The Justice Department has reached a deal to pay approximately $100 million to 100 women and girls who were sexually assaulted by former national women's gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar.
The FBI did not appropriately handle the reports it received of his abuse of athletes.
This deal closes the books on the legal claims against the host of agencies that failed to properly respond to complaints about Nassar, and brings the total of legal payouts to almost $1 billion.
The FBI's settlement was reached last fall and accepted in principle by those filing claims in 2022, but has not yet been made final, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Elite gymnasts Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, and Maggie Nichols are among the claimants after the athletes were identified in 2015 as Nassar victims.
In addition, there were dozens of patients Nassar sexually assaulted for more than a year after the FBI had been alerted to the concerns from the gymnasts.
Michigan State University settled claims with victims for $500 million in 2018 after it dismissed and hid complaints it has received about Nassar. It also paid $4.5 million to the U.S. Education Department for failing to protect students and for violating federal crime-reporting rules.
USA Gymnastics, the sport's national governing body, along with the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, further settled $380 million in claims in 2021 after they were accused of allowing an environment where Nassar was not supervised and gymnasts were too afraid to speak out. Reportedly, the doctor had assaulted hundreds of gymnasts over three decades.
In the DOJ case, the department's inspector general outlined several of the FBI's failings in its handling of the complaints, which USA Gymnastics brought to its field office in Indianapolis on July 28, 2015.
According to the IG report, the agents in Indianapolis were not sure if the Nassar allegations constituted a federal crime, and did not know how to handle the allegations that it received in Indianapolis, as there were no claims that Nassar had been abusing gymnasts there.
The report also indicates that the agents in Indianapolis didn't document the meeting formally, and only spoke with one gymnast, Maroney, speaking with her over the telephone.
The Maroney interview was not documented until February 2017, at about the time The Wall Street Journal first documented the investigation delays. The FBI did not follow up her interview with other gymnasts.
In addition, the IG found that the agents in Indianapolis did not transfer the Nassar allegations of the FBI's Lansing, Michigan, headquarters, which would have investigated potential federal crimes in the area. However, an assistant U.S. attorney had advised the Indianapolis agents to report the allegations, and the agents told USA Gymnastics the claims had been forwarded.
The report also showed that the FBI didn't contact state or local law enforcement agencies or take other actions to protect the gymnasts, and Nassar continued to see the girls and women for nearly 14 months after USA Gymnastics contacted the federal agents.
Nassar ended up being publicly accused of assault in the fall of 2016 and was sentenced to an effective sentence of life in prison for convictions of sexual abuse and child pornography charges. He was publicly accused of assault in the fall of 2016, and by early 2018 had been sentenced to an effective life sentence in prison on sexual abuse and child pornography charges.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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