Mary Lou Retton Responds to Backlash of Her Professional medical Bill Fundraiser

Mary Lou Retton thinks her family deserves a gold medal. 

The Olympian defended her daughters’ determination to start off a crowdsourcing fund to pay out for the health care expenditures she accrued although combating a exceptional variety of pneumonia, which she was hospitalized with in Oct. 

“They failed to should have that,” Mary Lou told Leisure Tonight in an interview published Might 22. “They ended up just striving to choose care of me. I really don’t care about the naysayers. There are trolls all over the place. It really is what can make us The us. Everybody’s got an view, but it is what it is.”

The former athlete—who shares daughters Shayla, 28, McKenna, 26, Skyla, 23, and Emma, 21, with ex-partner Shannon Kelley—went on to explain that she struggled to pay for her mounting clinical expenses because of to the effects of COVID-19 on her position as a public speaker and the expense of her 2018 divorce. 

“I was in the ICU for a thirty day period, like, the bills were being and are nonetheless coming in,” she continued. “You cannot visualize from ambulance expenses to almost everything.” 

Insisting that all of the money went directly to her treatment method, Mary Lou—who retired from gymnastics in 1986 soon after selecting up Team USA’s first gold medal in the All-All-around at the 1984 Olympics—added that she could not have gotten by her situation without her daughters’ thoughtful actions.