Márta Károlyi's 2017 testimony about Larry Nassar contradicts lawsuit
Béla and Márta Károlyi, the former USA Gymnastics national team coordinators and owners of the USA Gymnastics National Team Training Center at Károlyi Ranch in Huntsville, Texas, have been criticized to a great extent recently.
Many people have criticized the couple recently as a result of the fact that 54-year-old disgraced former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University physician Larry Nassar was able to get away with sexually assaulting gymnasts on the premises of the ranch.
In the Dateline NBC Special "Silent No More", the documentary about the Larry Nassar sexual assault scandal that aired on Sunday, April 22, Béla and Márta Károlyi claimed that they were not aware that Nassar was sexually assaulting gymnasts at the ranch, and they would not accept any responsibility for his actions, thus prompting this criticism to heat up.
That criticism may heat up even more with the news that was released on Thursday.
According to a report by the Orange County Register on Thursday, Márta Károlyi's testimony in a 2017 deposition contradicts what was stated in the lawsuit that she and her husband quietly filed against USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic Committee last month.
In the lawsuit that they filed last month, the couple claimed that USA Gymnastics warned them in 2015 of possible misconduct that was taking place. However, they allege that they were not told that such misconduct included sexual assault. They allege that they only found out that Nassar had been sexually assaulting gymnasts in 2016.
However, in the deposition that Márta Károlyi took last May under oath as a part of a lawsuit against the couple by a former member of the United States women's gymnastics national team, she told a different story.
In this deposition, Márta Károlyi claimed that then-USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny did, in fact, let her know that Nassar had sexually assaulted gymnasts at the Károlyi Ranch. She claimed that he let her know this in June of 2015.
With the criticism against Béla and Márta Károlyi having already been at a high level, especially after the Dateline NBC Special "Silent No More", this will likely only make things worse for the couple as the fallout from this devastating scandal.
Nassar, who is currently serving a 60-year federal prison sentence at United States Penitentiary, Tucson in Tucson, Arizona that he was given this past December on three child pornography charges, was also sentenced in January to between 40 and 175 years in state prison on seven sexual assault charges before he was sentenced to between an additional 40 and 125 years in state prison on three more sexual assault charges the following month.
He has been accused of sexually assaulting more than 260 people, mostly female gymnasts, under the guise of medical treatment over a period of roughly two decades.