Authorities find no smoking gun in Nassar records held by Michigan State University

DETROIT (AP) — Thousands of documents turned over by Michigan State University reveal nothing new about what the school might have known about years of sexual abuse committed by Larry Nassar, the campus doctor who assaulted female athletes, the state attorney general said Wednesday.

“It was surprising to me that we did not find anything that was incriminating,” Attorney General Dana Nessel said at a news conference.

“It seems sort of improbable to us, right?” she said. “This is a major university, obviously extensive number of employees that work there. I guess the expectation is that we would find a little bit more than we did.”

Nassar, who also worked for USA Gymnastics, which trains Olympians, is serving decades in prison for sexual assault committed under the guise of treatment as well as other crimes. Michigan State in 2018 agreed to a $500 million settlement with hundreds of people, mostly women, who said he abused them with his hands.

For years, Nessel and her predecessor clashed with Michigan State's lawyers and its elected governing board over the release of records. While more than 100,000 documents were initially turned over to investigators, another batch of 6,000 was withheld under attorney-client privilege until this year.

Since the Nassar scandal broke in 2016, Michigan State has repeatedly said that no one at the school covered up his actions. Former gymnastics coach Kathie Klages was found guilty of lying to investigators about allegations told to her back in the 1990s, but the state appeals court threw out the conviction.

Former Michigan State President Lou Anna Simon, too, was charged with misleading investigators during a 2018 interview, but that case was dismissed before a trial.

After seeing the records, Nessel believes the university was wrong to claim attorney-client privilege over all of the documents, though a judge in 2019 had agreed with the school's position.

The attorney general accused Michigan State of giving victims a “sense of false hope” that the records would be revealing after finally giving them up. Nessel plans to make them publicly available.

“Simply put, there remains no fulfilling answer to the question of how this abuse was able to be perpetuated on so many, for so long, without MSU, or anyone else, putting a stop to it,” Nessel said.

Michigan State spokesperson Emily Gerkin Guerrant said the university has taken significant steps to improve campus safety and culture since 2016.

Ripples from the Nassar saga have spread widely. In April, the U.S. Justice Department announced a $138 million settlement with more than 100 people who accused the FBI of mishandling allegations against the doctor in 2015 and 2016, a critical time gap that allowed Nassar to continue to prey on victims before his arrest.

USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee made a $380 million settlement for its alleged negligence.

A Justice Department internal watchdog recently said the FBI has failed to report some child sexual abuse allegations to local police or social service agencies even after its poor handling of claims about Nassar led to changes.

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