Half a billion dollars will be paid by the University of Michigan to a thousand former students and athletes sexually assaulted by a doctor at this establishment in the north of the United States, management announced on Wednesday.
The agreement, among the most important concluded to date in a case of sexual abuse on a university campus, must still be formally ratified by all the parties, according to a press release.
An agreement between the two parties
It focuses on the actions of Dr. Richard Anderson, who worked from 1966 to 2003 at the Ann Arbor-based university and died in 2008. Hundreds of mostly male students and sports team members, the accused in recent years of sexually assaulting them during routine checkups.
A report, produced by a law firm at the request of the university, had confirmed that the doctor “had engaged in abusive sexual behavior with his patients”.
The establishment had started a confidential mediation process in 2020, under the aegis of a federal judge, to compensate its victims.
The parties finally agreed on an amount of 490 million dollars, including 460 million for the 1,050 plaintiffs already identified and 30 million for the victims who would like to come forward by July 31.
The biggest sex scandal in US sports history
“We hope that this agreement will allow survivors to begin their healing process,” commented Jordan Acker, who chairs the board of directors of the University of Michigan, quoted in the press release. “The work that began two years ago, when the first victims bravely started speaking out, will continue,” he added. Another local institution, Michigan State University (MSU), has been rocked by the biggest sex scandal in US sports history.
Larry Nassar, the former US gymnastics team doctor who was sentenced to a heavy prison sentence in 2018 for sexually assaulting at least 265 victims over two decades, worked at MSU as a therapist.
In another case, the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles agreed to pay a total of $1.1 billion through three separate settlements to hundreds of female victims of a former gynecologist employed on the campus, the largest amount to date.
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