It's Wednesday, September 25th, and this is the 19 09, the state news's weekly podcast featuring all reporters talking about the news. I'm your host, Alex Walters. This week, thousands of long secret documents are revealed at last. The infamous Larry Nassar documents, a plethora of previously privileged communications and memoranda detailing Michigan State University's handling of the scandal are public after years of advocacy. During that time, a mythos has swirled around these documents.
Alex:The board's ardent secrecy over them drove speculation that they contained some sort of smoking gun, something MSU was fighting to hide. Now we here at the State News have read every one of the over 6,000 documents, and we can tell you that they don't. There's no smoking gun. There is not a flashy central allegation that can explain the crisis away. But what they do contain are scores of extraordinary insights into the day to day discussions inside MSU amid the fallout of this massive crisis.
Alex:They are the university's lawyers and leaders' true reactions and strategies at each moment of the swirling scandal. And here to talk about them with me are the 2 reporters that we read them all together.
Theo Scheer:Mhmm.
Alex:Owen McCarthy, administration reporter. Theo Sheer, other administration reporter. It's been a long week and a half or so. 6000 documents sounds like a lot, but it's also feels like a lot Yeah. When you read them.
Alex:But I'm excited that finally, you know, we published 12 stories now, and we get to share all these insights too on the podcast. So thank you guys for for coming on.
Owen McCarthy:Thanks for having us.
Theo Scheer:Yeah. Thanks, Alex.
Alex:Before we get there, for those who the Nassar documents, what? They don't know what we're talking about. Mhmm. Right? You know, it's this
Alex:collection of privileged documents.
Alex:You know, when this documents. You know, when this Nassar crisis swirled, there's all these investigations, federal department of ed, state AG, congress, state house, different regulators looking into how did MSU allow this serial sexual abuse to go on so long. And this is a set of documents that MSU never turned over to investigators. They said that they are covered by attorney client privilege, and so they became a subject of a lot of speculation because people are like, what is in these secret documents? And a couple months ago, the board at MSU finally decided, after about 6 years of withholding them, we're gonna turn them over to the state attorney general who reopened her investigation, spent months looking at them.
Alex:You guys covered a press conference last week where she announced, you know, the conclusion of that work. Theo, tell us, what did the attorney general say?
Owen McCarthy:Yeah.
Theo Scheer:Well, I think the sentiment was definitely sort of the same as as what you said starting this off. She was expecting because of all this withholding that there would be a smoking gun, but but there wasn't. She said that there was information that was maybe embarrassing to the university, but not incriminating. You know? There's no new charges as a result of her, you know, looking through the rest of these docs.
Alex:She thought because MSU tried to hide these for so long, there had to be something criminal. Right? That was kind of her assumption, she said?
Theo Scheer:Right. Exactly. Yeah. That it sort of implies that maybe there's something that they were hiding.
Alex:Mhmm. But she there was nothing like that. She just said it was embarrassing, but not something she could, like, charge someone over.
Theo Scheer:Exactly. Yeah. Embarrassing sort of communications about, you know, talking badly about the prosecutors on the the Larry Nassar case. Just different sort of little university instance here and there that, yeah, didn't really reflect well on university officials at the time.
Alex:I think a lot of people were disappointed that there wasn't a more kind of satisfying resolution to that AG probe. But what it did give us is finally because we we couldn't get them for a long time because they're privileged, then we couldn't get them because they were subject to this attorney general investigation. Finally, guys like us in the media can actually read them and report and tell people what is in these secret documents, and that's what we're doing today. But first of all, Owen, I want you to just give us a sense. NASSER documents NASSER documents has become this buzzword, this kind of political litmus test for people around MSU.
Alex:You know, you've read them. What even are they? Are are are they like some sort of secret memoranda? Are they text messages? What were we reading?
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. So, you know, the overwhelming majority of the documents are emails. They're email chains. They're even you know, you'll you'll see an email exchange, and then it's one administrator was forwarding that to another one. Right?
Owen McCarthy:Mhmm. And then, you know, but there's also, the occasional written note that you'll see. There's the occasional, text message chain. So, yeah, you're mostly looking at emails. You're mostly looking at emails from lawyers.
Owen McCarthy:And if you guys know anything about how lawyers speak, that definitely took some It's
Alex:very specific.
Owen McCarthy:Yes.
Alex:It's I think we, as we were reading them, noticed we started messaging each other
Owen McCarthy:and Exactly.
Alex:Telling each other to please advise. And
Owen McCarthy:It was bizarre, but but we were we were reading those docs. So it it sticks with you a little bit. But yeah. So you had you had mostly emails. But but some other stuff as well.
Alex:A lot of drafts. Right? Like, you'll see kind of documents that people in the public have seen the final version of. Yes. But there were these privileged kind of first drafts in the editing process, and it was interesting to see kind of the differences between Yeah.
Alex:What we ended up seeing in the public and what was kind of the first idea
Owen McCarthy:Yeah.
