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Blog and Media Roundup - Wednesday, January 24, 2018; News Roundup
Topic Started: Jan 24 2018, 05:27 AM (94 Views)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/sports/michigan-state-ncaa-investigation.html

N.C.A.A. Opens Investigation of Michigan State Over Nassar Case

By MARC TRACY
JAN. 23, 2018


The N.C.A.A. sent a letter of inquiry to Michigan State University, formally opening an investigation into how the university handled the case of Lawrence G. Nassar, the doctor who sexually assaulted scores of female athletes.

Dr. Nassar spent decades on the faculty at the university and treated its athletes, as well as members of the United States national gymnastics team.

“The N.C.A.A. has requested information from Michigan State about any potential rules violations,” Donald M. Remy, the association’s chief legal officer, said in a phone interview Tuesday evening.

N.C.A.A. bylaws require colleges to protect the health, safety and well-being of athletes. Among those who have said Dr. Nassar abused them are members of the Michigan State cross country and softball teams. Kathie Klages, the former gymnastics coach who retired last year, has been accused of seeking to cover up allegations against Dr. Nassar, who served as team physician for the university gymnastics and women’s crew programs.

In a statement late Tuesday, the association said: “The N.C.A.A. has sent a letter of inquiry to Michigan State University regarding potential N.C.A.A. rules violations related to the assaults Larry Nassar perpetrated against girls and young women, including some student-athletes at Michigan State. We will have no further comment at this time.”
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A Michigan State spokesman said Tuesday night that the university was reviewing the letter before issuing a response.

The N.C.A.A., the governing body of intercollegiate athletics, was widely criticized several years ago for its handling of a case involving Penn State University in which Jerry Sandusky, a longtime assistant football coach, sexually abused young boys. (Sandusky is serving a decades-long prison term.)

Less than a year after the Penn State scandal became public in the fall of 2011, an independent investigation commissioned by Penn State, and led by Louis J. Freeh, helped lead to N.C.A.A. sanctions, including a $60 million fine and the vacating of more than 100 wins from the lifetime record of the former head coach Joe Paterno, who died earlier that year. Several of the penalties were later rescinded, and the wins restored.

Critics contended that the N.C.A.A. had overstepped its bounds with those penalties. Emails made public because of a lawsuit two years later appeared to show N.C.A.A. officials questioning whether their institution had the authority to issue such penalties on a university, even one where several high-ranking officials later received jail time for their roles in covering up Mr. Sandusky’s abuse.

In one email, an N.C.A.A. official referred to the consent decree between the association and Penn State as a “bluff” and urged a settlement because the N.C.A.A.’s chances of proving a violation of its bylaws before a Committee on Infractions might prove difficult.

Last year, an N.C.A.A. Committee on Infractions demonstrated just how narrow those bylaws can be when it declined to penalize the University of North Carolina over a scandal in which scores of dubious classes were taken disproportionally by football and men’s basketball players. Through gritted teeth, the committee said it could not find an N.C.A.A. violation because the classes had been available to all students.
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The Nassar case has drawn comparisons to the Sandusky case, raising questions about how university officials responded to warning signs about federal crimes being committed on their campus and about whether they tried to protect someone who was considered valuable to the athletics program. The Michigan State University police received a report about Dr. Nassar as early as May 2014, and on Tuesday a former rower at Michigan State said she had received no response to two separate reports of abuse by Nassar.

Michigan State President Lou Anna Simon, a former chair of what is now known as the N.C.A.A. Board of Governors, has faced calls for resignation, though the university’s board has largely supported her.

The Nassar case has been pushed further into the national spotlight over the past week as Judge Rosemarie Aquilina has allowed more than 140 women, and others connected to the case, to speak at a sentencing hearing for Dr. Nassar, who has pleaded guilty to multiple sex crimes and has already been sentenced to 60 years in prison on child pornography charges. On Monday, three leading members of the board of U.S.A. Gymnastics, which also employed Dr. Nassar for years, resigned amid increasing criticism of how they responded to reports of his abuse.

Several voices ordinarily critical of the N.C.A.A. have urged the organization to stay away from the allegations against Dr. Nassar.

“We are always mindful of the voices around college athletics,” Remy said. “and we strive to do the right thing.”

At the N.C.A.A. Convention last week in Indianapolis, Mark Emmert, the association’s president, conspicuously did not mention Michigan State in his annual address, even as he alluded to the U.N.C. scandal and the under-the-table payments in men’s college basketball that federal officials revealed last fall. Emmert told members of the news media at the convention that he did not have enough information on what happened at Michigan State to comment on it in-depth.

However, in his address Emmert rebutted the notion that the N.C.A.A. should steer clear of controversy.

“We can’t dance around those things,” he said, referring to various scandals. “We can’t make excuses for it. We can’t say our process is slow.”

He added: “How do we respond? I think, first of all, by not retreating from it, not getting under our desks not hiding from it.”
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http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/01/23/michigan-state-ncaa-investigation-nassar/109755008/

MSU reviewing NCAA letter for response
Matt Charboneau, The Detroit News Published 10:39 p.m. ET Jan. 23, 2018 | Updated 12:05 a.m. ET Jan. 24, 2018

East Lansing – The National Collegiate Athletic Association has formally opened an investigation into the Michigan State athletic department, a university spokesman confirmed Tuesday night.

The NCAA sent a letter of inquiry to look into how Michigan State handled the case of Larry Nassar, the sports doctor who sexually assaulted dozens of young women and has spent the last six days hearing more than 100 victims make statements at his sentencing hearing.

“I can confirm the NCAA has sent the MSU Athletics Department a letter,” spokesman Jason Cody said in a text to The News. “I have not seen it. MSU is reviewing it for a response.”

