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by seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 25, 2018 10:34 am
by seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 26, 2018 12:43 pm
With Larry Nassar Sentenced, Focus Is on What Michigan State Knew
By MITCH SMITH and ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
JAN. 25, 2018
Dr. Lawrence G. Nassar on Wednesday, when he was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for molesting girls who came to him for treatment. Rena Laverty/European Pressphoto Agency
Michigan State University was propelled on Thursday to the center of the sexual abuse scandal involving Dr. Lawrence G. Nassar, as state and federal agencies mounted investigations demanding to know what the college knew of his behavior and when.
Neither the sentencing of Dr. Nassar on Wednesday to 40 to 175 years in prison, nor the resignation of the university president a few hours later, quelled the furor. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said on Thursday that her department would investigate Michigan State’s role, while state legislators asked that the university provide unredacted records of its investigations of Dr. Nassar and threatened to issue subpoenas if the school did not swiftly comply.
At the same time, the state attorney general was preparing his own review of the university, a United States senator asked for congressional hearings, and the speaker of the Michigan House called for the resignations of the university’s trustees, who are elected by voters.
“This is one of the biggest scandals in the history of our state,” said the speaker, Tom Leonard, a Republican, who has asked House lawyers to review options for removing trustees if they did not quit. “We are dealing with a Big Ten university. We are dealing with a monster who was a serial child molester and rapist who may have violated more victims than any other rapist in the history of our state.”
The repercussions were not limited to Michigan State. The head of the United States Olympic Committee, Scott Blackmun, wrote an email to U.S.A. Gymnastics, threatening to decertify the federation if its entire board did not resign by next Wednesday. Several board members, including the chairman, Paul Parilla, have already resigned.
Responding to Mr. Blackmun late Thursday, U.S.A. Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body, said it “completely embraces the requirements” outlined in the letter. The organization’s unsigned reply said U.S.A. Gymnastics would “work with the U.S.O.C. to accomplish change for the betterment of our organization, our athletes and our clubs.”
At Michigan State, university officials are already facing the prospect of legal judgments and fees from lawsuits filed by dozens of victims. At Penn State, where a former football coach was found to be a serial child molester, those costs have reached nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
The lawsuits and the legislative inquiries center on what Michigan State knew about Dr. Nassar’s behavior during the two decades he worked there. Several victims have alleged that they had told Michigan State employees, as far back as the late 1990s, about being molested under the guise of treatment.
In 2014, after a complaint from a patient, the university conducted an internal investigation that cleared him, after which he continued to prey on more patients. On Thursday, ESPN reported that Michigan State had neglected to tell federal authorities, who were investigating the college’s handling of other sexual misconduct complaints, about the 2014 case until the accusations against Dr. Nassar became widely known in 2016.
“I feel like every day we are peeling back another layer of a very deep mystery,” said State Representative Adam Zemke, a Democrat who introduced a resolution that passed by a wide margin on Wednesday and called for the resignation of the university president, Lou Anna K. Simon. Hours later, she resigned.
Mr. Zemke said he saw parallels between what happened at Michigan State and the “willful negligence” during the water crisis in Flint, for which government officials have been charged with felonies and accused of covering up evidence.
In her resignation message, Ms. Simon wrote, “To the survivors, I can never say enough that I am so sorry that a trusted, renowned physician was really such an evil, evil person.”
She added: “As tragedies are politicized, blame is inevitable. As president, it is only natural that I am the focus of this anger.”
The Legislature’s deepening interest reflects the importance of Michigan State to the state and the realization that the scandal can easily become a political liability if not handled correctly. It has also become a subplot in this year’s race for governor. Among those who have had a role in the investigations are two candidates — the Republican attorney general, Bill Schuette, whose office prosecuted the state criminal cases, and a Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, who was the county prosecutor in Lansing during part of the time that Dr. Nassar was being investigated.
Both Mr. Schuette and Ms. Whitmer have faced criticism by some for their work on the case, and both have strongly defended their record.
When The Detroit News wrote in an editorial this month that Mr. Schuette’s “indifference borders on dereliction of duty,” he called for a retraction and said “nothing could be further from the truth.” And after a foe in the Democratic primary race suggested Ms. Whitmer did not act aggressively enough on the case, she said that she was “proud of my record” and that “this is an issue that is incredibly close to my heart.”
“I think the system worked the way that it’s supposed to,” Ms. Whitmer said of the prosecution in an interview on Thursday. She also called for “a housecleaning” in Michigan State’s administration.
Jason Cody, a spokesman for the university, noted that its trustees had asked the state attorney general to investigate, and Mr. Cody said that the school would fully cooperate. The university has created a fund to help survivors get counseling and mental health services, he said.
“Many at M.S.U. viewed the brave women who came forward to tell their stories at Nassar’s sentencing hearing,” Mr. Cody said. “Words cannot express the sorrow we feel for Nassar’s victims; the thoughts and prayers of the entire M.S.U. community are with these women as we listen to their heartbreaking testimony.”
Dr. Nassar, 54, was sentenced on Wednesday for sexually abusing seven girls, though he had been accused by many more. His seven-day sentencing hearing drew more than 150 women, including Olympic gymnasts who are household names, to give wrenching testimony about what he had done to them.
Dozens of women, including gymnasts, swimmers, figure skaters, runners and basketball players, are now suing Dr. Nassar, Michigan State and U.S.A. Gymnastics, alleging abuse going back two decades. In court papers, they have said that they trusted Dr. Nassar because he was a renowned sports doctor, and the team physician for the United States gymnastics team.
Some of his patients said they complained to Michigan State employees, including the women’s gymnastics coach at the time, Kathie Klages, in the late 1990s, according to court papers, but were met with disbelief. A lawyer for Ms. Klages has not commented on the allegations.
In 2014, a recent graduate filed a complaint against Dr. Nassar under Title IX, the federal law governing sexual harassment and assault on campus. She said that she had sought out Dr. Nassar for hip pain, and that he molested her and became sexually aroused until she removed his hands from her body, according to court papers in the civil cases filed against him.
But after consulting with other medical professionals, including Dr. Nassar’s colleagues, the university’s investigation concluded that his treatment had been “medically appropriate,” the court papers said.
The abuse continued until 2016, when Rachael Denhollander, a former gymnast, told her story to The Indianapolis Star, and a police investigation soon began.
On Thursday, ESPN reported that Michigan State had failed to turn over its file on Dr. Nassar in 2014, when the Education Department was investigating unrelated complaints about the way the university had handled sexual assault and harassment cases. The university began turning over records in late 2016, ESPN reported, saying that the failure had been an oversight.
On Thursday, the education secretary said her agency would review Michigan State’s handling of the complaints against Dr. Nassar. “What happened at Michigan State is abhorrent,” Ms. DeVos said. “Students must be safe and protected on our nation’s campuses. The department is investigating this matter and will hold M.S.U. accountable for any violations of federal law.”
But in a December letter to Mr. Schuette, the Michigan attorney general, the university’s lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, said he believed that evidence would show that no Michigan State official believed that Dr. Nassar committed sexual abuse before the newspaper reports in 2016. The university is also arguing that it cannot be held liable because of Michigan’s sovereign immunity law, which protects state agencies from lawsuits in most circumstances and “protects the state’s citizens by safeguarding its fiscal stability,” the school said in a court filing.
John Manly, a lawyer for some of the women in the civil cases, said the university’s response to the lawsuits reminded him of the way the Roman Catholic Church had responded to allegations of child sex abuse by priests. “It’s a page right out of the bishops’ playbooks,” he said.
If Michigan State is ruled to be not immune, the cost could be significant. One state representative, Klint Kesto, a Republican, said he has drafted legislation that would prevent state funds from being used for payouts. If that bill is passed, it would force Michigan State to use tuition or endowment money. “The school should use all its assets, all its income from other sources first before they go into the pockets of taxpayers,” Mr. Kesto said.
On Thursday, Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat, called for congressional oversight and investigations of the scandal and said in a statement that it was “time for us to find out who is responsible at Michigan State University and U.S.A. Gymnastics for enabling and failing to stop this criminal.”
State legislators requested that university trustees provide investigative documents about Dr. Nassar dating back to 2014.
“It is our sincere hope that the university will cooperate with our request and inquiries without the need to employ means of compulsion,” the lawmakers wrote, adding that they may issue subpoenas if the records were not received by 5 p.m. on Feb. 9.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/l ... 80&gwt=pay
Feds Launch Investigation Of Michigan State University's Handling Of Sex Crimes
The US Department of Education is probing whether the school violated the law in its handling of reports of Larry Nassar's sexual assaults. "My heart breaks for the survivors of Larry Nassar’s disgusting crimes," said Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Tyler Kingkade
January 25, 2018, at 4:02 p.m.
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Michigan State University is under investigation regarding whether it violated federal law in connection with its handling of Larry Nassar's years of sexual abuse when he was a school athletic trainer and the USA Gymnastics doctor, BuzzFeed News has learned.
The US Department of Education notified the school on Jan. 18 that it was opening an investigation into MSU's compliance with the Clery Act, a federal law requiring colleges to track and disclose crimes reported on campus and warn communities about safety concerns. A Clery Act investigation led to Penn State University being ordered to fork over a record $2.4 million penalty in 2016, in part due to failures handling former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky's child abuse.
Nassar, who worked at the school from 1997 to 2016, was reported for sexual assault to MSU's Title IX office in 2014, but the university cleared him of wrongdoing at the time, and a related campus police investigation did not result in charges. Nassar resumed seeing patients until late summer 2016, when more victims came forward, sparking a new criminal investigation that ultimately led to charges of possessing child pornography and sexually assaulting eight women and girls during medical appointments.
Federal investigators will review what Michigan State University did with every single complaint about Nassar. The investigation will also look at how campus police handled crime reports dating back to 2011, and how the university worked with USA Gymnastics to protect athletes. The university, which has maintained it did not believe Nassar committed an assault until 2016, has to turn over an extensive list of documents to investigators by Feb. 2, according to a copy of a letter sent to MSU by the Education Department, and obtained by BuzzFeed News. The letter requested on-site access to the university starting Feb. 19.
The inquiry should reveal "what university personnel knew and when they knew it" when it came to Nassar's crimes, said S. Daniel Carter, a campus safety expert. MSU's investigation won't be as wide-ranging as Penn State's, which included complaints made over a two-decade period, "but it does sound like one of the department's more extensive Clery reviews," Carter told BuzzFeed News.
Many people have drawn comparisons between Penn State's handling of Sandusky's abuse and MSU's response to reports of crimes committed by Nassar, who was an athletic trainer and professor at the school. The Education Department ripped Penn State in a 2016 report for missing red flags about Sandusky, failing to warn the community about the convicted pedophile, and for mistakes made back as far as 2000 in documenting crimes reported to the university.