Alex:Especially when those first ideas were, you know Yeah. It was very different.
Owen McCarthy:It was sort of a painstaking process is what you see. You'll see these statements, and then you'll see, you know, different lawyers touching it, and they they sort of, you know, annotate the documents and and and the the way that they would look so closely at these sentences and the words and, you know, should we soften this? Should we not? It was a it was a pretty painstaking process. So, yeah, you're right.
Owen McCarthy:A lot of, you know, draft draft statements.
Alex:I think it's a good reminder too for people like us in the public and the media that, like, when MSC puts out a statement, it's incredibly intentional. I mean, the amount of time and energy they put into deciding every word and punctuation mark on every one of these statements, is true. It was shocking for me to think about. Like, they
Owen McCarthy:I
Alex:mean, there's no mistakes, like, when they say something. Before we get into kind of the specific revelatory things we found in these documents, I wanna kinda establish some of the broader themes that we got into. I think, Theo, you can talk about this. We wrote one story just about kind of the overall tone, the way that MSU talked about survivors, survivors' attorneys, the press, the public. You know, because in public, they talk a certain way.
Alex:Behind closed doors, they definitely talked about people a different way. Tell us, you know, what is the tone of these internal MSU conversations?
Theo Scheer:Yeah. Behind the scenes, it became very clear that a lot of these top attorneys, even MSU officials, they thought of this as a war. And, the survivors were kind of, you know, on the opposite end of that. They were suing MSU, and, and MSU has to defend itself. They compared it to a fight in a Rocky movie in one email that we we found especially insightful where they said, quote, we are going to have to take a lot of punishment before we can dish a lot out.
Theo Scheer:This is going to be a lot like a fight in a Rocky movie. I mean, it's
Alex:past that these analogies to the battlefield Yeah. War
Theo Scheer:A lot of
Alex:the trenches, all that. I mean, they saw this as a fight. They They did. And talk specifically, you know, if they are on one side of this war, who who are the various enemies that MSU saw itself as, you know, fighting?
Theo Scheer:Yeah. There was a lot a lot of criticism of the attorneys that were representing the survivors. I mean, specifically, you know, there's a lot of criticism towards, John Manley, who I think represented, I mean, hundreds of of Nassau survivors. You know, they they called him arrogant, aggressive, impolite. He's a jerk, said one MSU general counsel member.
Theo Scheer:It was very clear that they were kind of had had an extremely adversarial relationship to them. They wrote memos kind of characterizing each and every one of the attorneys that were representing them in these multiple cases, kind of offering different descriptions, saying, you know, this one's a little bit arrogant. This one's known for, you know, trying his cases in the media. This one pushes the ethical envelope, one of them wrote.
Alex:Well and it seems too that they really believe these plaintiff's attorneys who represented the 100 of survivors suing MSU had some sort of ulterior motive that they were out for money. They call them, you know, ambulance chasers. They say that they're trying to inflate this issue in order to take some kind of a settlement. We we actually we we asked John Manley about that, and he said, he gave you a great quote, Theo, that, he said I mean, he didn't deny it. He said, for the record, I am impolite, but to people in positions of authority who protect pedophiles was his kind of framing.
Alex:And tell me about 2, they also talk a lot about, the media. Looks like us as, you know, kind of another enemy in this war. Theo, what what what is the media to MSU in their kind of framing?
Theo Scheer:Yeah. The media is definitely, seems to be another enemy of theirs. You know, they they called some local reporters, what was that, a Pulitzer chaser or something like that. Not
Owen McCarthy:his investigative Pulitzer. Yeah.
Alex:Right. Exactly. They're trying
Theo Scheer:to outdo Indy Star, and that's Indy Star is a publication that first broke, this piece about Nassar. And, yeah, it it seems as though they're very sort of tired of all of these media requests, all these inquiries, all this digging into their internal systems.
Owen McCarthy:There's a sense that, you know, the media were you know, it's a characterization that we hear a lot, but, you know, that the media were were gonna go after anything that was gonna get them a flashy headline, and they were going to sensationalize.
Alex:When MSU seems to feel very victimized by the press, they feel like it's unfair. They and they they want some sort of avenue for retribution. Like, there's that great email exchange when the Washington Post writes a very unflattering editorial at MSU.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah.
Alex:And the lawyers are debating how do we respond respond, and the president of MSU, Lou Anna Simon, writes back, can we sue them? She's like, let's just take care of this.
Owen McCarthy:The communications director sort of respond back and say, well, you know, for the record, someone who didn't even read that editorial but wrote but but actually read the investigative piece that the Washington Post
Alex:just sort of straight news story.
Owen McCarthy:The straight news story that gave you the facts. They were saying if someone read that, they could draw the exact same conclusion as the editorial did.