The delivery of the letter of inquiry was first reported by the New York Times.

“The NCAA has requested information from Michigan State about any potential rules violations,” said Donald M. Remy, the association’s chief legal officer, told The Times.

According to NCAA bylaws, “It is the responsibility of each member institution to protect the health of and provide a safe environment for each of its participating student-athletes.”

Nassar’s case has drawn comparisons to that of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State University assistant football coach who was found guilty in 2012 of molesting boys on campus. He is serving a 30-year to 60-year sentence in prison.

Three university officials, including president Graham Spanier, were sentenced to prison for failing to report Sandusky to authorities.

The NCAA reached a consent decree with Penn State in 2012 over the scandal that resulted in the earmarking of a $60 million fine to be spent on child abuse programs, led to a temporary reduction in football scholarships and a two-year ban from playing in post-season bowl games, among other penalties.

The NCAA investigation of MSU comes five days after a Detroit News investigation found that reports of sexual misconduct by Dr. Larry Nassar reached at least 14 university representatives in the two decades before his arrest. No fewer than eight women reported his actions.

Nassar, 54, was a respected osteopathic sports doctor at MSU and USA Gymnastics who treated some of the nation’s most prominent Olympic athletes.

Former MSU women’s gymnastics coach Kathie Klages, who led the program for 27 seasons, was told in 1997 by some youth program gymnasts about sexual assaults.

Larissa Boyce was a 16-year-old high school student in Williamston when she began seeing Nassar after hurting her back in a youth gymnastics program at MSU. She says Nassar assaulted her and told another coach who advised her to talk to Klages. She is considered the first person to report Nassar.

“She said I must be misunderstanding what was going on,” said Boyce, now 37.

Boyce said she remembers what Klages said about filing a report.

“She said, ‘I can file this, but there are going to be serious consequences for you and Nassar,’” Boyce said. “I said I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

Klages retired in February after victims came forward through lawsuits and declined to be interviewed by The News.

Also among those notified was MSU President Lou Anna Simon, who was informed in 2014 that a Title IX complaint and a police report had been filed against an unnamed physician, she told The News.

“I told people to play it straight up,” Simon said last week, “and I did not receive a copy of the report.”

Among the others who were aware of alleged abuse were athletic trainers, assistant coaches, a university police detective and an official who is now MSU’s assistant general counsel, according to university records and accounts of victims who spoke to The News.

He has pleaded guilty to assaulting nine girls in Ingham County but faces more than 150 civil suits that also involve MSU and others. He is already sentenced to 60 years in prison for child pornography in federal court and still faces sentencing for seven counts of criminal sexual conduct.

In a response to a request for information from Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, former federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who led an internal MSU inquiry into the Nassar case, wrote: “While many in the community today wish that they had identified Nassar as a predator, we believe the evidence in this case will show that no one else at MSU knew that Nassar engaged in criminal behavior.”

MSU’s Cody has said the university responded vigorously once Nassar’s crimes came to light in 2016. He said campus police took 135 reports of criminal sexual conduct and executed a search warrant that contributed to Nassar’s convictions.

Staff Writer Kim Kozlowski contributed

mcharboneau@detroitnews.com
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http://abc7news.com/effort-to-recall-judge-in-stanford-sexual-assault-case-heads-to-ballot/2981786/

Effort to recall judge in Stanford sexual assault case heads to ballot
By Katie Marzullo
Tuesday, January 23, 2018 11:23PM

STANFORD, Calif. (KGO) --
The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters has certified that the campaign to recall Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky has enough signatures to put the recall on the June primary ballot.

The recall effort submitted 94,539 signatures.

The Registrar's Office released the following: "The random 5% sample of 4,727 signatures found 3,389 were valid. When applied to the total raw signature count of 94,539, the number of valid signatures is more than 110% of the 58,634 signatures that were required. The California Elections Code dictates that by topping that threshold, the petition is qualified for the ballot with no further verification necessary."

The matter will go before the Board of Supervisors on February 6.

It's been more than a year since former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman after a campus party.

Supervisors have 14 days to put the recall on the June ballot but if they abstain, it will happen automatically.

The recall campaign was launched after Judge Persky sentenced Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to 6 months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman on campus. Turner was released after 3 months.

Recall advocates said Persky had a history of leniency toward offenders who were college athletes.

In response to the recall signatures being certified, Persky's attorney Elizabeth Pipkin issued this statement: "Our firm has always been committed to protecting the law - the civil rights of all within our community and country. The recall effort does not comply with the California Constitution. It's unlawful, and in defending the Constitution and the independence of judges, we are protecting the rights of all citizens."
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http://www.ajc.com/news/local-education/georgia-campus-rape-bill-unlikely-move-forward-this-year-senator-says/cOBZxYiMNKrYQYo0B2jJIL/

Georgia campus rape bill unlikely to move forward this year, senator says

Eric Stirgus The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

4:57 p.m Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018 Atlanta Education News


The head of the Georgia Senate’s higher education committee said Tuesday it’s unlikely a contentious bill filed last year that would impose new mandates on how colleges and universities report and handle sexual assault accusations will be reviewed this year.

Sen. Fran Millar, R-Dunwoody, said during a joint higher education committee hearing that a “campus rape” bill led by Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, won’t move forward as Georgia lawmakers await new federal guidelines regarding how schools handle sexual misconduct complaints.

“I don’t anticipate us dealing with (the bill) for the balance of the session,” he said near the end of the hour-long meeting.

Millar said he’s discussed the bill’s status with Ehrhart.

About two dozen of the bill’s critics attended the hearing. Many of them were pleased with Millar’s comments.

The bill’s critics said the legislation would protect those accused of rape at the expense of the victims, while Ehrhart has said it would merely provide those accused with due process protections.
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