Simone Biles is one of the greatest athletes of our time. She’s the most decorated gymnast — male or female — ever. Several gymnastic moves have been named after her. At times, her talent even blows her own mind. 

Biles has also come forward as a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, a former doctor for the U.S. women’s national gymnastics team. The gymnast is currently a plaintiff in the sex abuse lawsuit against USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, as well.

In an interview for Vogue’s August 2020 issue, Biles opened up more about coming to terms with Nassar’s abuse, and the attempts by the USAG and USOPC to cover it up. 

When she first learned about Larry Nassar’s abuse, “It didn’t feel like real life,” Biles told interviewer Abby Aguirre. She describes refusing to talk about the case with her family and going through periods of anxiety without understanding why. 

After she moved out of her parents’ house, her mental health took a turn for the worse. “I was very depressed,” Biles said. “At one point I slept so much because, for me, it was the closest thing to death without harming myself. It was an escape from all of my thoughts, from the world, from what I was dealing with. It was a really dark time.”

One of the things that was so insidious about Nassar’s abuse was that he disguised it as medical treatments, so much so that some athletes’ parents were in the room when the abuse was taking place without realizing what was going on. In the Vogue interview, Biles was candid about not believing she was really a victim at first. “I felt like I wasn’t abused, because it wasn’t to the same extent as the other girls,” Biles said. She also described being afraid of letting down the public, who saw her as “perfect” and “America’s sweetheart,” by coming forward about her abuse. 

Ultimately, though, hearing teammates such as Maggie Nichols come forward about their own experiences with Nassar helped her come to terms with hers. “I was reading Maggie’s coverage and it just hit me,” Biles said. “I was like, I’ve had the same treatments. I remember googling, like, sexually abused.”

In January 2018, Biles posted a statement on social media identifying herself as a victim of abuse. To Vogue, she described the experience as cathartic. She also said she hoped that sharing her story would help other survivors feel safer coming forward. 

Biles has continued to be critical of USAG and USOPC, and in the interview said, “We can’t feel comfortable promoting our sport if we fear that something might happen like this again because they’re not doing their part.” The gymnast’s discomfort with USAG made the postponement of the Olympics — to July 2021, due to the coronavirus pandemic — even more painful, since it means she has to deal with the organization for another year, Aguirre wrote. But as of now, she’s still planning on competing. 

For Biles, Nichols, and other survivors of Nassar’s abuse to speak out against him and the people and organizations that were complicit is awe-inspiringly brave. But it’s also wrong to expect them to be solely responsible for pushing for accountability and change. Biles’s story illustrates how damaging sexual abuse can be. Unless they do the work required to uncover why it was allowed to go on for so long and to ensure something like this never happens again, the USAG and USOPC are placing a heavy and unacceptable burden on the backs of Nassar’s victims.

Early in the article, Aguirre describes attending a talk Biles was giving, during which she was asked whether she felt “obligated to stand up when something bad is going on in society.” 

“Personally, for me, I don’t think of it as an obligation,” Biles responded, according to Aguirre. “I think of it as an honor to speak for the less fortunate and for the voiceless. I also feel like it gives them power.”

If you have experienced sexual violence and are in need of crisis support, please call the RAINN Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). 

If you are thinking about suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or the Suicide Crisis Line at 1-800-784-2433.

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On its last decision day of 2020, the Supreme Court has delivered a 7-2 decision in favor of allowing subpoenas for President Donald Trump’s tax returns and financial records to proceed, forcing Trump to relinquish his tax returns to circuit courts. This also means the highest court in the land has rejected Trump’s claims that he has “absolute” immunity in a New York state criminal investigation, making clear that he can be investigated while holding office.

The court’s other big decision today was McGirt v. Oklahoma, in which the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of verifying that half the state of Oklahoma is legally Indian reservation land in terms of the criminal justice system. According to the New York Times, this vote could reshape the way criminal justice works in eastern Oklahoma by preventing state authorities from prosecuting Indigenous people.