Alex:Well, and eventually, this kind of anger at the media feeling victimized just sort of turns into, like, almost a just like helplessness. There's this great exchange where a spokesperson tells a bunch of administrators, NBC News tonight is gonna run this whole feature about the Nassar thing. They're interviewing student athletes who were abused by Nassar, and the provost of MSU just writes back just a one word email, just ugh, sent from my iPhone. Yep. And so they kinda just,
Owen McCarthy:gave up
Alex:at some point. But the iPad. Sorry. But no. So that's kind of the tone of this.
Alex:Right? Is that MSU feels there's some sort of victim in a war and that they're fighting, you know, the media and survivors and their attorneys. What about then this recurring theme, We call that kind of the central push and pull. A lot of these documents are just MSU going back and forth on various statements and decisions, and it seems like they kinda have the same fight over and over and over again. Owen, tell us about what is this thing they just keep fighting about and could never seem to agree on one strategy throughout the whole crisis.
Owen McCarthy:Right. Yeah. You're absolutely right. There was this push and pull. And, basically, there was, you know, there was 2 you know, we we talked about this fight.
Owen McCarthy:The fight was sort of twofold. The fight was there's a PR battle. There's a battle to save our image and our reputation.
Alex:Mhmm.
Owen McCarthy:But there's also a battle to not expose ourselves to unsustainable financial liability and make sure that the settlement we're we're ultimately served isn't something we can't handle. So A legal fight. There's a legal fight, and there's a PR fight.
Alex:And those are they feel are at odds.
Owen McCarthy:They are at odds because, you know, from the lawyer's point of view, it's constantly can we say as little as possible. Mhmm. We don't wanna give plaintiff's attorneys anything that they could ever use against us in any way. You know? So we don't wanna come, you know, say there's an allegation that that we feel and believe to be incorrect, we don't want to come out too strongly in the media and say that's not true because what if it's not and what if it comes back to bite them later and inflates that settlement even more.
Owen McCarthy:And, you know, they didn't want to make any type of too lofty promise. You know, there is this one interesting moment where, you know, they're they're working on a statement and, you know, they say, we wanna make sure that we are ensuring or we we pledge to ensure safety on our campus.
Alex:But it
Alex:won't happen again.
Owen McCarthy:That it won't happen again. And and, you know, a lawyer points out, well, don't say that. It it it might sound good, right, from a PR point of view, but don't say that because technically, we can't do that. We don't wanna say that in a legal sense that it will never happen again.
Alex:Or even just kind of the central thing of, like, an apology because that was kind of the most demanded thing I think by survivors. It was MSU. It's take accountability for its role in allowing this to happen. And there are a lot of moments when spokespeople, administrators, even the president, Louisa Simon, wants some sort of, like, we're sorry. Mhmm.
Alex:Know that we did things wrong, and the lawyers just will not let them say that.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. That would be an an admission of guilt, you know.
Alex:Is that how the lawyers see it? Yes. And actually, you know, we had an interesting conversation with Rachel Denhollander who, she was the first woman to publicly accuse Nassau of sexual assault, and she's an attorney whose practice I mean, she kind of advises institutions in this area, right, on how to prevent this kind of thing going forward. Yeah. She feels like MSU maybe hasn't taken her advice, but other institutions she feels has.
Alex:And she said that the lawyers, in her view, are kind of reading it wrong, that it's not this back and forth of either we do the right thing in public and people don't think we're so evil, or we do the right thing in court and we don't pay such a big settlement. Mhmm. She kinda felt like had MSU, at the very beginning, apologized, took accountability, and said to survivors, what can we do to improve to make sure this doesn't happen to other people again? And she said that the heartbeat of every survivor is, you know, I don't want this to happen to someone else.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah.
Alex:That That there probably wouldn't have been such a great settlement, so many lawsuits, so much anger that it was kind of a vicious cycle that perpetuated itself. And I thought that's a really interesting alternate reading Yeah. Because it's so the opposite of everything MSU says in these documents.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. Yeah. And she sort of faults MSU. She says they they thought only in terms of liability, she said, and and that was where they went wrong in her eyes.
Alex:Yeah. And then, Theo, I want you to tell me about before we get into the more specific stuff, one more kind of overarching theme, and this one's kinda meta, but we'll get into it. These documents were withheld from the public and from the rescuers for so long because they were privileged. The attorney client privilege protect them, which is this protection in the law for, like, lawyers to be able to have a frank discussion with their client without that getting out there. You heard a story about how the many of these documents just aren't.
Alex:They're they're not privileged documents, and some broader themes about sort of some gamesmanship around trying to withhold things that really should have been public. Tell me about, I mean, were these withheld wrongfully?
Theo Scheer:Yeah. I mean, we see that, looking through the documents themselves, sometimes by their own author's admission, these documents are not privileged. We see that multiple times, you know, MSU's counsel has had to remind, officials, even a university trustee at one point, that just simply writing privileged and confidential at the top of an email doesn't automatically make something Yeah. Privileged and confidential.
