The former USAG team doctor is heading to jail.
His sentencing trial continues as over a hundred women are testifying, emboldened by the opportunity to face their accuser before he disappears behind bars for probably the rest of his life.
How does it make me feel? It helps to start at the beginning, to acknowledge what he's done. He's an abuser and a pedophile whose criminal actions have been uncovered. To wonder how to feel is to wonder how to feel when a serial burglar goes to jail, a murderer, someone who's stolen millions of dollars from the elderly.
I feel the most relieved to see his actions labeled accordingly, as criminal, and then sentencing progressing the way any other trial would, where criminals are sentenced. Is the sentencing testimony too harsh, too unfair to the defendant as he claims? Hahaaaa!! Seriously?! The judge laughed at his six-page letter decrying the "media circus" she was allowing with the ongoing testimony lasting for days.
So yeah, I just feel good he's being labeled a criminal. I'm glad justice is being done. I don't feel good a person's life is being destroyed. But he made this decision decades ago, that was he was doing was criminal and there was a chance he might get caught.
Oh, and he literally destroyed hundreds of women's lives. HUNDREDS. Rendering most of them with permanent psychological scars that have physical and emotional consequences. The cost to them and to our economy and healthcare system is the tens of millions of dollars, not to mention the emotional toll on the victims, their families and future families. He left a swath of devastation that's somewhat unprecedented in its scope due to his excessively easy access to dozens of young athletes over such a long period of time.
A final hope... that his criminal conviction sends an icy, terrifying chill across the world showing that abusers go to jail. They don't get a hand slap. They don't have a bad news cycle then go on a book tour about their spiritual transformation. They don't go to cushy rehab centers. They go to the fucking slammer, because they break laws and break bodies.
A democracy is if anything a society based on lex rex, the rule of law. The rule of law won today. My fist is raised in a firm salute.