While both of these decisions came as welcome — but real — surprises to leftists, they were representative of the ways that this session of the Supreme Court has been full of shocks, a true mixed bag of progressive and conservative votes. Since early June, the Supreme Court has released a number of landmark decisions — from the future of the DACA program to ones involving contraceptive rights.

In many — though definitely not all —of these cases, reliably right-wing justices have voted with the left. There are also cases of liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Elena Kagan voting with the conservative justices, as Ginsberg did by siding with the energy company in the case about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and Kagan did by supporting the decision to allow employers to opt out of birth control coverage on “moral” grounds. Now, as dozens of cases have been postponed due to coronavirus, it’s nearly impossible to gauge what the Supreme Court will decide next.

In June, in an outcome that shocked many — but especially members of the LGBTQ+ community — the majority-conservative Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling staying that federal civil rights law also protects LGBTQ+ workers from discrimination. This ruling will affect approximately 1 million transgender workers and 7.1 million lesbian, gay and bisexual workers.

The majority opinion written by Trump-appointed justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote: “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.” 

In other progressive victories, the court first blocked a Louisiana abortion law that could have shut down almost all clinics in the state, with George W. Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the left — despite his prior support for a similar law in Texas. Then, the Supreme Court prevented the Trump Administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which serves to protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation.

Some of these decisions were unexpected because of which of the conservative justices, whether Gorsuch or Roberts, crossed idealogical lines. Others were shocking because they seem so internally contradictory. How does one judicial body protect abortion rights in Louisiana one week, and destroy access to birth control on “moral grounds” the next?

It’s not only progressives who have been surprised by things like the LGBTQ+ decision and DACA decision — they also took President Trump and right-wing pundits off-guard, with Trump called some of the recent decisions “horrible and politically charged,” saying that they’re “shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.” The president also noted that conservatives are worried about losing 2nd Amendment rights and “everything else.” Trump tweeted all this soon after the Supreme Court ruled against undoing DACA.

Still, even if you think the current Supreme Court is a confusing mess, just wait, because there’s a good chance things will get even more chaotic. With a second Trump term now less and less certain, conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are allegedly considering announcing their retirements, which would potentially give Trump the power to appoint two new, young, ultra-conservative justices to the court.

There would undoubtedly be pushback from Democrats (remember when Obama wasn’t allowed to appoint a new justice in the last year of his presidency?), but if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s this: Everything that’s strange and bad, will only get stranger and worse.

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March’s sweeping shelter-in-place order triggered a spike in video game downloads and purchases. From Animal Crossing to Fortnite, we gave ourselves makeovers, got married, graduated, and forged all kinds of connections in video games this past spring. To no surprise, The Sims’ perfect blend of nostalgia and world-building offered a dual dose of escapism amid a horribly-handled pandemic. So many players returning to The Sims these past few months will be pleased to know that a Sims reality TV show is airing later this month. 

Electronic Arts, The Sim’s publisher, is partnering with e-sports brand Eleague and Buzzfeed Multiplayer to bring to you a four-episode competition reality television show called The Sims – Spark’d. Twelve players will build worlds, characters, and tell stories on The Sims 4 in the hopes of winning the $100,000 prize.

The show will premiere at 11 p.m. (EST) on Friday, July 17 on TBS and will air every Friday at the same time. The episodes will also air at 8 a.m. on Mondays on Buzzfeed Miltiplayer’s YouTube channel.

The trailer’s comment section, however, shows lackluster enthusiasm for the new show. Among the key complaints is the fact that players have been asking EA for more affordable expansion packs and fewer bugs. It seems like loyal Sims players want that loyalty reciprocated in the game, not in the form of a reality TV show.

But content like this is without an audience. Artists and creatives, like UK-based drag artist Juno Birch, found a keen audience for videos of them using The Sims to create their own fantasy version of Celebrity Big Brother and other reality TV shows. So there is indeed an appetite for reality TV and Sims crossover content.

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