Owen McCarthy:Or cc ing a lawyer, for example.
Theo Scheer:Right. Exactly. They just cc a lawyer.
Alex:It's like, well, now this is a lawyer talk. It's secret.
Theo Scheer:If you're not actually seeking legal advice, then it's not privileged and confidential. And and she had to remind that, which I thought was sort of ironic that MSUs argued for years that these things are, you know, they're they're privileged and that's why they should be withheld. But once we actually see them, you know, the documents themselves are kinda saying, no. That's actually not true. I mean,
Alex:this conversation is not privileged just because you say so is a crazy thing to say in a document that was withheld for years as being privileged.
Theo Scheer:Exactly. And many of the other documents are simply just PR strategy, etcetera. They have nothing to do with legal, analyses of of any sort either. So I think it it was clear, you know, kind of what the attorney general was getting at in in that press conference when she said that, you know, maybe this is not the smoking gun, but it is really proof that MSU didn't withhold these documents.
Alex:And what about because you got into this in your story too. Beyond just the documents themselves, maybe probably not should have been withheld in the way they were. Also, the documents and we're getting into a lot of talk about documents. Listeners, bear with us. The documents also allude to other documents which were withheld for other reasons from other investigations.
Alex:It seems like this is kind of a thing at MSU, withholding documents wrongly.
Theo Scheer:There's definitely a theme of kind of faulty records keeping, especially when it came to Nassar. I mean, we see that, for example, the former president, Lou Anna Simon, she admitted that to to deleting her own text messages. This is when the, then attorney general, was requesting everybody sort of hold on to their records for an investigation. Meanwhile, she was sort of deleting everything saying that, you know, oh, she assumed that personal texts are, you know, not gonna be applied to that that sort of investigation. They're okay to be deleted.
Theo Scheer:And she she mentioned that her husband, Roy, who was, I think, at the time also an MSU employee, was also a compulsive, text deleter as well. So there's kind of a history there, and sort of a history, I think, throughout multiple MSU officials. We saw in these documents, I think it was,
Owen McCarthy:I mean,
Alex:what about these missing files with Department of Ed? That seems like another sort of fishy area.
Theo Scheer:That was a big thing. That was when the, Department of Education, their Office of Civil Rights, they were requesting all of the, sexual abuse investigatory files from a certain date range
Alex:is for
Alex:federal government Yes. Looking to kinda provide oversight of MSU to investigate the university.
Theo Scheer:Do an an audit into sort of, yeah, what's happening behind the scenes there. They provided all the records that they thought they had, at the time, but then about a year later, they realized looking back, oh, we didn't give you 9 investigatory files, including one about Nassar. They and they they say, in retrospect that this is because of sort of staffing changes. The the department that was organizing this didn't have any sort of file organization system, and that's why all these documents sort of went missing for this review.
Alex:And a university psychologist has similar problem too. Right? I mean, this is the psychologist who knew about Nassar years before anyone else. He also had this, you know, supposedly accidental missing file problem.
Theo Scheer:Yeah. This was Gary Stalek. He, you know, he surrendered his license in 2018 after, failing to to inform authorities about Nassar's suspected abuse. So he's kind of he's in this situation for sure. But we saw an email about him from his attorney, saying that he didn't have access to his patient records because he destroyed all of them.
Theo Scheer:Yeah. So I guess the he his house is broken to, twice in a period of 2 years, and some patient records were removed during those breakers.
Alex:Someone broke into his house and stole the patient records.
Theo Scheer:So he decided after this happens to just remove all of his papers. Just destroy them,
Alex:including the appointment where he heard about Nassar and didn't report it.
Theo Scheer:Exactly. Right. So that's why he, you know, can't really provide that information.
Alex:Yeah.
Alex:So that's another theme. Documents Right. Related to Nassar just keeps magically going missing. Okay. Let's get into specific stuff.
Alex:Right? I think the first thing, the first kind of specific story we published, Theo, you and I looked at in these documents, there are a lot of ways in which it seems MSU, you know, we use the term monitoring, that they were monitoring survivors. And
Alex:kind of
Alex:a central criticism during the scandal is survivors of Nassar's abuse would say MSU is not listening to us. They won't meet with us. They won't talk to us. They're not listening to our concerns and demands. What we found is that the university was actually spending a lot of time and money listening to survivors, but to kind of better their litigation strategy, not maybe listening in the way that survivors wanted them to.
Alex:Tell me about like, take the the victim impact statements, for example. Right. MSU was listening?
Theo Scheer:They they were listening. They were writing down, you know, information about, what they were saying, if they were mentioning anything about MSU in these victim impact statements, all in seeming anticipation of litigation kind of, preparing for that. They were, yeah, taking very detailed notes. They had a an investigator for an outside firm there. Yeah.
Theo Scheer:Absolutely. Listening.