Victims and others at the sentencing hearing for Larry Nassar.
Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters
Victims and others at the sentencing hearing for Larry Nassar.
Michigan State University rejects the comparison with the Penn State–Sandusky scandal. Jason Cody, an MSU spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News on Thursday that the university "will be cooperating fully" with the federal inquiry.
Clery investigations take years to complete. The Education Department usually does not reveal when a Clery investigation is underway, but it confirmed the MSU probe.
"My heart breaks for the survivors of Larry Nassar’s disgusting crimes," Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. "What happened at Michigan State is abhorrent. It cannot ever happen again — there or anywhere. Students must be safe and protected on our nation’s campuses. The Department is investigating this matter and will hold MSU accountable for any violations of federal law."
Michigan State University was notified last week as 133 victims began reading statements in court about Nassar's assaults, some of which took place at Michigan State University. Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in prison for child pornography, and up to 175 years for his assaults.
The president of MSU resigned this week under pressure from state lawmakers, students, and local newspapers, following reports that women had told employees at MSU about Nassar as far back as 1997. The National Collegiate Athletic Association also announced this week it will investigate MSU's handling of Nassar's crimes.
A separate office of the Education Department is already investigating MSU for its compliance with the gender equity law Title IX. Unlike Clery investigations, Title IX investigations usually only result in demands for policy changes, not fines. In 2015, for example, the feds found that MSU violated Title IX by taking too long to adjudicate student sexual misconduct cases, and ordered reforms to university policies.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tylerkingkade/ ... .hcapqyjaj
by Karmamatterz » Sat Jan 27, 2018 12:09 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 27, 2018 4:11 pm
by seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 27, 2018 2:13 pm
A Former Michigan State University Dean Allegedly Had A Video Of Larry Nassar "Treating" A Young Female Patient
William Strampel, a former dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Nassar's ex-boss, faces charges of sexual misconduct.
March 26, 2018, at 9:23 p.m.
Michigan State University
A former dean at Michigan State University has been charged amid an investigation into the school's handling of allegations against Larry Nassar, a former MSU doctor convicted of sexually abusing dozens of female patients.
William Strampel, 70, has been charged with allegedly using his office to harass and sexually assault female students as well as having pornographic material on his work computer, including a video of Nassar performing "treatment" on a young female patient.
He was booked at the Ingham County Jail in Michigan, and will be arraigned Tuesday afternoon, Sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth told BuzzFeed News. Strampel faces a felony charge of misconduct in office, a misdemeanor of criminal sexual conduct in the fourth degree and two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty.
Strampel's lawyer did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed News' request for comment.
A former dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, Strampel was Nassar's boss at MSU, and oversaw the implementation of new protocols after a Title IX investigation into the sports medicine doctor's conduct.
Nassar was sentenced in January to serve between 40 and 175 years in prison, after more than a hundred women detailed how he had assaulted them while working at MSU and as the team doctor for USA Gymnastics. The women and girls said Nassar inserted his ungloved fingers into their vaginas under the guise of medical treatment.
The case sparked outrage over how Nassar's abusive behavior was able to continue for decades. During the sentencing hearing, some women who were abused by Nassar said they reported it to university officials, but nothing was done to stop his abusive behavior.
The Title IX investigation cleared Nassar of wrongdoing in 2014, and he continued seeing patients until the summer of 2016, when more victims came forward.
According to an affidavit by special prosecutor Bill Forsyth, Strampel allowed Nassar to see patients before the Title IX investigation concluded and did not enforce the protocols put in place for Nassar following the probe.
"Nassar continued 'treating' numerous patients unchecked by the protocols supposedly put in place by Strampel to protect Nassar’s patients," the affidavit reads. "As a result, Nassar was able to commit a host of sexual assaults against new victims until, following news reports of additional allegations against Nassar, MSU finally terminated his employment over two years later."
Larry Nassar
Rena Laverty / AFP / Getty Images
Strampel worked at MSU from 1999 until December, when he took a leave of absence for medical reasons, the university said. As well as being a dean, he was the lead medical director of MSU HealthTeam, according to the school's website.
According to Tuesday's affidavit, Strampel used his position to sexually harass and assault at least four female medial students. The allegations include groping and inappropriate sexual comments.
According to the document, one woman alleges Strampel told her she would not make it in the medical field unless she started to dress sexier. The same woman said he groped her buttocks in 2013 during a scholarship dinner.
A spokesperson for MSU said the university will continue to cooperate with all ongoing investigations.
During a press conference Tuesday, Forsyth said his team received a tip about Strampel resulting in a search warrant. Investigators seized the former dean's computer and found approximately 50 photos of bare vaginas, nude or semi-nude women, sex toys, and pornography. Several of the women in the photos appear to be MSU students.
"In a previous statement, [MSU interim president John] Engler has said that Strampel did not act with the level of professionalism we expect from individuals who hold senior leadership positions, particularly in a position that involves student and patient safety," a statement from the MSU spokesperson states. "Allegations have arisen that question whether his personal conduct over a long period of time met MSU’s standards. We are sending an unmistakable message that we will remove employees who do not treat students, faculty, staff or anyone else in our community in an appropriate manner."
A Wall Street Journal report this month revealed that Strampel told students and school officials in the fall of 2016 that he did not believe the women accusing Nassar of abuse.
"Patients lie to get doctors in trouble. And we’re seeing that right now in the news with this Nassar stuff," Strampel reportedly said in a 2016 meeting, a written account of which was obtained by the Journal. "I don’t think any of these women were actually assaulted by Larry, but Larry didn’t learn that lesson and didn’t have a chaperone in the room, so now they see an opening and they can take advantage of him."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/police-ar ... hdz4ydyWKx
by Marionumber1 » Fri Mar 30, 2018 4:21 pm
The University That Launched a CIA Front Operation in Vietnam
How the friendship between a Vietnamese politician and an American academic led Michigan State University into a vast experiment in nation-building and pulled America deeper into war.
By ERIC SCIGLIANO | March 25, 2018
Time was, Michigan State University made national headlines mostly with its football and basketball teams. Then, more than 250 women accused Larry Nassar, a Michigan State physician and USA Gymnastics team doctor, of sexually assaulting them in the course of their gymnastics training. Since then, Nassar has been sentenced to up to 175 years in prison, MSU’s president and athletic director and five other officials have either resigned or been forced out, and pressure is mounting for its board of trustees to walk the same plank. From here on, many fear, the university’s name will be indelibly linked with the vile Dr. Nassar’s wholesale sexual abuse.
Or will it? A little over 50 years ago, another national scandal overtook Michigan State University, an academic and political cause célèbre that seemed to leave the school indelibly associated with—even, in some quarters, blamed for—nothing less than America’s war in Vietnam. Today the fateful exercise in nation-building and government-and-gown cooperation known as the Michigan State University Advisory Group rates but a footnote in popular histories of the war, if that. Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s recent 18-hour documentary series The Vietnam War does not mention it at all.
[...]
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 16, 2018 7:05 pm
Michigan State and 332 of Larry Nassar's victims reach 'historic' $500 million settlement
Matt Mencarini and Justin A. Hinkley, Lansing State Journal
Assistant Attorney General Angela Povilaitis gives closing statements during Larry Nassar's Eaton County sentencing hearing. Nassar was sentenced to 40 to 125 years in prison. Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal
EAST LANSING - Michigan State University has agreed to a $500 million settlement with hundreds of women and girls Larry Nassar sexually assaulted, bringing to a close another aspect of the scandal now in its 20th month.
The settlement and the details were announced in a statement from attorneys representing victims and the university. A portion of the settlement — $75 million — will be held back in the event of future lawsuits filed against MSU over Nassar.
The lawsuits, filed in federal court in Grand Rapids and state courts in California, claim that MSU, USA Gymnastics and others failed to protect Nassar's victims from his sexual abuse.
Despite the high dollar figure, several of the victims said they were disappointed the university didn't agree to institutional reforms as part of the settlement and vowed to continue pushing for those and for legislative reforms.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs and defendants met on Monday and Tuesday in a mediation session. The settlement was agreed to by the university's Board of Trustees during a conference call held Tuesday night, according to the statement. The agreement comes as a result of the second round of settlement talks, with the first ending in December after five months, and only relates to the university and its current or former employees named as defendants.
More: Schuette targets former Michigan State dean's medical license
More: MSU settlement won't end debate in Lansing over sexual assault bills
Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to publicly say that Nassar abused her, has been credited by many of the other victims who came forward as the reason they did so, ultimately forming the "army of survivors" or "sister survivors" as they've referred to themselves.
"I am thankful that the historic settlement amount at least in part reflects the horrific nature of what took place at MSU," she said in a statement. "However, I am deeply disappointed at the missed opportunity for meaningful reform and change at the University.
"My sisters and I have said from the beginning that coming forward was to push for accountability and needed reform, and there is much work left to be done."
Amanda Thomashow reported Nassar to MSU in 2014, prompting a Title IX investigation that ended with the university telling her that she wasn't sexually assaulted and that she misunderstood what happened because she didn't understand "nuanced difference" between sexual assault and an appropriate medical procedure.
"I think that this is a step in the right direction," she said of the settlement. "But I think there’s a lot more work to be done at MSU and institutions across the country."
Thomashow is considering a run for MSU's Board of Trustees.
And Larissa Boyce, who along with Thomashow, Denhollander and others testified during a state House committee on a package of bills inspired by Nassar's crimes, said she's happy with the settlement and hopes it sends a message to other institutions.
"I am disappointed that we were not able to come to an agreement with non-monetary requests ... even something as simple as a true apology," she said in a statement. "I will not rest until we see changes in policy at MSU and state legislation in order to further shine a light on the culture of abuse that exists in our society.
"Writing a check does not bring healing to me as a survivor. We still have a long way to go in order to ensure our children are safer and people will be held accountable for their actions or inaction. My healing will come through our continued fight to protect our children."
Brian Breslin, the chairman of MSU's Board of Trustees who isn't seeking re-election, said he hopes the agreement represents progress.
"We are truly sorry to all the survivors and their families for what they have been through, and we admire the courage it has taken to tell their stories," he said in a statement. "We recognize the need for change on our campus and in our community around sexual assault awareness and prevention. A successful resolution to the litigation is a positive step in moving us all forward."
MSU spokeswoman Emily Guerrant said the university has not determined how it will pay for the settlement or how much will be covered by its insurance providers.
