The United States Justice Department agreed to pay $100 million to 100 victims of former Team USA doctor Larry Nassar over the FBI’s failures in the investigation on Wednesday, .
The deal, once it is finalized, will end the last legal claims against institutions involved in the Nassar investigations. It will also bring the total settlement amount for all of the legal cases against him to nearly $1 billion. The settlement follows a $380 million settlement with both USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee in 2021, and a $500 million settlement with Michigan State in 2018.
Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison after he admitted to sexually assaulting girls while serving as the team doctor for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State gymnastics. He was sentenced in 2018, and he committed at that hearing — including Olympic gold medalists Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, Gabby Douglas, Madison Kocian and Jordyn Wieber. , and sentenced to 60 years in prison. after his ruling, too. in a high-security federal prison in Florida last year.
Biles, Raisman, Maroney and others are reportedly involved in the latest settlement.
FBI director Christopher Wray apologized to Nassar survivors at a Senate hearing in 2021 for the bureau’s failures throughout the investigation, which first started in 2015. Several Team USA gymnasts told agents within the FBI’s Indianapolis field office about the abuse they were experiencing in 2015, but agents there “did not undertake any investigative activity” for five weeks, among other failures.
A report from the Justice Department found that “despite the extraordinarily serious nature of the allegations and the possibility that Nassar’s conduct could be continuing, senior officials in the FBI Indianapolis Field Office failed to respond to the Nassar allegations with the utmost seriousness and urgency,” .
Nassar was not publicly accused of his crimes until November 2016. He continued to see patients for nearly 14 months after gymnasts first went to the FBI.
“By not taking action from my report, [the FBI] allowed a child molester to go free for more than a year,” Maroney testified at a Senate hearing, per ESPN. “They had legal evidence of child abuse and did nothing.”
By comparison, the settlement is similar to what the U.S. government has paid out to mass shooting victims in recent years. According to the report, the Justice Department paid nearly $145 million in 2023 to victims of a mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and nearly $128 million to survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2021.
Source Agencies