Alex:Yeah. And it it's interesting because that is actually such a specific moment where, you know, you have in the criminal proceedings against Nassar, hundreds of survivors telling their stories, which is part of this plea deal. And they had said, Louanna Simon, the president of MSU, should be here listening to us because a lot of this has to do with you. And she didn't go, and she was criticized for that. But we're now seeing that she did send lawyers to go and kind of develop a litigation defense around the information.
Alex:We also have some new insight around the way MSU they actually hired sort of a private investigator to find not just monitor women who had come forward publicly and accuse Nassar of abuse, but find new allegations before they came out. And MSU, you know, publicly has long denied that there were problems with the investigator, that they were outing survivors, that they were looking into plaintiffs. In the documents, we get kind of a different view. It seems like they were there's actually a great moment where someone wants to issue a statement that says, we've never investigated survivors. We're not doing that.
Alex:And Embassy's lawyers say, well, what you could say that would be true would be that we're we're not currently investigating survivors. And that's the kinda insight that we get in these documents. So, like, the way they craft these statements so specifically to seem as if they're denying wrongdoing while not actually lying about any of the things that they've done they've been alleged.
Owen McCarthy:And that statement was so ambiguous that it I I don't even think it was saying we're currently investigating. It took out the currently, but just changed the tense to say investigating. That's how that's how much they were thinking about the the words that they were using in the language and what it implied and the liability it might have.
Alex:It's clever stuff. It's like to play with the tense like that to try and get out of having to admit something. It's it's very sophisticated, but it's shocking to see Mhmm. Kinda laid bare
Alex:like that because it's not the kind of discussion we're usually privy to. Right. And then what about this? We also we wrote kind of
Alex:a little bit of a profile
Owen McCarthy:y story about Lou
Alex:Anna
Alex:Simon Mhmm. The MSU president who is kind of, I think, the public face of the scandal of MSU's handling of it at least. Yeah. And we felt like we got, you know, kind of a fuller picture of her with these documents. I mean, Owen, tell tell me about, you know, this sort of thesis that we developed about, like, you know, how do we what does Lou Anna Simon look like when you look at her through the lens of these documents and not the lens of how she's viewed publicly otherwise?
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. So so I would start, you know, with with how she is viewed, publicly and kinda how she has been been viewed over time.
Alex:It's not good.
Owen McCarthy:It it's not great. And and I think that, you know, the big criticism is that she seemed, you know, often sort of obtuse to criticism. Cold? Cold, defensive, and, you know, one person Allegedly lied to police. Allegedly lied to police.
Owen McCarthy:I mean,
Alex:the charges were dropped, but there's still much discussion of that.
Owen McCarthy:There is. And also, you know, never really offering never really just offering an apology. It seemed like, you know, we already talked about Rachel Denhollander and sort of how she said, you know, we would have really appreciated that apology from the get go. And if we got that, things could have been a lot different.
Alex:Yeah.
Owen McCarthy:You know, publicly, Lou Anna Simon never really offered that. But I
Alex:mean, she did right as she resigned.
Owen McCarthy:But I mean, here's
Alex:after people
Owen McCarthy:wanted it. Exactly. But but what we sort of turned up is that, you know, these documents show she did, in fact, want to apologize to these survivors.
Alex:She actually wrote an apology. She sent it around of, like, I want to send these personal letters of apology to survivors, and her lawyer said, don't do that. It's gonna come back to get us in court, which is kind of that push pull we're talking about earlier. And she listened to them. Yeah.
Alex:And so what does that mean? Kind of our thesis, right, was that this idea of Lou Anna Simon as there are these moments in the documents where she kind of has the right instincts. Mhmm. But she listens to lawyers who tell her, don't do that. And then those things come back to bite her.
Alex:And I think that's a more nuanced view of her than, like, I I might have had before reading these documents just the way she is publicly. But tell me, of course, there's also so much more bad stuff about Lou Anna Simon and the documents. I mean, Owen, take us through.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. There there there's plenty that's consistent with sort of this existing view of her, and and one of them we already touched on is that, you know, she deleted she admitted that she deleted a bunch of text messages. You know, that that doesn't that doesn't look good, and and that was something that, Dana Nessel herself, the attorney general, even sort of pointed out as one of those specifically embarrassing things in her press conferences that the president, at the helm of this whole thing, admitted in these documents that she had been, deleting a bunch of text messages. We also mentioned that she said her husband was also deleting a bunch of texts. But, yeah, we we also see that in in a lot of these communications where we're sort of, administrators and lawyers are kind of pouring over these these, you know, PR statements, you know, Simon sort of wanted to insert this sort of defensive language in framing, and and even wanted to sort of, you know, seem to shift the blame in some ways.
Owen McCarthy:Mhmm. You know, in particular, she wanted this one statement to defend MSU by by noting that, you know, Nassar, he was an impossible pedophile. You know, sort of saying that even if things were,
Alex:Basically, there's nothing we could have done.
Owen McCarthy:There's nothing we could have done.