MSU has paid nine law firms more than $11.3 million to represent it and its current and former employees in the civil litigation and state and federal investigations related to Nassar’s crimes. At least $2.5 million of that total has gone law firms handling insurance aspects related to Nassar's crimes and the lawsuits.
It's likely MSU has multiple liability insurance policies and it’s possible for an organization its size to have $500 million in coverage, although the university’s out-of-pocket costs could still be in the tens of millions, Lars Powell, an insurance expert at the University of Alabama who is not involved with MSU, said Wednesday. It’s likely the insurers were part of the settlement discussions, he said.
"I would guess that whatever settlement they reached would be the amount of insurance they carry," said Powell, who is director of the Alabama Center for Insurance Information & Research. "They wouldn't just agree to the settlement, nor would the plaintiffs agree to that settlement, if the insurers weren't on board."
One caveat, he said, is that medical malpractice and other professional liability insurance policies often say explicitly that they will not cover sexual misconduct. That could create the possibility for MSU to end up in a court fight with insurers.
Nassar, 54, formerly of Holt, worked at MSU and with USA Gymnastics for decades. Sexual assault claims against Nassar were first made public by the Indianapolis Star in September 2016, in a story that included Denhollander's experience.
'Historic settlement'
In August 2017, when the number of victims suing was less than half of what it is now, the lawsuits entered mediation for the first time.
It was seven months after Tiffany Thomas Lopez, a former MSU softball player who said Nassar abused her several times from 1998 to 2000, filed the first lawsuit against MSU, in a state court in California. She’s said that she told several MSU trainers about the abuse but nothing was done to stop it.
A month later, in January 2017, Denhollander and 17 women and girls filed the first federal lawsuit against MSU and USA Gymnastics related to Nassar.
Three weeks after Denhollander's lawsuit, Boyce filed a lawsuit with 11 other victims and said she had raised concerns to Kathie Klages, the longtime MSU women's gymnastics coach, in 1997 along with another woman who was also a plaintiff on that lawsuit. Boyce has said she was discouraged from filing an official complaint against Nassar.
By the middle of March 2017, the number of women and girls who had filed lawsuits stood at 78. Later that month, Thomashow filed her lawsuit and by late June 2017, the number of women and girls suing MSU and USAG was at 119.
The five-month first mediation phase ended in December 2017, just days before Nassar was sentenced to 60-years in federal prison on three child pornography charges. The following month, Nassar's sentencing hearing on 10 sexual assault charges split between two state courts began.
His seven-day marathon sentencing in Ingham County, covered by national and international media outlets, pushed his crimes and his connection to MSU to a level not seen before.
Lindsey Lemke, a former MSU gymnast, was among the 156 who made victim impact statements during that sentencing. She harshly criticized the university during her statement and said on Wednesday that she hopes the settlement with MSU is a sign of real change at the university.
"This has been a very long and exhausting road, especially for those who have been so vocal from the very beginning of this case," she said in a statement. "This settlement from Michigan State is a huge victory for the survivors as it is the real first sign of accountability that we've seen."
Just days before Nassar’s Ingham County sentencing began, MSU filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuits, saying that as a state institution it "retains absolute immunity from liability" for his actions. It also argued that the statute of limitations had expired and some plaintiffs lacked standing for protection under the federal Title IX law.
The settlement does not include confidentiality agreements or non-disclosure agreements, according to the release from attorneys and the university, and is only between victims and MSU and the university's current and former employees, not USA Gymnastics and the others who have been sued.
Independent review: MSU must work on communication to fix Title IX issues
John Engler on his MSU job: 'I'm ready to go now'
More: Nassar scandal drives interest in Michigan State University board election
"Michigan State has shown leadership by its willingness to begin closing this dark chapter," Jamie White, one of the attorneys suing MSU, told the State Journal. "The victims of Nassar can never be made whole but this is a step in the right direction."
Many of the victims have said Nassar abused them at MSU, but also at Twistars gymnastics club in Dimondale, Nassar’s home in Holt or at USA Gymnastics sponsored events.
"USA Gymnastics is very encouraged by the settlement in principle recently made by Michigan State University and the attorneys for the Larry Nassar survivors," the organization said in a statement. "We remain committed to continuing our mediation efforts to reach resolution as well."
A message was left seeking comment from an attorney for John Geddert, who is being sued along with his Dimondale gym Twistars.
John Manly, an attorney representing many of the victims, thanked the other attorneys who represented victims and the mediator.
"This historic settlement came about through the bravery of more than 300 women and girls who had the courage to stand up and refuse to be silenced," he said in a statement. "It is the sincere hope of all of the survivors that the legacy of this settlement will be far reaching institutional reform that will end the threat of sexual assault in sports, schools and throughout our society."
David Mittleman, an attorney for 111 of the plaintiffs, said there are plans to continue settlement talks with USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic Committee and Geddert.
"Because of the brave, strong army of survivors that brought light to the darkness of the largest university sex assault case in history, we have arrived at a fair and just resolution with MSU," he said.
Robert Young, special counsel to MSU and former state Supreme Court justice, said in a statement that "Michigan State is pleased that we have been able to agree in principle on a settlement that is fair to the survivors of Nassar's crimes. We appreciate the hard work both sides put into the mediation, and the efforts of the mediator, which achieved a result that is responsible and equitable."
More: Inside the investigation and prosecution of Larry Nassar
'By the way, enjoy hell': Read the words of the many women who confronted Larry Nassar
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette's office prosecuted Nassar on sexual assault charges and is currently conducting an investigation of sexual misconduct at MSU.
"I am pleased for the survivors of Larry Nassar's mistreatment that this settlement is occurring," Schuette said in a statement. "This is about justice for the survivors; each of the women who came forward deserve justice. Those who spoke at the many days of sentencing remain in my thoughts every day, and their strength is an inspiration to us all."
MSU finances
The Nassar scandal sparked a flurry of legislation after his state court sentencing in January.
Among the bills still being debated in the Legislature are ones that would extend the statutes of limitations for both criminal charges and civil lawsuits in sex assault cases and make those extensions retroactive to the late 1990s, when the first accusations against Nassar were raised to MSU officials.
Interim MSU President John Engler opposed the proposals, saying it would raise the price tag for MSU to settle lawsuits and that students and taxpayers would shoulder much of the burden.
But state Sen. Curtis Hertel Jr., D-Meridian Township, whose district includes MSU's campus, said the bills may have forced the university back to the negotiating table.
"For all the talk of, 'the sky is falling' by some at MSU ... while this is certainly a large of sum of money, it certainly doesn't look like it's going to be the end of MSU," Hertel said, adding that he still believes the legislation is needed "because it's never just been about MSU for me."
Engler has said any settlement costs will be covered by tuition and state aid. Some lawmakers have said no state aid should be used. University officials have said their legal expenses are being paid with non-endowment investment income.
MSU brought in $859 million in tuition revenue in 2016-17, according to its audited financial statements. That's 29% of its total revenue of $2.9 billion.
On the other side of the ledger, the university has $1.1 billion in outstanding debt. Ashley Ramchandani, a credit analyst with S&P Global Ratings, said it considers MSU to be in good shape financially with debt and could likely add some if needed.
MSU also ended the last fiscal year with $1.1 billion in unrestricted net assets. That's money that isn't legally contracted to a certain project, but often is set aside for particular projects.
The two biggest chunks of what MSU has set aside its unrestricted net assets for are infrastructure ($557 million) and programs ($400 million).
Timeline: Larry Nassar's decades-long career, sexual assault convictions and prison sentences
Timeline: Michigan State and its handling of sexual assault cases
More: How Larry Nassar abused hundreds of gymnasts and eluded justice for decades
David Jesse of the Detroit Free Press contributed to this report. Contact Matt Mencarini at (517) 267-1347 or mmencarini@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattMencarini.
https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/sto ... 614502002/
by seemslikeadream » Mon May 28, 2018 12:27 am
Report: USA Gymnastics Approved Cover Stories For Larry Nassar Amid Sex Abuse Probe
Officals from USA Gymnastics agreed to provide the attorney for former team doctor Larry Nassar "false excuses" after he skipped major gymnastics events in 2015, rather than tell parents and gymnasts that Nassar was facing a probe for alleged sexual abuse, according to a report from the Indianapolis Star.
The newspaper obtained two emails explaining that Nassar and an attorney for USA Gymnastics came up with cover stories.
The first story claimed that Nassar was ill and other one said he was focused his private practice as reason while he didn't show up to two events, the Secret U.S. Classic and the USA P&G Championships in Indianapolis, leading up to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio.
According to the email, attorney Scott D. Himsel told Nassar that he was under investigation and that he would tell people that Nassar would not be attending the events because of "personal reasons."
Nassar's reply to the email: "Can we just say that i am sick? That would make more sense to everyone. Would that be ok?"
"I stayed with the story of that I am nauseated, not feeling well and staying home," Nassar added.
Over 300 girls and women accused Nassar of assaulting them, including Olympic gold medalists Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney and Gabby Douglas, who have said that Nassar abused them for years.
Nassar was later sentenced up to 175 years on Michigan state charges of sexual assault, to go along with a sentence of 40 to 125 years in prison on three counts of sexual assault with another 60–year sentence on federal child pornography charges.
USA Gymnastics cleaned house after the Nassar story broke, as the entire board of directors and its president Steve Penny resigned under pressure. Scott Blackmun, the chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee, also stepped down.
The organization is facing dozens of lawsuits, accused of turning a blind eye to Nassar's years of abusing athletes. USA Gymnastics is seeking to have those lawsuits thrown out.
https://www.si.com/olympics/2018/05/24/ ... xual-abuse
by seemslikeadream » Thu May 31, 2018 8:15 pm
'The media killed me,' Larry Nassar wrote in newly released email
By Julie Mack jmack1@mlive.comUpdated 11:38 AM; Posted 11:37 AM
As the law and his victims closed in on Larry Nassar in September 2016, the Michigan State University sports-medicine doctor scrambled to fend off allegations of sexual misconduct -- and he seemed to have an ally in his boss, Dr. William Strampel, then-dean of MSU's College of Osteopathic Medicine, newly released emails show.
The emails detail Nassar's growing panic after Rachael Denhollander filed a report with MSU Police on Aug. 29, 2016, alleging she was molested by Nassar when she was a 15-year-old patient at MSU's Sports Medicine Clinic in 2000.
Nassar also became aware Denhollander and two other former patients told the Indianapolis Star that they were sexually abused by Nassar under the guise of medical treatment.
The Indianapolis Star published its story on Sept. 12, 2016, kick-starting the biggest crisis in MSU history -- a scandal that has resulted in a life prison sentence for Nassar; the resignation of MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon and athletic director Mark Hollis, among others; and an agreement by MSU to pay $500 million to settle lawsuits filed by more than 300 former Nassar patients.
