(CN) — The Department of Justice announced Tuesday it has approved a settlement for 139 separate claims of sexual abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, formerly the team doctor for the U.S. women's national gymnastics team.
The settlement will distribute a total of $138.7 million to the 139 claimants, according to the Justice Department. The department approved the settlement in light of a July 2021 report from its Office of the Inspector General, which found FBI investigators in Indianapolis botched their 2015 investigation into claims of Nassar's sexual abuse.
"The OIG found that senior officials in the FBI Indianapolis Field Office failed to respond to the Lawrence Gerard Nassar allegations with the utmost seriousness and urgency that the allegations deserved and required, made numerous and fundamental errors when they did respond to them, and failed to notify state or local authorities of the allegations or take other steps to mitigate the ongoing threat posed by Nassar," the Inspector General's Office concluded in 2021.
Some of the women the Indianapolis FBI office interviewed said Nassar had assaulted them "hundreds" of times. At least 150 women have come forward since the investigation was launched in 2015, some of them claiming to have been as young as 13 when Nassar began molesting them. The Inspector General's Office found the Indianapolis office, after receiving the accusations, nevertheless tried to pass the buck for the responsibility of investigating them.
"In September 2015... the Indianapolis Field Office, as well as the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Indiana, concluded that there was no venue in Indianapolis since Indianapolis had no connection to any of the alleged illegal activity," the Inspector General's Office reported.
The inspector general found the Indianapolis officials doubted Nassar's case belonged in federal court at all, and if it did, it belonged in Michigan where Nassar worked for Michigan State University. But instead of alerting the FBI's Lansing agency, they let the case gather dust for eight months.
The FBI's Los Angeles office also looked into the case in the spring of 2016, but it took the Michigan State University Police Department responding to a separate claim against Nassar that August for FBI agents in Lansing to open their own investigation. They ended up discovering over 30,000 images of child pornography on devices seized by the university police.
In response to the 2021 report, the FBI's assistant director of its Inspection Division, Douglass Leff, issued a letter conceding ethical breaches on the part of FBI agents, as well as a failure to thoroughly investigate the claims against Nassar.
The botched investigation preceded the #MeToo social media movement, which sought to call attention to the global commonality of — and lack of significant consequences for — sexual misconduct.
“These allegations should have been taken seriously from the outset," Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said in a prepared statement Tuesday. 'While these settlements won’t undo the harm Nassar inflicted, our hope is that they will help give the victims of his crimes some of the critical support they need to continue healing.”
Federal prosecutors indicted Nassar, who spent nearly two decades working with gymnasts including Olympians, on two child pornography counts in December 2016. He initially pleaded not guilty, but changed his plea to guilty on all counts in July 2017 after the government issued a superseding indictment accusing him of trying to destroy evidence of his crimes. That November he pleaded guilty to 10 additional charges of sexually abusing children in Michigan state courts.
Nassar is currently serving an effective life sentence behind bars. U.S. District Judge Janet Neff, a George W. Bush appointee in the District of Western Michigan, sentenced him to three consecutive 20-year terms in December 2017.
Michigan Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie Aquilina sentenced him to 40 to 175 more years in January 2018. She seemed to relish handing down Nassar's sentence after hearing a week of victim impact statements from dozens of women the former physician abused.
“I just signed your death warrant,” the judge said after sentencing him.
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