Alex:Because she has these moments where she wants sort of more accountability. She wants to apologize. Yeah. And then there are other moments when even against the advice of her lawyers and PR people
Alex:Mhmm.
Alex:She's like, let's put out a statement that says, like, our hands were tied. There's nothing we could have done. How can you blame us for this?
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. And, you know, you had communications directors in there sort of, you know, saying, I don't think that's a good thing to say. You know, we have Heather Swain at one point and specifically responding to this, you know, impossible to stop a pedophile framing. You know, this this woman, Heather Swain, said, I do not think it is helpful on the PR front. Sounds more like an excuse or defensiveness.
Owen McCarthy:You know, we also had, we already mentioned the can we sue them, comment with regards to a we we read the editorial. To be honest, we already talked I mean, the editorial is it it does say that MSU
Alex:saying anything that people hadn't been saying for a year at that point very loudly.
Owen McCarthy:Yes. You know, specifically, it said the administration had a had a willful blindness, to Nassar. And, you know, Simon just writes in an email exchange. Can we sue them? And then we also got a quick little insight into how maybe she she was viewed by those who who worked with her, who worked under her.
Owen McCarthy:We had text exchanges, specifically some text between communications directors. You know, it was after a series of unfavorable stories about sexual misconduct unrelated to Nassar. A spokesperson, Jason Cody, texted another spokesperson and said, it's been a crazy few days, more football rates, and getting yelled at by Simon, typical MSU.
Alex:Yeah.
Owen McCarthy:So so a little bit of insight into how, you know, maybe what her tone was like with
Alex:what she what
Owen McCarthy:she worked with.
Alex:There are these moments where it's you know, you think of a president a certain way kinda sitting up in their office.
Theo Scheer:And and
Alex:through the documents, you can see she had a very hands on role, and she's involved in a lot of day to day decisions. And she has these, like, little bursts of enthusiasm where suddenly she'll send some email about, like, are we complying with this investigation? She'll send specific lists of names. Like, can you search the documents of these for evidence?
Owen McCarthy:Yeah.
Alex:And she is kind of versed of enthusiasm about this kind of thing. She also and this is something I felt fascinating. The presmail email address, which is like a public email anyone can write into that supposedly goes to the president of MSU, and it's read by, like, an assistant and certain things are forwarded around. She seemed to actually read
Alex:Mhmm.
Alex:Everything that went into the presmail thing and then would demand people write responses. Like, when just random pea even people who weren't, like, an alumni, just some random person writes in about, like, MSU is so horrible. Yeah.
Alex:She would be
Alex:like, I read this. Can someone write a response? There was one point when someone from, like, a Penn State alumni
Owen McCarthy:Penn State. Yeah.
Alex:Wrote this series of, like, kinda screeds. And they were just, like, these very kind of bizarre comparisons between MSU and Penn State. And it was like this war plan of, like, how MSU can learn from Penn State's mistakes and whatnot. She seemed to read these, like, 3,000 words of comparisons and then asked a bunch she asked lawyers and spokespeople, like, there's this message from her assistant where it's like, president Simon would like you to read these Yeah. And see if there's any useful advice in them.
Alex:Yeah. And she she seemed to want to engage with the people that came and criticized her, but, ultimately, they actually ended up making decision. They said the only people respond to are people who are big donors
Owen McCarthy:Yeah.
Alex:Which is interesting. But she I don't know. I think I I feel as if we know her a little bit more now than we might have. We do. Haven't read these docs.
Owen McCarthy:I think it's absolutely fair to say that that we know her a little bit more now, and I I hope that readers sort of get this more nuanced full picture from our story as well. But but what I would add, I mean, she seems to be fascinating. I mean, this this sort of complicated. She's complicated. I mean, you're right.
Owen McCarthy:This is the sort of these burst of inspiration that they're like, oh, now she wants to make sure that we're complying with the sort of day to day nitty gritty stuff. And at other times, she wants to sort of shift blame away from MSU onto other people. So, she's confident. Sit down with
Alex:us and talk about it. She didn't take our calls.
Owen McCarthy:She didn't she we had a hard time reaching her.
Alex:Simon, if you're a listener of the 19 09, that'd be crazy if she was.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. You can
Alex:call us back.
Owen McCarthy:We'll throw it out there Yeah. To have you.
Alex:Your lawyer has our number. You have our number. You can call
Owen McCarthy:us back. Yep.
Alex:Anyway, Owen, you wrote another little profile. Mhmm. Another sort of very public figure in the Nassar affair. William Strampel, Nassar's boss, who at first was accused of not doing enough to stop Nasser, and then it came out that he too actually should have been stopped.
Alex:He
Alex:was committing some pretty egregious sexual misconduct for many, many years.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah.
