Listen to the man

Which man?  John Manly, attorney for many of Larry Nassar's victims, is saying here that the thing his clients are most interested is not money--though some of that is necessary--but rather repentance and openness so others don't have to go through what they did.


I'm not saying here that those who work with young people can somehow evade large settlements if they come clean, apologize, and investigate what went wrong and figure out how to avoid it in the future.  I will say, however, that it's entirely possible that doing so will not only help the healing process, but will also result in smaller monetary settlements than would otherwise be demanded.


One other note is that that somewhere between 88% and 96% of all reported sexual assaults end with neither a conclusion that the complainant was wrong or lying, nor a conviction of a perpetrator.  In this case, various agencies have been tremendously slow to investigate, and it suggests that for a significant portion of those 88-96% of complaints that end with "not enough evidence to arrest" or "not enough evidence to indict" become so for a very simple reason; the police are not willing to aggressively investigate these crimes, just like we saw here in Minnesota and have seen nationwide. 


Yes, these crimes are messy, traumatic, and difficult to investigate, but if we want a world where fewer people become victims, we need to start treating sexual assault like the criminal matter that it is.  And yes, take Officer Opie off traffic patrol for a while and see what he can find out.  Maybe if such were done, the city of New London would be able to hire officers of above average intelligence because they weren't getting bored out of their minds issuing speeding tickets.