Former President of Michigan State Charged With Felony for Lying to Police
“If convicted, she could spend four years in prison.”
This charge is related to the investigation of Larry Nassar, the doctor at the center of the sexual abuse scandal.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Felony Charges Against Former Michigan State President
Michigan State University’s former president Lou Anna K. Simon was charged on Tuesday with lying to police in their investigation of sexual abuse by Larry Nassar, the disgraced and now imprisoned university physician.
Simon resigned in January after revelations of the breadth of abuse by Nassar, who sexually assaulted hundreds of women both in his role as a former team doctor at the institution and with the U.S. gymnastics team.
As the scandal grew, Michigan State’s board first stood by Simon, who claimed to be unaware of the worst of the allegations. But Nassar victims said they informed Michigan State officials of the abuse years before the institution acted.
The Michigan attorney general’s office charged Simon with two misdemeanor and two felony counts. If convicted, she could spend four years in prison. Simon had initially told Michigan State police that she was aware a “sports medicine doctor” whose name she hadn’t known had been the subject of a gender-discrimination investigation by the university in 2014. But the attorney general’s office suggests that she knew it was Nassar and also said she knew more about the nature of the allegations than she admitted at the time. The charges stem from that alleged lie. In January, the office started investigating the university’s handling of sexual assault reports against Nassar.
Michigan State said in a statement that it “was aware” of the charges brought against Simon and that she was taking a leave of absence from the university (she remained there as a professor) to focus on her “legal situation.”
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Comments
As an MSU alumni this makes me so Happy! Embarrassed, but happy. I get very distressed when I consider all governance issues and failures that allowed this to happen. I have to stop there or I will be putting some hazelnut liquor in my coffee.
It’s a crime to lie to the police in Michigan? What other states do that? I thought that was only a Federal thing.