Alex:You wrote a story about how this strample guy who, for public onlookers, the Nassar scandal was kind of a wrinkle, a twist Yeah. Inside MSU, kind of an open secret the way this guy was. At least that's kinda your thesis. Tell me about what did you learn about William Strample.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. I mean, I I wanna start with with sort of the anecdote that I that I've led my story with, because I think it's indicative of of really how people kinda come, you know, it was kind of on par for him what what he did here, and and it's sort of indicative of this larger pattern and and sort of what his reputation was. So, you know, as soon as this is shortly after the Indy Star story came out, MSU MSU personnel had received new police evidence that was, you know, it it was clear at this point that they had a a grounds for immediate suspension of Larry Nassar. And so as soon as they get this evidence from the police department, you know, they they start scrambling in an email chain, basically saying, hey. We need to meet right now.
Owen McCarthy:I wanna do suspension. Other people are like, yes. I think suspension is the move. And so they're saying, when can we meet? When can we meet?
Owen McCarthy:And someone in there says, hey. Can you reach out to to Bill Stramble? We need him. He's he's the dean of of the college, the College of Osteopathic Medicine, and master supervisor. Obviously, we need him.
Owen McCarthy:When they reached William Strampel, he said he wouldn't be available until nearly a week later. I don't know if he was on vacation. We don't know what he was up to.
Alex:But It's like when can we meet about your doctor who's been publicly accused of pretty egregious abuse? How about late next week? How about
Owen McCarthy:late next week? Exactly.
Alex:People kind of poke him for that. I mean, they they say, like
Owen McCarthy:Yes. I don't think this can wait until Wednesday or Thursday. Are you able to meet remotely? It's interesting that the person who said that was was then associate provost Terry Curry. And when you look through the documents, Terry Curry was was sort of on Strampel's case for years for for these various
Alex:also, Curry was on vacation at the time. Yeah. He was ready to meet, and Strampel wanted to meet a week later. Strampel, I don't think was on vacation. Yeah.
Owen McCarthy:Curry, I think, said he was, you know, he was gonna work remotely. Yeah. So maybe Terry Terry Curry had the capabilities, Zoom or whatnot, and and Strampel hadn't gotten on that wave yesterday.
Alex:And what about you had this other amazing anecdote in your story about kind of the way other people talked about Stramples' commitment to stopping this Nassar thing. Tell me about that.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. So so this is a flashback to to 2014. And just to remind our listeners, in 2014 was a title 9 investigation of of Larry Nassar, that ultimately cleared him of wrong doing. But it's become very controversial, and there's a lot of admitted flaws with the, you know, methods they use there to to clear Nassar, of wrongdoing. Basically, that title 9 investigation did make some recommendations.
Owen McCarthy:Right? And and, you know, we have this email exchange where general counsel is sort of saying, you know, talking to Strampel, who had just sort of informed Nassar, okay. You can come back to work in 2014. And, you know, the general counsel are kinda saying, hey, you know, Dean Strampel, just wanna close the loop on this matter. They say one of the recommendations of the title 9 report was to ensure patient complaints of this type get referred to an appropriate person at the practice.
Owen McCarthy:And she says, you know, is that something you wanna cover with with a certain physician in the office or or I can if you like? And there's no response. But what you do see is that a month later, someone who was cc'd on the message, who was the title 9 investigator, you know, says, says, hey. Did you ever hear back from Strampel on this? Did he ever get back to you on this?
Alex:Did he follow through on this oversight of Nassar?
Owen McCarthy:And the response was, of course not. So so this was telling. You know? This was telling about how people had sort of, come to view Strampel and how seriously he took these issues of sexual abuse.
Alex:And there's also you know? And we don't have to get into it on the show, but your story kinda dives into the whole timeline and Strandbl kinda shifts with these documents when everybody knew about his misconduct itself seems to be a little bit earlier. There's this odd thing in 2000 where he seems to know about, a kinda research malpractice complaint with Nassar. She's having trouble, and it's a little more complicated than maybe we'll get into on this already very long episode of 19 09. Yes.
Alex:But I don't know. Stramble, again, like Simon, we seem to have a fuller picture of it. It's it's far less nuanced, but it's It's
Owen McCarthy:far less nuanced.
Alex:It's pretty kinda know more about the way at least he was seen internally at MSU.
Owen McCarthy:Yes.
Alex:And then this is another thing. So now we're zooming way out. These aren't profiles about individual people. Yeah. At the time, with Nassar, there was a lot of interest in trying to make sure not just at MSU individually, but at institutions across Michigan that just doesn't happen again.
Alex:It's easier to report. It's easier to prosecute, and that institutions would be held, more so liable for it. And there's this package of bills moving to the Michigan legislature. Publicly, I must say you didn't say much about the bills. John Engler, who briefly was president as an interim, made some comments that were sort of snarky about the bills at times, but MSU was never publicly opposed to the bills.
Alex:What we learned in the documents was that quietly, MSU was working really, really hard to kill this package of legislation any way they could. If that way didn't mean the kind of, like, bad look of doing so publicly. Theo, tell me about what are these very secretive ways that MSU worked to, you know, kill this legislation.
