NEW YORK (NY)
Huffington Post
January 17, 2019
By Alanna Vagianos
This article is part of “One Year Later: Larry Nassar And The Women Who Made Us Listen,” a seven-part series that commemorates the seven days women stood in a Lansing, Michigan, courtroom last year and faced their abuser, former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State trainer Larry Nassar. Read more here.
By all appearances, Sarah Klein leads a relatively ordinary life.
The 39-year-old lives outside Philadelphia with her 3-year-old daughter, Genevieve. A former attorney, she travels a lot for her work as a consultant for a firm based in Florida. She’s driven and passionate, but has a relaxed way about her that would make anyone feel at home.
What most don’t know is how Klein’s life has been shaped, especially in the past few years, by the scandal of Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University trainer now serving a life sentence for child sexual abuse. Klein is Nassar’s first known victim. She says he began sexually abusing her in 1988. She was only 8 years old.
Up until this past summer, Klein was only known in court documents as “Victim 125.” Her choice to keep her identity private through Nassar’s various trials and sentence hearings was a “deliberate decision” to maintain privacy while she sifted through and unpacked years of trauma.
Over three decades after the abuse began, Klein tells me these last few years have been a complicated mix of sadness, anger and exhaustion.
“It’s so sad to find out that somebody you loved so much was capable of harming so many people and breaking so many lives,” she said.
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