"The media has killed me," Nassar wrote in a Sept. 16, 2016, email to Strampel, which is among the emails MLive obtained this week through the Freedom of Information Act.
The emails offer an inside look at the early days of the scandal, which occurred two years after MSU quietly cleared Nassar in a complaint by Amanda Thomashow, who said she was molested during a March 2014 appointment.
Nassar saw patients for more than two years while under criminal investigation
Nassar saw patients for more than two years while under criminal investigation
During the last two and a half years of his career, Michigan State University's Dr. Larry Nassar was under investigation by five different institutions on allegations of sexual misconduct
On Aug. 30, 2016, a day after Denhollander filed her report, Nassar was pulled from clinical duty and told he could not see patients while under investigation.
Over the next week, Nassar sent multiple emails to Strampel, including one titled "Earning My Keep," offering ideas on how to be productive since he was not seeing patients; telling Strampel he was considering giving up osteopathic manual manipulations as part of his treatment practices "as a result of all that has happened," and emailing a Google Drive link detailing his treatment methods.
On Sept. 6, Nassar received an email from Tim Evans, a reporter from the Indianapolis Star, seeking an interview. Nassar forwarded the email to Strampel and asked for advice.
"I spoke to my attorney and he said I should talk to the reporter to prevent the story from being one-sided so that I can deny any wrong doing," Nassar wrote. "I am asking for legal assistance from MSU as to how to handle this. Should I work through my own attorney or through MSU or both? I am so sorry about this mess."
Strampel wrote that the university lawyers "declined to provide any specific legal advice." But he passed along some tips from the MSU public-relations office: If Nassar agreed to an interview, "be very aware not to take the tone of 'blaming the victim'" and be sure to tell the reporter that the medical treatments were "science based" and helped "100s if not 1000s" of women.
"Good luck," Strampel wrote. "I am on your side."
Strampel echoed that sentiment a few days later when Nassar wrote he and his attorney were meeting with the reporter on Sept. 12.
"I do wish you luck," Strampel wrote.
During that Sept. 12 interview, Nassar and his attorney denied claims that patients were digitally penetrated during treatments for sports injuries.
The Indianapolis Star posted its investigation into Nassar later that afternoon, and it got immediate coverage by other media.
"Most of the stories have focused (for now) on Nassar and his affiliation with USAG (USA Gymnastics), not his MSU affiliation," Jason Cody, then MSU spokesman, wrote in an Sept. 13 email to MSU top administrators. "Unfortunately, we can expect that to change quickly as we just got our first query" about 2014 investigation.
The next day, an MSU attorney contacted Strampel about the 2014 complaint.
Nassar "was NOT suspended and I made the move to protect him at that time," Strampel responded.
Meanwhile, Nassar's denial that he digitally penetrated patients drew a slew of calls to the MSU Police Department from women who countered that claim -- and wondered why Nassar was denying something presented to them as a legitimate medical treatment.
The emails show Nassar swinging between defiance and despair in the aftermath of the Indy Star report.
On Sept. 15, he emailed Strampel about the "many messages of support" he received.
"I have had so many messages of support today and have another 75 more to go through still," Nassar wrote. "... National Team Gymnastics Coaches started a legal affidavit about my good character and are trying to get 1000 gymnasts, coaches and parent to sign it and another former national team gymnast that is now a lawyer is preparing another legal affidavit about my morals and ethics and has many people supporting it as well.
"I am trying to take advantage of this time before the 'Me Toos' come out in the media and the second media blitz occurs," Nassar added, saying he was worried "the Indy Star will make their next Crucifixion of me on Monday. That is what I am emotionally prepared for."
Late that night, Nassar wrote a second email to Strampel, who was in California.
"I knew the media blitz was going to create more people to call in with accusations about me but this is absurb (sic)," Nassar wrote. "I have not been charged with any crime. I don't understand why this is happening. This is not right. .... This is not right."
In his response, Strampel was no longer supportive.
"There seems to have been more people who have come forward," Strampel wrote. "Also, there is a report of an investigation back in 2004 that I did not hear about. We will talk next week when I am back."
"The media has killed me," Nassar wrote back.
Strampel responded with an even more ominous email: "This may not wait until next week. ... Things are moving beyond my control."
A few hours later on Sept. 16, Nassar was delivered a letter from MSU saying the university was considering his "immediate termination."
"I am so sorry that this situation has become so public in the media casting such a shadow over MSU and myself," Nassar wrote to Strampel. "I understand your position and appreciate all the support you have given to me. My heart is breaking but I will stay strong in my Faith and with the support of my friends and my family I will overcome this."
On Sept. 20, Nassar received a second letter from MSU: "Given the seriousness of the issues raised in our letter of Sept. 16, we have no recourse but to terminate your fixed termed appointment effective immediately."
By late December 2016, Nassar was charged with first-degree sexual assault for molesting a family friend starting when she was 6 until she was 12 and was indicted on federal child pornography charges for having more than 30,000 images of porn on his computer.
Meanwhile, Nassar's former colleagues struggled to understand the depths of Nassar's crimes.
In a Dec. 22, 2016, email, MSU head athletic trainer Sally Nogle told Tracey Covassin, director of MSU's undergraduate athletic trainer program, that she finally came to believe Nassar was a predator.
"It makes me sad that he is so bad," Nogle wrote. "It is so hard to believe but what we are seeing is so awful that I am now believing it ... just too much info from what I am reading.
"How could he fool us and so many others," Nogle continued. "Still trying to reconcile what I am hearing with who I thought he was."
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/201 ... r_wro.html
Ex-MSU president Lou Anna Simon to testify before Senate on Nassar
Todd SpanglerUpdated 9:29 p.m. ET May 29, 2018
WASHINGTON – Former Michigan State University president Lou Anna Simon will testify before a U.S. Senate subcommittee next week in the wake of the scandal involving disgraced sports medicine physician Larry Nassar.
It is expected to be Simon's first public comments since Nassar — a former employee at the university who was accused of molesting more than a hundred girls and young women through his role as a doctor for USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee — was sentenced.
Simon stepped down Jan. 24 amid outrage over Nassar's case and accusations that MSU did not adequately respond to warnings and allegations made against him sooner. At the time, Simon said that while there was no cover-up at the university, "As tragedies are politicized, blame is inevitable."
Read more:
She is set to testify next Tuesday before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance and Data Security, which has been investigating whether Olympic athletes have been preyed upon by sexual predators and what is being done to ensure athletes are safe in the future.
The hearing is set to begin at 3 p.m. in Washington and will include testimony from Rhonda Faehn, the former women's program director at USA Gymnastics, and Steve Penny, the former president of USA Gymnastics.
Last month, at another hearing, Olympic gold medal gymnast Jordyn Wieber, a Lansing-area native, described for the subcommittee how she was abused by Nassar beginning at age 14, saying she believed that if she raised concerns at the time it might have hurt her future goals.
This month, Michigan State settled claims made by 332 people, agreeing to pay $500 million.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/ ... 652087002/
Grizzly » Thu May 31, 2018 1:26 pm wrote:https://soundcloud.com/guns-and-butter-1/americas-traffic-in-child-pornography-lori-handrahan-381Dr. Lori Handrahan discusses her research into rampant pedophilia that her new book, "Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape", documents in detail. She analyzes pedophilia, not as a sexual orientation, or as an act of “attraction” to children, but as violent abuse and sadism, often ending in death, that meets the Convention Against Torture definition. Discussed is the lack of comprehensive data collection on arrests of pedophiles in a fast growing crime wave about which little is known; the easy profit-model of child rape; online networks; the proliferation of servers, websites, pictures and videos; the traffic in infants and toddlers; professions that act as magnets for pedophiles; attempts to define pedophilia as a disability rather than a violent crime; the massive amount of child porn on computers in all government agencies; the powerful as perpetrators.
Originally Aired: January 31, 2018
Visit Guns and Butter at: http://www.gunsandbutter.org
Interesting the the lead in the poll is 'A Glimpse into Pedo-Culture in Washington, DC' at 28% ...
the above doesn't go into human trafficking in DC per say, but gives one a needed insight into our culture of death power and deviant sex.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 01, 2018 10:29 am
Congressional Candidate In Virginia Admits He’s A Pedophile
Nathan Larson also ran online forums for pedophiles and misogynists.
By Jesselyn Cook and Andy Campbell
Nathan Larson, a 37-year-old accountant from Charlottesville, Virginia, is running for Congress as an independent candidate in his native state. He is also a pedophile, as he admitted to HuffPost on Thursday, who has bragged in website posts about raping his late ex-wife.
In a phone call, Larson confirmed that he created the now-defunct websites suiped.org and incelocalypse.today ― chat rooms that served as gathering places for pedophiles and violence-minded misogynists like himself. HuffPost contacted Larson after confirming that his campaign website shared an IP address with these forums, among others. His sites were terminated by their domain host on Tuesday.
On the phone, he was open about his pedophilia and seemingly unfazed about his long odds of attaining government office.
“A lot of people are tired of political correctness and being constrained by it,” he said. “People prefer when there’s an outsider who doesn’t have anything to lose and is willing to say what’s on a lot of people’s minds.”
When asked whether he’s a pedophile or just writes about pedophilia, he said, “It’s a mix of both. When people go over the top there’s a grain of truth to what they say.”
Asked whether there was a “grain of truth” in his essay about father-daughter incest and another about raping his ex-wife repeatedly, he said yes, offering that plenty of women have rape fantasies.
According to Larson’s campaign manifesto, his platform as a “quasi-neoreactionary libertarian” candidate includes protecting gun ownership rights, establishing free trade and protecting “benevolent white supremacy,” as well as legalizing incestuous marriage and child pornography.
In the manifesto, Larson called Nazi leader Adolf Hitler a “white supremacist hero.” He urged Congress to repeal the Violence Against Women Act, adding, “We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers and later of their husbands.” He also showed sympathy for men who identify as involuntary celibates, or incels, suggesting it is unfair that they “are forced to pay taxes for schools, welfare, and other support for other men’s children.”
Using the pseudonyms Leucosticte and Lysander, Larson frequently participated in conversations on his own message boards, he confirmed to HuffPost.
Larson posted as "Lysander" on his now-defunct website, suiped.org.
SUIPED ORG
Larson posted as “Lysander” on his now-defunct website, suiped.org.
As Lysander on suiped.org, a forum for “suicidal pedophiles,” Larson wrote numerous posts endorsing child rape and other forms of sexual abuse.
