Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you so much, Judge Aquilina. You're a hero of ours. This is some of the most important testimony that we're going to hear. As some of my colleagues have mentioned, we embarked on this process about a year ago now. We are coming to the point where we're going to have to produce our conclusions and recommendations, so your testimony comes at just the right time.
You said a couple of things that really struck me. First, there's the power of the fear of retaliation, which silences victims when there isn't a balance of institutions to allow those voices of the victims to be heard. You also talked about bystanders, about people doing nothing. If I'm quoting you properly, you said that potentially hundreds of people allowed Larry Nassar to be a serial abuser, victimizer and rapist, with no one speaking up until he was brought to justice.
I'd like you to talk about those two points. First, how do we counter the fear of retaliation? In the Larry Nassar case, so many people did nothing, even though they may have been aware of the abuse that was taking place. How do we stop that? How do we build a culture where people speak out because they understand that to not speak out is wrong?