LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne appeared to describe the camp where former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar abused the team’s athletes as an asylum in a TikTok post.
More than hundred athletes, including gold medal winners Simone Biles and Aly Raisman, say they were sexually abused 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 boasts eight million followers on TikTok, referenced the ranch in a recent post, branding it an ‘asylum’.
Using a TikTok trend to Taylor Swift’s song, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?, off the singer’s latest album, Dunne shared a series of photos of 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 to a Taylor Swift song to share photos of the Karolyi Ranch
More than 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 was released, uses the lyric, ‘You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.’
Dunne has previously touched upon the USA Gymnastics training camp and the scandals that occurred at the ranch.
‘I would leave my family for a week every year to go to the USA training camp, which obviously had terrible scandals and that whole environment was not so good,’ she said in an interview on the Full Send Podcast last year.
‘I was on the USA national team there. I decided when I was 16… USA gymnastics fell apart while I was in that program and I was like, “I’m just going to be happy keep my full ride to 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 when he worked at Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics.
The doctor also admitted to possessing child pornography, and more than 100 women sought over $1billion from the federal government for the FBI’s failure to stop him.
He was sentenced in federal court in 2017 to 60 years in prison on charges of possessing child sex abuse material. The following year, Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years and up to 125 years, respectively, in two separate Michigan courts for molesting female gymnasts under his care.
Simone Biles is one of the athletes who were abused by the former team doctor
Biles, a four-time Olympics Gold medalist, trains at the Karolyi Ranch back in 2015
In 2018, USA Gymnastics terminated its agreement with the Karolyi coaches’ camp after the abuse was uncovered in an investigation.
Last week, the US Justice Department announced a $138.7 million settlement Tuesday with more than 100 people who accused the FBI of grossly mishandling allegations of sexual assault against Nassar in 2015 and 2016, a critical time gap that allowed the sports doctor to continue to prey on victims before his arrest.
When combined with other settlements, $1 billion now has been set aside by various organizations to compensate hundreds of women who said Nassar assaulted 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 – whom the Karolyi Ranch was named after
Gymnast workout during a morning training session at Karolyi Ranch in 2011
In her statement, she also shared her heartbreak over having to continue to train at Karolyi Ranch, the former USA Gymnastics 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 couple of days, because every time I would go to write, I would start balling, and I couldn’t get through it,’ she said.
Shortly after Simone’s tweet, USA Gymnastics shut down the ranch in Central Texas 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 Nassar began abusing her when she 13, and that the assaults did not stop until she left the sport in 2017 at the age of 20.
