Sarah Klein

Sarah Klein grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and joined a gymnastics club after a bring-a-friend day; by age 8 she was on the competitive team. Around 1988, Larry Nassar arrived as a volunteer athletic trainer and began abusing her under the guise of treatment. Her stepfather, a Detroit judge for almost 30 years, gave her a front-row seat to the law. By the time she testified against Nassar she had been a lawyer for over a decade, and she saw a real need for survivors to represent abused children.

Sarah works only on child sexual abuse civil cases, the sole focus of Manly, Stewart & Finaldi. What sets her apart is lived experience: she is the first known victim of Larry Nassar, publicly known as Victim 125, and was a plaintiff in that litigation. “Being a survivor, having gone through a civil lawsuit myself brings a very unique set of skills,” she says, including knowing how to walk a client through the worst thing that ever happened to them and leave them stronger.

A pediatrician licensed in the 1970s who testified he began abusing children under the guise of medical treatment in 1974, yet was not arrested until 2018. Three little girls made credible accusations in the late 1990s and were told they were wrong; the medical board suspended his license for a year or two, then gave it back. He abused hundreds more children before turning himself in at the end of 2017. Parents were often in the room. “It doesn’t look the way you think it’s going to look,” Sarah says.

Sarah says every case has unique facts, but the themes repeat: an adult with unfettered access to children, safeguarding policies that are missing or never followed, institutions that fail. She could take the same set of facts and drop them into a different town with a different perpetrator and find the same failures. She challenges adults to notice the red flags and take responsibility, whatever the cost to reputation. “Children are not tiny adults. They are children and it is our job to keep them safe,” she says.

Sarah was an instrumental voice in the $500 million settlement with Michigan State University and the $380 million settlement with USA Gymnastics for Larry Nassar survivors. As a lawyer, she played a role in the $490 million resolution between the University of Michigan and attorneys for more than 1,000 survivors of sports team doctor Robert Anderson, and has secured confidential settlements under New York’s Child Victims Act against the South Orangetown Central School District and the YMCA of New York.

Criminal courts answer yes or no, Sarah says, while civil lawsuits ask how abuse continued for decades when complaints were made and people who spoke up were called crazy. Naming the institutions that covered it up helps a survivor see “this wasn’t a me thing,” it was systemic. She points to gymnasts successfully suing the FBI and the Department of Justice for putting a report in a drawer, which returns power to survivors by letting them name the people and entities who failed them.

Sarah Klein earned her A.B. from Columbia University in 2002, attended Columbia Law School and completed MIT’s Global Entrepreneurship Program in 2014. She is admitted in Arizona, Minnesota and Montana, with New York admission pending, and practices at Manly, Stewart & Finaldi in Irvine, California (manlystewart.com). In July 2018 she accepted the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs on behalf of Nassar survivors, and she received Child USA’s Child Protector Award in 2018 and Day One’s Voice of Courage Award in 2023.