This article is part of One Year Later: Larry Nassar And The Women Who Made Us Listen, a seven-part series that commemorates the seven days women stood in a Lansing, Michigan, courtroom last year and faced their abuser, former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University trainer Larry Nassar. One Year Later was produced by reporter Alanna Vagianos. Read more installments: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six

The first time Andrea Munford saw Angela Povilaitis was in a training video. Povilaitis, a prosecutor for the state, was presenting best practices for investigating complex cases of sexual assault.

The next time shed see Povilaitis this time in person was October 2016. Munford, a detective sergeant at the Michigan State University Police Department, was fielding dozens of calls from young women who said Dr. Lawrence Nassar , a former USA Gymnastics physician, had repeatedly sexually abused them when they were children. Munford and her team asked the Michigan attorney generals office, where Povilaitis was a prosecutor, to pursue action.

Povilaitis and Munford were fast comrades. For the next 18 months, the two women built a case that involved hundreds of accusers and a sophisticated approach to prosecuting large-scale charges of assault. A year ago, the two women watched from a courtroom in Lansing, Michigan, as 169 voices, in agonizing harmony, offered a chorus of me too that reverberated across the nation.

But first, they believed.

An Almost Miraculous Pairing

If ever there were two people ready to take down a serial abuser against whom more than 100 reports of abuse had been made years after the fact, Angela Povilaitis and Andrea Munford were them.

Povilaitis spent 12 years as a prosecutor in Michigans Wayne County before joining the state attorney generals office, where she led a statewide sexual assault project devoted to complex, multivictim cases as an assistant AG. By the time she took on the Nassar case, she had more than 16 years of experience prosecuting delayed-disclosure sexual assault cases with multiple victims.

Meanwhile, Munford had begun building out a special victims unit within the MSU police department in 2014. A graduate of the university, shed joined the department in 1997. Munford had developed and implemented a specific, compassion-based approach to cases involving sexual abuse when Rachael Denhollander the first victim to publicly accuse Nassar contacted the bureau prepared to make a complaint in August 2016.