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Three U.S.A. Gymnastics Board Members Resign

Dr. Lawrence G. Nassar, a former doctor for U.S.A. Gymnastics, being led into the courtroom during his sentencing hearing.Credit...Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

The organization that governs gymnastics in the United States said its chairman and several board members had resigned under intense pressure resulting from the molestation case involving a team doctor. The announcement was made Monday, as dozens more young women and girls gave victim-impact statements in a Michigan courtroom.

U.S.A. Gymnastics’ handling of the sexual abuse scandal involving the longtime national team doctor Dr. Lawrence G. Nassar has been widely derided — including sharp criticism by many of the gymnasts speaking out last week and this week at Dr. Nassar’s sentencing in court in Ingham County, Mich.

The officials who resigned Monday included the chairman of the board, Paul Parilla; the vice chairman, Jay Binder; and the board’s treasurer, Bitsy Kelley. They could not be immediately reached for comment.

“We support their decisions to resign at this time,” the gymnastics federation’s president, Kerry Perry, said on Monday in a statement posted on Twitter. “We believe this step will allow us to more effectively move forward in implementing change within our organization.”

The United States Olympic Committee, which also has been criticized for its inaction in the Nassar case, praised the resignations. Scott Blackmun, the Olympic committee’s chief executive, said in a statement that his organization had been discussing board changes with U.S.A. Gymnastics since October. He said those talks escalated over the weekend, after days of victim-impact statements by former gymnasts in Michigan, and culminated in the decision by the three board members to give up their roles.

“New board leadership is necessary because the current leaders have been focused on establishing that they did nothing wrong,” Mr. Blackmun said in his statement. “The Olympic family failed these athletes and we must continue to take every step necessary to ensure this never happens again.”

Mark Jones, a spokesman for the U.S.O.C., said that top Olympic committee officials met with Parilla on Jan. 11 to ask him to resign.

The Olympic committee has decertified other federations in the past for mismanagement, stripping them of their authority as the national governing bodies. Mr. Blackmun’s statement did not indicate that the committee deemed that necessary in this case.

The announcement came on the fifth day of women and girls providing their victim impact statements to a judge in a Michigan courtroom, where Dr. Nassar is being sentenced on multiple counts of sexual assault. More than 140 women and teenagers are expected to speak.

Many of those survivors who spoke have accused U.S.A. Gymnastics of turning a blind eye to the abuse, which occurred in Dr. Nassar’s home, at local Michigan gyms, at Michigan State University where he was an osteopathic sports doctor and at the United States women’s gymnastics’ team’s national training center run by Martha and Bela Karolyi.

The gymnastics organization severed ties with the training center, which was held at a remote Texas ranch, last week.

Jessica Howard, a former United States national champion in rhythmic gymnastics who served on the board from about 2009 to 2012, said the resignation of those top board members was a long time coming.

“Paul Parilla has been the architect of the USA Gymnastics board for as long as I can remember and is one of the people responsible for the broken culture in our sport,” said Howard, who was a teenager when Nassar abused her. “I truly believe that no one on the board thinks they are responsible for anything that Larry Nassar did to those girls, and that’s just sick.”

Parilla is a lawyer and a retired Marine colonel. His daughter, Jennifer, was a two-time Olympian in trampoline.

An investigative review led by the former federal prosecutor Deborah J. Daniels last year found that the board did not adequately address sexual abuse issues in the sport, and Howard personally found that to be true.

On Sunday, she could recall only one time the board spoke about an abuse case, and it was quickly dismissed as a mere legal matter.

“I remember feeling like I was gut-punched,” she said. “If there ever was a time I would have killed myself, it would’ve been when I was away at one of those meetings. I saw that they really didn’t care about what happened to the athletes at all.”

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