“Why doesn’t every pedo just focus on making money so they can get a pedo-wife and then either impregnate her with some fucktoys or adopt some fucktoys?” he wrote on the platform in October. “That would accommodate both those who are and aren’t into incest. And of course, the adoption process lets you pick a boy or a girl.”
Larson has a 3-year-old daughter who lives with relatives. He told HuffPost that he relinquished his parental rights during a custody battle. His ex-wife got a court-ordered restraining order against him in 2015 before committing suicide. He has since remarried, he says, and is now living in Catlett, Virginia.
Larson used the moniker “Leucosticte” on incelocalypse.today ― a forum for incels who are pedophiles that was removed this week after the website Babe contacted the domain host. There, he identified as a “hebephilic rapist,” noting that he’s not a typical incel because he’d had sex by raping his ex-wife.
According to the site, which HuffPost viewed before it was taken down, “incelocalypse” refers to “the day we make the jailbaits our rape-slaves.” (The term “jailbait” is slang for a person who is under the legal age of consent for sex.)
Larson posted as "Leucosticte" on incelocalypse.today.
INCELOCALYPSE TODAY
Larson posted as “Leucosticte” on incelocalypse.today.
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HuffPost did not view any posts explicitly stating that he has engaged in sexual activity with minors, although he repeatedly expressed a desire to have sex with infants and children, including his own daughter. In the phone call, Larson said that the word “pedophile” is “vague” and “just a label,” adding that it’s “normal” for men to be attracted to underage women. He said he did not commit any crimes.
In a 3,300-word essay on incelocalypse.today, titled “Here’s How to Psyche Yourself Up to Feel Entitled to Rape,” Larson tells other members: “Don’t forget: feminism is the problem, and rape is the solution.” On the platform, he also advocated for father-daughter marriage, killing women and raping virgins.
Larson is less worried about his run for Congress than about his sites coming down. He told HuffPost that the termination of his websites is an affront to his freedom of speech and that he’s going to try to get them hosted elsewhere. Not that it’ll matter ― there are still plenty of forums where incels and other such communities can congregate. The removal of Larson’s sites caused an uproar on incels.me, a separate, much larger forum for incels.
Larson’s political ambitions span more than a decade. He first ran for Congress in Virginia’s 1st District in 2008 on what he described as an “anarcho-capitalist” platform. That same year, he sent a letter to the Secret Service threatening to kill the president, which landed him in federal prison for 14 months and barred him from seeking public office.
But in 2016, then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) restored voting and other civil rights to thousands of felons, allowing Larson to campaign yet again. In 2017 he ran in Virginia’s House of Delegates District 31 and secured less than 2 percent of the vote. Now he is gunning for a seat in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District.
On websites, Nathan Larson, 37, has advocated for rape, pedophilia, incest and kidnapping.
NATHAN LARSON
On websites, Nathan Larson, 37, has advocated for rape, pedophilia, incest and kidnapping.
Until it was pulled down, Larson’s site Nathania.org, a wiki page with details about his latest candidacy, featured posts titled “A Man Should Be Allowed to Choke His Wife to Death as Punishment for Cutting Her Hair Short Without Permission, or Other Acts of Gross Insubordination,” “Advantages of Father-Daughter Incest” and “The Justifiability of an Incel’s Kidnapping a Girl and Keeping Her as His Rape-Slave for Sex and Babymaking.” Wiki pages can be edited by other people, but Larson confirmed he wrote these posts as well as several other disturbing entries.
In “Let’s Define What Rape Is,” a 3,000-word essay posted on Nathania.org as well as other incel sites, Larson wrote: “Women are objects, to be taken care of by men like any other property, and for powerful men to insert themselves into as it pleases them, and as they believe will be in women’s own interests. In most cases, their interests are aligned, as long as the man is strong. Female sex-slaves actually get a much better deal than animals, because in most cases, they are allowed to reproduce, unlike animals raised for meat or companionship.”
When asked what his constituents would think about his pedophiliac writings, he said, “People are open-minded.”
He continued, “A lot of people who disagreed with someone like Trump … might vote for them anyway just because the establishment doesn’t like them.”
Nathan Larson is running for Congress as an independent in Virginia. In an interview with HuffPost, he was open about his ped
NATHANLARSONORG
Nathan Larson is running for Congress as an independent in Virginia. In an interview with HuffPost, he was open about his pedophilia.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/na ... mg00000004
by Cordelia » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:51 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 18, 2018 5:52 am
Former USA Gymnastics President Arrested For Tampering With Nassar Evidence
Emily SullivanOctober 18, 20182:32 AM ET
Former USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny invokes the Fifth Amendment during a hearing about Larry Nassar before a Senate subcommittee in June.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
Steve Penny, the former president of USA Gymnastics who has been criticized for allegedly covering up sexual abuse by Larry Nassar, was arrested on Wednesday for tampering with evidence related to a Nassar investigation.
If convicted, Penny could receive two to 10 years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine.
He was arrested in Gatlinburg, Tenn., after a Texas indictment dated Sept. 28 called for his arrest.
It is the first arrest of an alleged Nassar enabler. USA Gymnastics' leadership has faced previous allegations of both ignoring reports of Nassar's massive sexual abuse and actively working to hide it.
The indictment by Texas authorities alleges that Penny ordered the removal of documents from the Karolyi Ranch where USA Gymnastics athletes trained in Walker County, Texas, that were related to Nassar's activities at the ranch after learning an investigation was underway.
The documents were allegedly delivered to Penny at the USA Gymnastics headquarters in Indianapolis, where he either destroyed or hid them. They have not been recovered. The Texas Rangers and the Walker County Sheriff's Office said in the indictment that the documents are "material" to their investigation of Nassar, and would have aided an investigation of other offenses at the ranch.
Nassar — who served as the doctor for the U.S. National Women's Gymnastics Team, U.S. Olympic team and Michigan State University for two decades — pleaded guilty earlier this year to federal child pornography charges and 10 counts of criminal sexual conduct in Michigan state courts.
He was sentenced to 60 years in prison on federal child pornography charges and 300 years in prison on the state charges. More than 250 women and girls have accused Nassar of sexual abuse.
Earlier this year, Penny was dismissed from a hearing before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating Nassar's sexual abuse after he refused to answer questions from lawmakers, repeatedly pleading his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
USA Gymnastics reported the abuse to the FBI five weeks after a coach voiced concern to its leadership.
However, emails submitted to the subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance and Data Security appear to show that one week before the FBI was notified, Penny ordered USA Gymnastics officials not to disclose reports of abuse.
Penny resigned from USA Gymnastics in March 2017 after initial reports alleged that the organization ignored the abuse allegations.
In the past, Penny has denied all accusations of a cover up.
"Our clients are grateful to the Walker County DA that finally, after 3 years of waiting, Nassar's USAG and USOC enablers are finally being held to account," John Manly, an attorney who represents over 180 alleged victims of Nassar, told NPR in a statement. "Mr. Penny is currently where he belongs for his enabling a pedophile."
Penny is being held in Gatlinburg, awaiting extradition to Walker County, Texas.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/18/65835663 ... r-evidence
by seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 16, 2018 11:53 am
Everyone Believed Larry Nassar
The predatory trainer may have just taken down USA Gymnastics. How did he deceive so many for so long?
Kerry HowleyNov. 11, 2018
Larry Nassar at Ingham County Circuit Court on November 22, 2017. Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images
Larissa Boyce was 10 when her coach, John Geddert, forced her legs into a split so hard she cried. He pulled her right leg up toward his torso, sending shooting pains through her groin and hamstrings, and he kept pulling. “Racking,” as it’s called, was common practice at the gym, but it was evidently too much for Larissa’s mother, who marched onto the mats and told Geddert to take his hands off her daughter. From then on, Larissa would train under Kathie Klages, a relatively low-key coach with unruly red hair and glasses at Michigan State University’s Spartan youth gymnastics team. Klages, like Geddert, considered herself a dear friend of an athletic trainer named Larry Nassar and sent her gymnasts to him.
When, six years later, Larissa felt ready to talk about the fact that Larry had penetrated her with his hand without warning, she approached Klages. Larissa remembers her office as a small room with a desk, a window, and green carpet. “‘I have known Larry for years and years,’” Larissa recalls Klages saying. “‘He would never do anything inappropriate.’”
Larissa named another gymnast who had been touched, and when Klages called her into the office, she told her the same story. Klages countered by bringing in college gymnasts, who said that Larry had touched “around” the area but that it was never “inappropriate.”
“That’s not what happened to me,” Larissa said. Klages, who has been indicted for allegedly lying to police about this and another such instance, maintains that no one ever came to her with complaints of sexual abuse.
According to Larissa, Klages said she could report the allegations but doing so would have “very serious consequences” for both Larry and Larissa. Larissa couldn’t look at Klages, so she stared out the window. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. Afterward, she cried in the bathroom and resolved never to tell anyone again. She worried that Klages would tell Larry.
The next time she went to visit Larry, he closed the door, pulled up a stool, sat down, and looked at her. “So,” he said, “I talked to Kathie.”
“I’m so sorry,” Larissa said. “I misunderstood. It’s all my fault.”
It was 1997. Most of Larry Nassar’s victims had not yet been born.
It has by the fall of 2018 become commonplace to describe the 499 known victims of Larry Nassar as “breaking their silence,” though in fact they were never, as a group, particularly silent. Over the course of at least 20 years of consistent abuse, women and girls reported to every proximate authority. They told their parents. They told gymnastics coaches, running coaches, softball coaches. They told Michigan State University police and Meridian Township police. They told physicians and psychologists. They told university administrators. They told, repeatedly, USA Gymnastics. They told one another. Athletes were interviewed, reports were written up, charges recommended. The story of Larry Nassar is not a story of silence. The story of Larry Nassar is that of an edifice of trust so resilient, so impermeable to common sense, that it endured for decades against the allegations of so many women.
If this is a story of institutional failure, it is also a story of astonishing individual ingenuity. Larry Nassar was good at this. His continued success depended on deceiving parents, fellow doctors, elite coaches, Olympic gatekeepers, athletes, and, with some regularity, law enforcement. Before getting caught, he managed to abuse women and girls whose names you know — Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney — and hundreds whose names you don’t.
As of November 5, it looks likely that Nassar has destroyed the sport’s governing body, USA Gymnastics. In an open letter citing the “struggle to change its culture,” the U.S. Olympic Committee began the process of decertifying USAG, which withheld knowledge about Nassar from its members for over a year and whose former president was recently arrested by U.S. Marshals for disappearing Nassar-related documents. The organization is being sued by hundreds of accusers represented by “37 or 38” law firms, according to the lawyer charged with organizing them; it’s hard to keep count.
If this is a story of institutional failure, it is also a story of astonishing individual ingenuity. Larry Nassar was good at this.
