USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee reached a $380 million settlement on Monday with hundreds of women who were sexually abused by former U.S. Olympic and national team physician Larry Nassar, ending a bitter legal battle that highlighted the organization’s role in covering up Nassar’s predatory behavior for more than year.
The settlement comes almost three years to the day that USA Gymnastics, facing decertification proceedings by the USOPC and hundreds of lawsuits from survivors, filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of Indiana.
USA Gymnastics and the USOPC have also agreed to designate board seats to survivors and Safe Sport policies designed to provide greater protections for athletes. The USOPC has committed $5 million to the reforms.
But the agreement and new measures did not silence the growing demand among survivors and their supporters for Congress to remove the current USOPC board and strip USA Gymnastics of it’s national governing body status.
“Congress needs to remove the USOPC’s leadership and completely revamp that organization,” said John Manley, an Orange County attorney who represents hundreds of Nassar survivors. “These organizations are utterly corrupt. They only care about their junkets and money and medals. Athletes are just commodities to them and Larry Nassar is the result of that culture.”
Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in prison in 2017 in the child pornography case. He was later sentenced to 40 to 175 years and 40 to 125 years in two Michigan state courts after pleading guilty to multiple sexual assault charges. He is currently an inmate at a federal prison in Florida.
USA Gymnastics had a longstanding policy prior to the Nassar scandal of not warning member gyms or parents of athletes of sexual misconduct allegations against coaches or other individuals, a longtime top aide to the organization’s former CEO acknowledged in a previously undisclosed sworn deposition revealed by the SCNG in June.
Renee Jamison, the administrative assistant to former USA Gymnastics CEO Penny from 2005 to 2011 and later the organization’s director of administration and Olympic relations, also revealed in the deposition that employees were instructed by USA Gymnastics not to report sexual misconduct complaints to law enforcement or Child Protective Services – even though they were informed by the organization that they were mandated reporters.
Instead, USA Gymnastics employees prior to 2015 were told to forward sexual misconduct complaints to attorneys representing the organization – first Jack Swarbrick, and later Scott Himsel, Jamison said. Swarbrick is currently the University of Notre Dame athletic director.
The policy, Jamison said, was one of the reasons why Penny and USA Gymnastics did not notify Michigan State University officials about sexual assault allegations against Nassar when they were first brought to Penny’s attention in June 2015. Michigan State officials said they did not become aware of allegations that Nassar had sexually assaulted Team USA members under the guise of medical treatment until the allegations were made public in September 2016.
Top USOPC officials were aware of allegations that Nassar had sexually abused Nichols and other U.S. national team members in the summer of 2015 but took no action to report the abuse to law enforcement or discipline Nassar and continued to be briefed on efforts by Penny to conceal the allegations from the public and potential future victims. Nassar continued to sexually abuse new victims at Michigan State, where he was on the sports medicine staff, in the 16 months between when USA Gymnastics, the USOPC and the FBI were told of the allegations against him and when Nassar’s abuse became public in September 2016.
USOPC officials were also briefed on discussions between Penny and W. Jay Abbott, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis office, about Abbott receiving a top level security position with the USOPC.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General recently determined that Abbott lied to DOJ investigators about applying for the USOPC post. The OIG investigation found that Abbott also lied to investigators about the initial steps he took in the days and weeks after he learned of allegations against Nassar in July 2015.
Abbott retired from the FBI in January 2018.
The Justice Department, however, has issued no indictments in the FBI case.
“The federal government has completely let the survivors down,” Manly said. “The DOJ, the attorney general have altogether failed these women. They know what happened and they’ve listened to some of the finest athletes ever to represent this country testify (before Congress) and they still will not hold their tormentors accountable. And that is an obscenity.”
Source: Orange County Register
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