Michigan State Athletics Scandal

[The Buscher]

As most of you already know, Larry Nassar has been sentenced to 175 years in prison for committing sexual assault on over 160 female gymnasts while employed by USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University.  Leadership at both organizations has been getting cleared out, including the forced resignations of Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis and university president Lou Anna Simon.

Well, according to this story ESPN put out today, there are a lot more cover-ups that are coming to light, especially from the football and basketball programs.

It's a really lengthy story, but I'll post this snippet as a preview:
 

Quote

Even MSU's most-recognizable figures, football coach Mark Dantonio and basketball coach Tom Izzo, have had incidents involving their programs, Outside the Lines has found.

Since Dantonio's tenure began in 2007, at least 16 MSU football players have been accused of sexual assault or violence against women, according to interviews and public records obtained by Outside the Lines. Even more, Dantonio was said to be involved in handling the discipline in at least one of the cases several years ago. As recently as June, Dantonio faced a crowd of reporters who were asking questions about four of his football players who had been accused of sexual assault. Six questions in, a reporter asked Dantonio how he had handled such allegations previously.

"This is new ground for us," Dantonio answered. "We've been here 11 years -- it has not happened previously."

Outside the Lines also has obtained never-before-publicized reports of sexual or violent incidents involving members of Izzo's storied basketball program, including one report made against a former undergraduate student-assistant coach who was allowed to continue coaching after he had been criminally charged for punching a female MSU student in the face at a bar in 2010. A few months later, after the Spartans qualified for the 2010 Final Four, the same assistant coach was accused of sexually assaulting a different female student.

Michigan State officials, including former president Lou Anna Simon -- who resigned Wednesday -- have been criticized for a lack of transparency and for not properly handling the Nassar sexual abuse allegations. As far back as 1997, athletes began telling multiple MSU officials, including the university's longtime gymnastics coach, that Nassar was assaulting them under the guise of medical treatment. Several survivors of Nassar's abuse excoriated Simon and Michigan State during Nassar's sentencing hearing in recent days, repeatedly saying that MSU's inaction allowed Nassar to continue abusing scores of young girls and women.

On Thursday, Outside the Lines reported that MSU officials in 2014 did not notify federal officials that the university had dual Title IX and campus police investigations of Nassar under way even though federal investigators were on campus that year scrutinizing how MSU dealt with sexual assault allegations. The Outside the Lines report also found that MSU administrators still have not provided to federal officials all documents related to the Nassar allegations.

In her resignation statement, Simon was defiant, saying that as "tragedies are politicized," someone had to take the blame. Further, she praised her campus police department's handling of Nassar-related matters and stated unequivocally that "there is no cover-up."

Yet former Michigan State sexual assault counselor Lauren Allswede, who left the university in 2015 over frustrations about how administrators handled sexual assault cases, told Outside the Lines that MSU administrators' entire approach to such cases has been misguided for years. The biggest issue? Complaints involving athletes were routinely investigated and handled by athletic director Hollis' department, and sometimes even coaches, she says.

"Whatever protocol or policy was in place, whatever frontline staff might normally be involved in response or investigation, it all got kind of swept away and it was handled more by administration [and] athletic department officials," says Allswede, who worked at MSU for seven years. "It was all happening behind closed doors. ... None of it was transparent or included people who would normally be involved in certain decisions."

 

And
 

Quote

Over the past three years, MSU has three times fought in court -- unsuccessfully -- to withhold names of athletes in campus police records. The school has also deleted so much information from some incident reports that they were nearly unreadable. In circumstances in which administrators have commissioned internal examinations to review how they have handled certain sexual violence complaints, officials have been selective in releasing information publicly. In one case, a university-hired outside investigator claimed to have not even generated a written report at the conclusion of his work. And attorneys who have represented accusers and the accused agree on this: University officials have not always been transparent, and often put the school's reputation above the need to give fair treatment to those reporting sexual violence and to the alleged perpetrators.

I have a feeling this is going to lead to some major sanctions being handed out, potentially university-wide.
 

 

[ThrillhouseMAX]

I posted this in the Weinstein thread, but its related to this as well. The U.S. Olympic Committee has given the USA Gymnastics board six days to resign or be de-certified.

[gunnar hendershow]

Burn everything to the ground

https://www.theathletic.com/223555/2018/01/26/ncaa-president-mark-emmert-was-alerted-to-michigan-state-sexual-assault-reports-in-2010/

[Maxx]

Mark Emmert should be in prison.