Nassar has pleaded guilty in three separate trials and been sentenced to a collective minimum of 100 years. Michigan State University has settled with 332 women for half a billion dollars. Karolyi Ranch, the dated, isolated training camp where Olympians were required to see Nassar, has been shut down. Yet strangely little has been said about the man, his strategies, his undeniable and persistent success in serving his own needs. One can read news reports for hours about athletes and judicial process and, inescapably, the triumph of “finding a voice” without being informed of what, precisely, this man had done to any of the athletes whose voices required finding. News broadcasts are hard to parse: a dozen medal-winning gymnasts, of three different generations, “speaking out” about what was typically and unspecifically called “abuse” but that many of them had understood to be “treatment.” There are logistical questions. How had he molested girls who were never alone with him? What, precisely, motivated coaches and administrators to protect him — at great risk to themselves? With what rhetorical magic had he argued himself out of complaint after complaint?
Nassar is neither charismatic nor smooth; he is nerdy, a little awkward, a little “Inspector Gadget,” as one gymnast put it. He is a man who laughs a lot and snorts when he laughs. He tells dad jokes and never dirty ones; his voice is nasal and his patter never-ending. His talkativeness, particularly on technical matters relating to the body’s response to injury, can verge on excessive, even logorrheic. “Sometimes,” says a former colleague, “it was like, ‘Okay, Larry, that’s enough, got it.’ ” Yet he projects such kindness, such determined, tireless selflessness, that people around him are rendered inarticulate when they attempt to express his essential benevolence. “He was such a kind man,” says the father of a girl Nassar abused many times, his voice bright with incredulity. “I really cannot say enough good about Larry, because he is just a wonderful man,” Nassar’s neighbor Jody Rosebush told the Detroit News last year after the allegations emerged. He had helped shovel snow; he had rushed across the street in bare feet when she’d had a sudden medical issue. “He will do anything in the world for anybody. We all love Larry. We really, really love Larry.” Jessica O’Beirne, the host of a podcast called GymCastic and perhaps the most biting editorialist about Nassar and his myriad enablers, had him on the show before the allegations were made public. “I just love Larry Nassar,” she said by way of introduction. “He’s totally amazing … He’s just amazing. I think he’s awesome. And that’s from personal experience. He’s just … he’s great.”
Much-loved Larry placed himself in a position of authority in the least-monitored space full of children and proceeded to become the most successful pedophile in sports history. Beyond the choice of medical school, the apparent research interest in the sacrotuberous ligament, the intense focus on a world populated by 11-year-old girls, the useful belief in alternative therapies, there was also this: his incredible brazenness. Nassar molested young girls in his office while their fathers watched. He molested elite athletes under blankets in busy gyms teeming with people. Even a paranoid parent would not have perceived a meeting with a doctor in an open gym, a few feet away, to be an encounter requiring vigilance. Your daughter was safe because you never left her side. When mothers might have a moment of pause, a flicker of suspicion, there was the reassuring thought that no man would try something right in front of them.
“It’s like that story,” the mother of a gymnast tells me, “ ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’? It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I believe it was a little child who finally says, ‘Doesn’t anybody know that the emperor has no clothes on?’”
It was a little child who alerted the townspeople in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, but upon reflection, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” demonstrates precisely the opposite lesson of that learned through the decades-long saga of Larry Nassar. In order to be heard, the little child does not need to age 20 years, join a chorus of other adults telling the same story, and be corroborated by digital evidence of the king’s depravity. The king, in Andersen’s story, is immediately exposed. The story of Larry Nassar is that of a man more skilled at deception and a world more credulous.
Simone Biles, who’s said of Larry Nassar, “It feels like he took a part of me that I can’t get back.” Photo: Alexey Filippov/Sputnik via AP
Trinea Gonczar, now 37, is the oldest of three in an athletic family and the most intense. At 6 years old, just starting out at Twistars — the gym owned by John Geddert, who had forced Larissa into a split — she looked at her mother and demanded to know why she hadn’t been put in gymnastics earlier. Three years later, the gym was her entire existence outside school and the only social life that mattered. “Those girls just melted into one another and became one,” says Dawn Homer, Trinea’s mother, a tall, soft-spoken woman and founder of a medical-billing company. “They were one another’s best lives. It was like a cult, and I don’t say that in a bad way.” Trinea’s sisters excelled at volleyball and basketball; Dawn noted that there was less cultlike intimacy on these teams. When Trinea was selected for Geddert’s team at 9 years old, Dawn was required to attend a meeting. “One hundred percent of the girls will be injured,” she recalls a coach saying. “But we have a trainer right here.”
Larry was, in Trinea’s words, the “dorky escape from John,” John being a man you’d need to escape from because he might, in a rage, twist your arm, shove you against a wall, and call it, as he did five years ago in conversation with police, a “discipline meeting.” (A prosecutor later ordered Geddert to undergo counseling.)
“I don’t have a good reference to compare him to,” Trinea says. “I don’t know another coaching style. We won. We were good. John made a good product. We were hand-selected. You were picked. Measured. Your toe point was measured, your muscles were measured, your splits were measured.”
Gymnasts were afraid to disappoint Geddert, afraid to admit to injury lest they be accused of lying. By contrast, Larry was unfailingly reassuring: He had a plan to make you better, a series of discrete steps to get you back on the mat. He knew what was wrong, had likely “attended a conference” or “given a lecture” on precisely the injury in question, and knew how to fix you. You might feel hopeless, but your career as a gymnast was not over. He pushed girls to talk about their goals, their dreams of gymnastic greatness.
Dawn Homer and other parents recall being moved to tears as Larry promised their worried girls that they’d continue to be the athletes they were meant to be.
In 1990, when Trinea was 9, her hip began popping out of its socket whenever she was on bars. Larry suggested that she needed more work than he could provide in the gym and asked if she might come over to his apartment with her mother. Trinea knew this invitation was considered an honor among the other 9-year-olds with whom she spent all her time, and she was proud.
When she arrived with her mother, another girl was leaving. Larry had filled his bath with ice water, and he left the room while Trinea undressed and lowered her shivering body into it. On the toilet, an egg timer ticked through 14 minutes. She flipped through a USA Gymnastics magazine he’d left by the tub. When she came out, in shorts and a T-shirt, he gestured toward a table in the living room.
There was a chair a few feet away, by the television, where Dawn sat that day and many, many days afterward. It was angled such that she could see only Trinea’s head and shoulders. Larry maintained a steady, quick patter with Dawn through the treatment. He asked about her other girls. He told them about his plans to move beyond athletic training and go to medical school; he wanted to be a doctor like his grandfather.
Trinea — 60-odd pounds, curly brown hair (it was 1990, and it was a perm), hands ripped from bar work — was all muscle. When she showed the neighborhood boys her six-pack, they told her she looked like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, which she did not take as a compliment. Like Nassar, she was a talker; at the mall, she greeted every single person until her mother told her to stop talking to strangers. Nassar bent her knees, placed her leg over her hip, turned her over, and placed her on her stomach. He moved the table, with her on it, while he worked. While she was on her stomach, out of her mother’s view but without breaking the flow of conversation with her, he penetrated Trinea with his ungloved hand.
“Anytime she is in pain,” Larry said to Dawn, “no matter what time, what day, you call me and I will get her in for treatment.”
It was true; he always did. Larry spent hours teaching Dawn how to tape Trinea’s shins. He came over to the house for dinner.
“Larry fixed my ankles,” Trinea says. “He fixed my shins. He fixed my knees. He fixed my shoulders. He fixed my wrists. We called it ‘the magic of Larry’ — he could fix you so you could compete. And I always wanted to compete.”
“We had the best clinic available to us for gymnastics injuries that anyone in the world could have. We had the best,” says Dawn. “We were so lucky.”
At Twistars, the idea of family was more than notional: Larry proposed to another athletic trainer at the gym and asked Geddert to be a groomsman. Trinea attended the wedding and thought Nassar’s bride the luckiest woman in the world. When Trinea was 15, a cyst ruptured on her ovary and she required surgery; it was the Nassars standing over her as she opened her eyes.
In the late ’90s, another gymnast came to Trinea and said Larry had penetrated her with his fingers. She was looking for corroboration, support for her intuition that something was not right. It’s a scene Trinea plays over and over in her head. “He does that to me all the time!” she said lightly, happy to be in the position to comfort someone. “You’re fine.” Trinea’s lawyer estimates that she was molested 856 times.
Nassar reaching out to an injured Kerri Strug at the 1996 Olympics. Photo: IOPP/AFP/Getty Images
Nassar’s interest in women’s gymnastics extends deep into his history, which matters because there are two stories one can tell about Larry Nassar: a man who drifted slowly into darkness and a man whose career goals were structured by desire. In high school and college, Nassar was an athletic trainer, essentially an on-site EMT for athletes, taping and icing and bandaging. By the late 1980s, he was working with USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University, and John Geddert. He worked regional and national meets, shook hands, and dealt with injuries as they arose.
“He was tireless in taking care of the kids,” says William Sands, the research scientist who has probably published the most on the sport of gymnastics in exercise medicine and someone Nassar considered a personal hero. “He was up early and went to bed late. He would do anything for an injured athlete. He was an astonishingly giving person.”
Who was paying him to be at all these meets remains unclear because the people who can elucidate these economic relationships tend to be themselves subject to ongoing legal action or are employed by the legal quagmire that is USA Gymnastics. But a word that emerges frequently in conversations about Nassar is volunteer. He volunteered, for instance, at Geddert’s gym 20 hours a week. He volunteered at the 1987 Pan-American Games and volunteered at the 1988 Olympic trials. According to Sands, Nassar maxed out two credit cards working his way up, cementing a reputation as someone who could identify an injury, concoct a plan, and get an athlete back on the floor. Liked and trusted and ever present, he knew the body and knew the sport. Whereas another doctor might ban an injured athlete from competing altogether, Nassar could tell her which tricks were still safe to perform. He was, by almost all accounts, good at what he did.
By the late ’80s, Nassar had decided to become an osteopathic physician, which entails being trained in osteopathic manipulative therapy, learning to move a patient’s joints and muscles in ways said to relieve pain and dysfunction. OMT is based on the intuitively appealing but largely unsupported idea that a wide array of diseases spring from musculoskeletal irregularities, and one therefore expects to be touched differently by an osteopath than by an M.D.; one expects to be folded and bent and cracked. Manipulated. He chose, too, to practice alongside athletes in contexts that lacked the intermediary structures of a traditional doctor’s office — receptionists, insurance companies, medical records. After his residency, he was named the national medical coordinator for USA Gymnastics, the organization responsible for selecting and training Olympians.
