” she said. “You do it because you love it.”

On the floor, Wieber and her senior coach paced in slingback heels. Every time a girl finished a routine, her teammates, who wore teal ribbons in their hair to support sexual-abuse survivors, screamed and cheered. As Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” pumped over the loudspeakers, U.C.L.A. pulled ahead on the uneven bars and vault.

Next were acrobatic dance routines on the floor. Katelyn Ohashi, a two-time All-American who had been a favorite for the last Olympics but got derailed by shoulder surgery, stood on a corner of the mat. Once in the grips of a vicious eating disorder, she now looked healthy, happy, and ready to throw down a routine to a medley of Michael Jackson songs.

Ohashi dashed across the mat, performing back splits, midair splits, midair somersaults, and even a little moonwalking. From the sidelines, Wieber watched intently, her hands by her sides, and each time Ohashi stuck a landing, Wieber clenched her fists. They were having fun. And when Ohashi finished, the judges awarded her a perfect 10.