Hannah Morrow
Life handed me lemons and you best believe that I am well prepared to make some lemonade. You cannot break me, Larry. I am a survivor.
date of testimony: January 19th 2018
location of testimony: Lansing, Michigan
age of abuse: 11-15
Your Honor, I want to thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak and share today. I want to thank my family. They’ve been super supportive with me, and my boyfriend for loving me unconditionally and supporting me through a really tough time in my life. My coaches, my teammates, the freshmen that I teach in advisory who listened to my story yesterday, and my supportive teachers and everything.
And I want to start off by reading a poem that I wrote during my junior year of high school, and I feel blessed that I get the opportunity to read this poem directly to the face of the person that inspired it, and that’s you, Larry. This piece is called, The Monster.
He appeared to be a wise man but he made despicable decisions, putting his reputation at risk all for a revolting addiction.
Fracturing childhoods of hundreds makes him deserve conviction. Because of him I cannot be touched without a panic being riven.
The monster could have had it all with his lovely life and children; doctor, father, husband, but now he’s off to prison.
I hope you enjoyed that, and I have found that writing is a brilliant way to cope with all the vile things that you have done to me, Larry. I won’t get into speaking exactly what these things are because you already know what you did to me during the four to five years that you worked on me, including when I was 11 years old.
However, I would like to tell you that I have taken all of the pain and hurt that you have caused me and I will turn it into good. I have contacted my principal and talked to some teachers about inserting sexual assault awareness into my school’s curriculum somehow so that I might be able to prevent a monster like you from destroying others.
I will be out in the real world thriving, empowering, and standing by others while you rot in a prison cell the rest of your life.
I don’t know why God put me through this, but I assure you I will stand by the other survivors and use my trauma to help others.
By the way, I don’t need your sorry excuse for a treatment to succeed in gymnastics the way you made it seem like I did. I started out my season well this year. I am determined to finish it better than it started, and then I will drive myself towards a successful career in gymnastics at the college of my dreams.
Life handed me lemons and you best believe that I am well prepared to make some lemonade. You cannot break me, Larry. I am a survivor.
Thank you, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Thank you. That was some sweet lemonade. You are amazing. I absolutely love that you have made suggestions already with your high school, because it starts with one school, just like it started with one voice, Rachael’s voice, to get all of these voices here.
You are a woman of action, of power, of change. You are not defeated. Don’t ever feel that way. I believe we may very well see you at the Olympics. I’m going to watch. I don’t watch sports but I’m going to watch all of you, okay, because I think that this is just tremendous, and you’ve empowered yourself, you’ve empowered so many other women to speak out. You’re a survivor. A strong one. You’re exemplary, and I will consider what you said in sentencing, and I appreciate your poem.
You’ve just been published. Thank you. Congratulations.
MS. MORROW: Thank you.