If you’re old enough, you remember watching Kerri Strug hurl herself in the air, land hard on a badly injured ankle, collapse, and guarantee all-around gold for the American team. This was taken at the time to be evidence of athletic heroism and American grit, fodder for sponsorships and presidential photo ops and write-ups in which it was not mentioned that her vault had been, in the end, unnecessary; the team had the scores to win. But stick with the camera a bit, beyond memory, and watch coach Martha Karolyi carry a crying Strug toward a young, dark-haired physician. This is the moment Nassar becomes “the Olympics doctor,” the man who cares for the athletes millions of children aspire to be, and his access to girls widens inexorably, constrained only by the number of minutes in the day.
The prestige conferred on Nassar by his volunteer position at the Olympics, by both the parents of gymnasts and clinical sports medicine in general, is hard to overstate and hard, from the outside, to understand. That Nassar was an inexperienced physician who had just finished his residency in ’96 did not seem to matter, because in sports medicine the caliber of athlete one treats is taken to be correlated with curative power. Hospitals pay millions of dollars for the privilege of treating sports teams; UC–San Diego Health, for example, pays $1 million to treat the Padres.
Nassar covered the walls of his office with signed pictures of Olympians and gave girls he favored Olympics patches, pins, and jackets. Parents interviewed for this article come from diverse backgrounds and have daughters at very different levels of gymnastics competition, but they all once shared an astonished gratitude that Nassar would even see their kids. The circular quality of this claim to competence became clear in the testimony of parents of actual Olympians; they too were told their kids were lucky to see Larry, who wouldn’t be in his position if he didn’t know what he was doing. Whether they believed this or not, they were required to leave their kids for weeks in Huntsville, Texas, at Karolyi Ranch, where the showers were moldy and the blankets stained and the food so bad the kids were always hungry; where there were no parents, and cell-phone service was spotty, and Nassar would knock on their doors at night, bearing candy, to treat them in their beds. If this was drift, it was drift straight into the least-monitored space full of young girls, into a position of authority requiring a decade of career building, in a specialty that allowed him particular latitude.
Chloe Myers at home in Hawaii earlier this year. Photo: Alec Soth/Magnum Photos for New York Magazine
The trick was to establish traditional medical credibility and then get weird. A mother we’ll call Jane began bringing her gymnast daughter, Kate, to Nassar when Kate was 8 and suffering from back pain. Larry diagnosed her with spondylolisthesis, a spinal disorder. When a pediatric spine specialist confirmed the diagnosis, Jane, who has some medical training, was impressed that Larry, a generalist, had caught it. When he started using cupping — a practice in which suction is said to release muscles — she went with it. When he invited them over to his house to administer manipulations to Kate in his basement, she went with that, too.
William Sands, the scientist Larry idolized, was at Karolyi Ranch doing research when he walked in on Larry inserting acupuncture needles into a gymnast’s back. “I rolled my eyes and walked out,” he said. “This is such a crock of pseudoscientific bullshit that I don’t want anything to do with it. And cupping? Give me a freaking break.” Sands was so offended he cut off contact.
Alternative treatments, along with frequent references to presentations given and conferences attended, lent Nassar a useful air of the creative scientist. Who knew what he would try next? But his best cover — the story that would get him out of police stations and back into exam rooms — was not in fact pseudoscientific bullshit. As his career progressed, he began to develop a research interest in the musculature of the pelvis: the sacrotuberous ligament in particular. He developed, for instance, two PowerPoint presentations called “Pelvic Floor: Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Pelvic Floor: The Final Frontier.” He was associating himself with evidence that back and hip problems can be addressed through pelvic-floor physical therapy, which is, according to J. Welles Henderson, an OB/GYN and clinical professor specializing in pelvic disorders at University Hospitals in Cleveland, “mainstream medicine,” “a first-line treatment,” and “backed by 30 years of well-established research” on patients with weak or spastic pelvic floors. (Sands, for his part, still considers it a “crock of shit.”)
There is, according to Rhonda Kotarinos, a pelvic-floor physical therapist and the author of several studies on the subject, a correlation between pelvic-floor dysfunction and strenuous exercise in young female athletes for reasons that remain speculative but may have something to do with the way developing the glutes over-recruits the pelvis, leading those muscles to shorten. Pelvic pain not uncommonly presents as lower-back pain. It would not be out of the ordinary for a trusted, almost always female specialist in pelvic disorders to enter the vagina, palpate the levator ani against the grain of the muscle fiber, and look for painful trigger points that suggest the muscle has lost the capacity to fully elongate or shorten. Opinions vary on whether PFPT is an appropriate treatment for young women, but unambiguously damning was the fact that Nassar hardly ever explained what he was doing, never gained consent, never used gloves, and found it necessary for ankle and knee injuries. He did not use the phrase “pelvic-floor physical therapy”; when he did explain himself, which was rare, he called it “myofascial release” or “intravaginal adjustment.”
He didn’t call it anything when he molested Chloe Myers, another young woman who was suffering from debilitating back pain with a bent coccyx and facet-joint syndrome. He covered Chloe in a blanket and positioned himself between her and her chatty, outgoing mother, Kristen, a few feet away. It wasn’t until he stopped and washed his hands that Kristen wondered where his hands had been. It occurred to her that he wouldn’t have to wash his hands if he had merely been touching her daughter’s leg. It occurred to her that if he had done an internal exam, she would have expected him to wear gloves. In the car on the way home, Chloe said that his hands had been “way up in there” and that it had been uncomfortable. Kristen was alarmed. But Chloe also said she felt much better. She continued to feel better every time she went back.
Like many women and many parents of female athletes, Kristen knew of treatments that involve vaginal penetration; Chloe’s chiropractor had mentioned something. “I did know there was a legitimate treatment that could help, internally, like an internal adjustment,” she says. “I was aware of it. And this was Larry. So it was no big surprise that he was trying some kind of alternative treatment.”
Some women were surprised. Directly after Nassar touched her in 2004, 17-year-old Brianne Randall filed a complaint with Meridian Township police and had a rape kit administered at the local hospital. Detective Andrew McCready called Nassar and asked him to come in for questioning, which he did. Nassar told McCready that he had indeed touched Brianne’s perineum, that it was part of a treatment called “sacrotuberous-ligament release,” and that the treatment was “published in medical journals and training tapes.” He also gave McCready his PowerPoint presentation on said ligament, in which he is pictured cupping a girl’s buttocks and pressing near a girl’s vulva. McCready then called Brianne’s mother to tell her the case would be closed and that “no crime was committed.”
When, in 2014, cheerleader Amanda Thomashow reported an assault to one of MSU’s Title IX investigators and university police, the latter launched an investigation and referred the case to prosecutors for review. The office of Ingham County prosecutor Stuart Dunnings concluded that the prosecution “would not be able to sustain [its] burden at trial” and declined to prosecute. Dunnings was later charged, imprisoned, and disbarred for soliciting prostitutes.
MSU Title IX investigator Kristine Moore launched her own investigation. She interviewed three osteopathic physicians and one athletic trainer. All four found Nassar’s conduct to be medically appropriate. All of them worked for MSU and knew Nassar personally. Dr. William Strampel, the dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at MSU, instructed Nassar to have a chaperone in the room and avoid skin-to-skin contact, though he never enforced these new rules and Nassar would not follow them. Strampel has since been arrested and charged with, among other things, sexually harassing and groping female medical students.
Thomashow, concluded Moore, failed to understand the “nuanced difference” between osteopathic manipulative medicine and sexual massage. “Dr. Nassar has presented on this nationally and internationally,” reads the Title IX report, “has videos posted to the web that explain the procedure, and is widely known for this work … We cannot find that the conduct was medically inappropriate and thus cannot find it was sexual in nature.” That “videos posted to the web,” presentations, and PowerPoints are distinct from peer-reviewed publications seems not to have occurred to MSU, the Ingham County prosecutor’s office, or Meridian Township detectives; nor does the idea that people Nassar has worked with, and in some cases mentored, are poor sources of objective testimony. This was not stellar police work, but it was the level of investigatory prowess available to the women of Michigan, and it was precisely the level of scrutiny Nassar’s cover was designed to weather, right up until the day a former gymnast named Rachael Denhollander emailed the Indianapolis Star.
When the Star broke the story, in September 2016, and all of elite gymnastics read it, not a single person interviewed for this piece believed that Denhollander and a second, anonymous accuser had been assaulted by Nassar. Dawn Homer asked Trinea Gonczar whether Larry could be capable of such a thing, and Trinea said, unreservedly, “No.” She waited patiently for medical experts to come forward and defend the practice.
“They’re describing,” Chloe Myers told her parents, “the exact same treatment I was receiving.” It had helped her back pain, she reasoned, and thus was legitimate. “They weren’t remembering right,” Chloe’s father concluded. Nassar asked his colleague, fellow osteopathic physician Steven Karageanes, to lend him his support, and Karageanes said he would.
Parents concluded that Nassar had, in his boundless generosity — all those extra appointments in his home, free of charge — “put himself in a bad position” and allowed his treatments to be “misconstrued.” William Sands thought it would all blow over. According to The Wall Street Journal, Dean William Strampel had this to say to students at a meeting at MSU: “This just goes to show that none of you learned the most basic lesson in medicine, Medicine 101: Don’t trust your patients. Patients lie to get doctors in trouble.” Kathie Klages asked her gymnasts to sign a card that read, thinking of you.
Denhollander’s allegations were backed by a growing list of accusers; there were by February 2017 at least 50 complaints to the police. If Michigan was paying attention, it was hard to tell. Parents of gymnasts continued driving their girls from Twistars to his house for treatments. Larry ran for school board, pulled out, and still got 2,700 votes. Not even Larissa Boyce, who had accused him of molesting her in 1997 and been shut down by Klages, believed Denhollander’s account. “I had convinced myself,” she says, “that it was a medical treatment.”
“No one was buying it yet,” says Karageanes. “There was no quote-unquote evidence. He had supporters lined up to defend him. It would have taken a monumental effort from the first people coming out to get the public on their side.”
Although, much later, the only story line American media would be able to process was one of a “survivor” who had “found her voice” and was ready to “take on” her abuser in open court, it did not appear to be a woman at all who had persuaded those closest to this story, including most of the “survivors,” to come forward. It was, rather, a set of external hard drives — tossed to the curb in the trash in the days after Denhollander went public, on a day when the garbage crew was behind schedule, and recovered by a police officer.* Had the crew been on time, had the officer been late, had the warrant come through a day after Nassar decided to dump his digital history on the street, he might still have the support of most of the people he abused.
