NEW YORK (NY)
Deadspin
December 14, 2017
By Dvora Meyers
This past March, Michigan State University trustee Joel Ferguson told Michigan’s WXYZ-TV that “MSU is going to look great” after an internal investigation into how the school handled sexual assault allegations against Larry Nassar. For all that we still do not know about Nassar’s crimes or the institutional cover-ups that allowed them to continue, we do know this: Nassar will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in jail for decades of offenses against hundreds of athletes, most of them young gymnasts. He was sentenced to 60 years for federal child pornography charges last week and will be sentenced on state level criminal sexual conduct charges next month. The former physician for Michigan State and USA Gymnastics is the most prolific sex criminal in sports history.
But, as of now, there is no way to know how MSU and their actions appear in that internal Michigan State review on how the school handled sexual abuse allegations against Nassar. If the report even exists—and a letter released this week by Patrick Fitzgerald, the former U.S. attorney who is representing the school, suggests that it does not—the university has no plans to release it. MSU spokesperson Jason Cody has repeatedly asserted that the findings of the review were “never designed to end in a report.”
Until very recently, USA Gymnastics has received most of the critical coverage when it came to Nassar’s sexual abuse of gymnasts. And deservedly so: journalists and victims have cited the national governing body’s failure to properly supervise how Nassar provided medical “treatment” at the national team training center and on the road at competitions, the complicity of its board of directors, the prioritization of medals ahead of athlete well-being. In the year and change since the Indianapolis Star first broke the Nassar story back in September 2016, Steve Penny was forced to resign as CEO of USA Gymnastics in March. Former Olympic gymnasts and national team members testified before a Senate committee about their experiences as young athletes. (USA Gymnastics did not send a representative to this hearing.) And Olympic stars like Aly Raisman and McKayla Maroney have recently come forward and said that they were abused by Nassar and denounced how USA Gymnastics looked after them when they were minor gymnasts competing on the national team. None of this criticism is disproportionate. But there is another, much larger institution that has, until now, mostly escaped repercussions in the Nassar case—Michigan State.
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