Abigail Pesta

Abigail Pesta is an investigative journalist whose work has run in the Wall Street Journal, NBC News and New York magazine. The Girls, published by Seal Press in 2019, is built from interviews with twenty-five women treated by Larry Nassar, the doctor who worked with American gymnasts for two decades and is now serving sentences that will hold him for life. Several speak in it for the first time, among them Sara Teristi, the earliest of them known, who had tried to tell an adult in the 1980s. The book is less about the man than about what stood around him: a small Michigan gym, coaches, parents, a university and a national federation, and how far a complaint could travel without arriving anywhere. It took the women decades to be heard, and the book is an account of that delay.