Healthy people tend not to distinguish between varieties of child pornography or think much about the habits of its consumption, but Nassar’s accumulation of more than 37,000 images suggests an unusual level of deviance even among pedophiles. According to a sentencing memorandum issued by federal prosecutors for the Western District of Michigan, these images form a particularly “graphic” and “hard-core” collection, including children as young as infants and images of children being raped by adults.
Here was a fact that one simply could not integrate into the image of a dedicated doctor attacked by confused or malicious women. The story stopped making sense. Mothers struggled to find a way to ask their girls whether they’d been digitally penetrated at the gym. Parents awoke for the first time to the possibility that their daughters’ first sexual experience had taken place at the hands of Larry Nassar, often as said parent watched from a few feet away. “Did Larry do anything to you?” Michael Weiszbrod, an affable state administrator, asked his 13-year-old daughter, Ashleigh, a few times, and she shook her head no. He and his wife took this as authoritative until one day, months later, when Weiszbrod found himself watching Nassar’s sentencing hearing at work. He was thinking about another physician who worked at the gym, Brooke, whom Larry was training. When he got home, he put down his bag and turned directly to Ashleigh, who was hunched over her homework, legs crossed on the couch. “Did Larry touch you,” he asked, “different than Brooke touched you?” Ashleigh was very still, and then she was crying. She had seen Larry at Twistars once a week for three years.
Jane asked Kate, 14 at the time, whether she thought Larry was guilty, and Kate said no. Jane left it alone for a while. Later, in the car, Jane’s husband asked their daughter whether she knew what Nassar had been accused of, and she said yes. He asked if Nassar had done treatments to her that “fell into this category,” and she said yes. He asked if there had been penetration, and she said, “Dad, this is hard to talk about.”
In the light of day, parents thought about the choices they’d made, hearing them in a new and horrifying light. “All of a sudden, the stuff you think is normal coming out of somebody else’s mouth doesn’t sound normal,” says Jane.
It did not sound normal, for instance, that every week after practice, Jane had driven her daughter to a white three-bedroom house with green shutters, next to many identical houses in a development on a quiet street in Holt, Michigan, and taken her to see a man in the basement of that house. It didn’t seem normal that he never billed for these visits or that he always had hot chocolate waiting.
“I hear myself telling you this,” says Jane, “and I know it sounds crazy. It sounds crazy! But when I was pulling into his driveway, someone else would be pulling out.”
A detective told Trinea Gonczar that there were images of little girls in his bathtub — the bathtub in which she had waited, alongside the egg timer — but the detective could not tell her whether she was among them. “That’s when I started to think back and go deep into the places I had been with him,” says Trinea. “How many times I had been to his house. How many times I had been to MSU. How many times I had seen him at the gym. Realizing that there was probably never a time I didn’t have this treatment.”
The goodwill Nassar built is so resilient that even now it cannot be wholly erased. Trinea’s husband asked her to revise her testimony because it was too kind — people might get the wrong idea. “I don’t hate Larry,” she says. “I don’t want him to be raped and beaten in prison. I feel like the parents of someone who shot up a school. You still love them today like you did yesterday.”
“I’m still grateful to him,” says Chloe’s mother, and her father wonders aloud whether sometimes he really was just performing vaginal treatments in the interest of his daughter, who, after all, says she is “100 percent sure” the treatments she considers abusive helped her back pain every time. “I don’t know,” he says. “Is it 24/7? So every time he has someone in there? Are there times when he is just doing the treatment?” Says Dawn: “I really believe Larry at some point in his life thought it was the appropriate treatment. I don’t know when he went to the dark side and changed it.”
Is this their naïveté, or is it ours? Nassar “groomed the entire community,” reads a Lansing State Journal piece from January on the town of Holt. At a certain level of psychological reduction, every friendly conversation, every accurate diagnosis, every accommodation was part of Larry Nassar’s strategy. Did he shovel the neighbors’ snow as part of a plan to gain access to ever more girls? Apart from being an implausibly simplistic picture of a single human mind, this would not even seem to be the ideal psychology for a successful pedophile. A man who takes pleasure in going out of his way for people, who thrives on simple gratitude, who finds actual satisfaction in lifting the spirits of an injured gymnast, is one you risk letting into your life. One you call, as Trinea once did, family.
“Larry,” she said on the fourth day of Nassar’s sentencing hearing, staring straight at him, voice deep with controlled fury. She had known how young the other accusers would be, but somehow it hadn’t struck her until she walked into that room full of them. They were little girls. Her rage was such that she spoke slowly and almost in a whisper: “What. Have. You.
Done.” Between sobs she looked him straight in the eye, cocked her head, and raised her eyebrows, a look of profound disappointment and deep familiarity. Larry had sat emotionless, listening to other women he’d abused, for hours prior to this. Sometimes he shook his head, as if to deny their claims. During Trinea’s testimony, something changed. He started to shake, and then he started to cry.
“I think his heart broke because my heart broke,” she tells me later. “I was worried the other girls would hate me because of his reaction to me.” There’s pride in her voice, the triumph of having been the one, out of the hundreds, who actually broke through. This may be her win, or it may be his. There are a lot of ways to make a person feel special, and Larry Nassar knows all of them.
*This article appears in the November 12, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
*This article has been corrected to reflect that it was a police officer, not a FBI agent, who initially found Nassar’s hard drives.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/how-did- ... -long.html
by seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 31, 2018 8:44 am
Former Gymnast Rachael Denhollander Wins Sports Illustrated's Inspiration of the Year Award
Rachael Denhollander Inspiration of the Year
Lawyer and former gymnast Rachael Denhollander has been selected as Sports Illustrated's Inspiration of the Year.
Denhollander was the first woman to publicly accuse former Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar of sexual assault.
Denhollander filed a federal lawsuit against Nassar at the U.S. District Court for the Western District fo Michigan. Two-hundered and fifty-one other former gymnasts, along with 23 husbands of gymnasts, also brought up claims consolidated into her suit.
Following Denhollander's lead, more than 300 women in total have said they were sexually assaulted by Nassar.
Denhollander was the last to confront Nassar during his hearing for criminal sexual misconduct and delivered a powerful rebuke of the serial predator.
Nassar was sentenced up to 175 years on Michigan state charges of sexual assault, in addition to a sentence of 40 to 125 years in prison on three counts of sexual assault. He also was given a 60-year sentence on federal child-pornography charges.
In a recent telephone interview, Denhollander said that, “unless the new organization is populated with people who are willing to stand up and say: This is wrong, we are not going to do it this way, this is not the right priority, this is not the right value systems, we’re just going to end up with another organization that repeats the same problem.”
SI's Sportsperson of the Year award ceremony will take place on Dec. 11 at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles. It will be telecast on NBCSN on Dec. 13 at 9 p.m. ET. Comedian and actor Joel McHale will host this year’s event
https://www.si.com/sportsperson/2018/12 ... ed-gymnast
by seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 02, 2019 7:26 pm
Trial for William Strampel, one of Larry Nassar's former bosses, is set for May
Matt MencariniUpdated 4:48 p.m. ET Feb. 28, 2019
John Dakmak argues for William Strampel in District Court during a motion hearing May 3, 2018. Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal, Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal
LANSING - The criminal trial for William Strampel, a former MSU dean and one of Larry Nassar's former bosses, is set for May 28 and could take two weeks.
Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Joyce Draganchuk set the start date during a hearing Thursday afternoon. She said any hearings between now and then will be set as motions are filed by the defense or prosecution.
John Dakmak, Strampel's attorney, said after the hearing that they've set aside two weeks for the trial and the judge plans to start with a larger jury pool than usual due to the high-profile case. He added that he doesn't plan to file a motion seeking to move the trial out of Ingham County.
Strampel was the first person charged through the Michigan Attorney General's Office investigation of Michigan State University and its employees related to the handling of sexual assault reports against Nassar. The investigation was announced amid Nassar's two sentencing hearings on sexual assault convictions in early 2018 and has also led to charges against former MSU President Lou Anna Simon and former MSU gymnastics coach Kathie Klages.
Strampel faces a felony misconduct in office charge for, as the AG's Office described in court records, using his position to "harass, discriminate, demean, sexually proposition, and sexually assault female students."
Strampel also faces a misdemeanor sexual assault charge and a two counts of willful neglect of duty related to actions during and after Nassar's 2014 Title IX investigation.
He faces up to five years in prison if convicted.
Nassar, 55, abused hundreds of women and girls, most of whom sought medical care for injuries. He is serving 60 years in a federal prison on child pornography charges. If he is still alive after completing the federal sentence, he will face additional time in Michigan prisons after pleading guilty to 10 counts of sexual assault. MSU fired him in 2016 after the first the Indiana Star newspaper first reported his abuse of gymnasts who sought treatment.
https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/sto ... 017966002/
MSU sets up interim fund for some Nassar victims, investigation of first fund still open
Matt Mencarini
Acting MSU President Satish Udpa made an opening statement at Friday's MSU Board of Trustees meeting. He apologized to survivors of Larry Nassar. RJ Wolcott, Lansing State Journal
EAST LANSING - Michigan State University has set up an interim fund for some of Larry Nassar victims while a new fund for counseling services is being established and a police investigation of the first fund remains ongoing.
The temporary fund, which MSU calls an intermediate fund, will have the same eligibility requirements as the first Healing Assistance Fund and will be administered by the same company, the university said in a news release.
However, different staff at Commonwealth Mediation & Conciliation Inc. will be involved and counseling or other service providers will be "required to sign an affidavit stating they are licensed in the state where they do business and that the treatment was related to Nassar’s abuse," according to the university.
Only victims who Nassar abused at MSU or who were MSU student-athletes are eligible for the fund. Those victims' parents are also eligible. The fund will pay for counseling or mental health services, as well as reimburse for counseling or other services that have already been paid.
Victims that Nassar abused only at Twistars gymnastics club in Dimondale, at his Holt home or at USA Gymnastics events will not be eligible.
The university Board of Trustees set up the first fund in early 2018, amid intense criticism of the university's handling of Nassar and its treatment of his hundreds of victims.
Payments out of the fund were halted in July, after concerns over "possible fraudulent claims" were made. At that point, about $1.1 million of the $10 million fund had been paid out. The university's police department is still investigating, the university said on Thursday.
In December, John Engler, the former Michigan governor who had been serving as MSU's interim president, made the decision to close the fund, which was still frozen during the investigation. In January, university trustees decided to establish a new fund after many Nassar victims and their families asked for a new or reopened fund.
Victims can contact the administrators for the interim fund at michiganstate@commonwealthmediation.com or 800-540-2624. Valid claims will be paid at the end of each month, the university said on its website.
https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/sto ... 014999002/
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