Theo Scheer:Right. Yeah. It's important to note that they were very much aware at a certain point that they had to be discreet about this, that it's not a good look for MSU, which is the site of a lot of Larry Nassar's abuse to be opposing this legislation. So, yeah, they they hired law firms to analyze the bills, what sort of effect it would have on on universities across Michigan. They even considered appeals, some of the lawyers, whether it would hold up to a, a challenge under the constitution, under the state's constitution.
Theo Scheer:They wrote a lot of analyses of the bills. They supported, Michigan Association of State Universities, was it? Yeah. MASU is is like a Kind of all
Alex:the public colleges lobbying
Theo Scheer:group. Right. Right. Their lobbying group. They they had written a proposal, to against the bill, basically, kind of a message saying this is not gonna be good for our our state's universities, and they had supported that.
Theo Scheer:They had also wished that they went further. Behind the scenes, there were general counsel for the university saying, you know, I wish they weren't so, you know, conservative on this. I wish
Alex:I mean, they wanted an attack dog. They wanted someone who wasn't MSU to go out and say the really mean things about these bills they were saying behind closed doors.
Theo Scheer:Exactly. There was talk of of proxies, fighting the battle for them, etcetera. They they tried
Alex:to stuff.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. Exactly.
Theo Scheer:Right. Right. They tried to rely on unfriendly lawmakers, but they found that a lot of them, especially during this moment of just intense rage at at Larry Nassar and and kind of this hope to prevent it from happening in the future. Nobody wanted to step in front of the train is what they called it.
Owen McCarthy:Especially with with the looming election.
Alex:Yeah. I mean, this is all, you know, what, like, summer 2018, winter 2018, and know this looming midterm.
Theo Scheer:Nobody wants to be the one to
Alex:MSU is lackey. Out opposing these bills that are supposedly gonna stop the next Larry Nassar. Right.
Owen McCarthy:And one attorney with MSU, you know, speaking on this this notion of the looming election, he's even calling people by name. This is Robert Young, an attorney representing MSU, who said, you know, moreover, the intelligence on the likelihood of the bill's passage is not encouraging, sort of signaling that they expected a vote to come for these bills to pass. He says, as an election year in which the speaker of the house is running to become the AG and is challenged by senator Shoemaker, a sponsor of the O'Brien bills, that is not a propitious occasion to expect statesmanship in the legislature. He says, you know, it remains unclear where the governor will land, but, he remains our best hope in the moment. I don't you know, we we didn't see that the governor had had become that attack dog that MSU wanted.
Owen McCarthy:Right.
Alex:Right.
Alex:And again, it's that same framing that we talked about before where MSU is like this victim. Yeah. And all these legislators only care about getting reelected. They're not real statesmen that would defend the university. Right.
Alex:And it's that same kind of tone that comes through throughout Yeah. These messages. And it's just an interesting insight too about, like, you know, I mean, nobody knew that MSU was or at least it wasn't reported publicly that MSU was doing so much trying to kill these bills. I mean, they have a lot of very sneaky tools at their disposal
Owen McCarthy:Yeah.
Alex:To kind of do their dirty work without the bad headlines.
Alex:Yeah.
Alex:Exactly. So it makes you wonder. Speaking of wondering,
Alex:it's a
Alex:great segue by me. Theo, tell me about, there's this kind of thing that happens in these documents, right, where they're so worried about the bad press, the bad headlines that a lot of times people ask, like, okay. Let's just make a list of every other bad thing that could possibly come out about MSU, and they kinda list all the skeletons in the closet. Right? And the vast majority of it never did, but it's interesting for us now, and a lot of this is kinda years old.
Alex:It might not be a story on its own, But you you did a little story just kinda compiling all of these things that MSU just kinda worried about. It's like, oh my gosh. This awful thing could come out about us, and it never did until now. Theo, tell us what was MSU so paranoid was gonna make for the next bad headline.
Theo Scheer:It's worth noting that a lot of it well, not a lot. Some of it. A few instances, you you read them and you're like, okay. And maybe, oh, MSU is being a little overly cautious right now during Nasser. But a lot of the other stuff, I mean, there were real kind of scandals that I I think never really were ended up being reported on.
Theo Scheer:For example, there is some additional information about Gary Stalek, who we we talked about a little bit earlier. He lost his license because he failed to report Nassar's abuse. There was an email from a woman, whose name was redacted, saying that, he had in the 19 seventies, he had, abused and, you know, sexually harassed, etcetera, a bunch of graduate students at MSU. I think she said it was around a dozen according to an attorney that she spoke to. And and she herself, she had been asked by Salic, I think, around that same time.
Theo Scheer:I I think he he asked her, do you masturbate in in a meeting with her? Just kinda popped that question out of the blue. And that's something It's
Alex:like Stramble again where it's like one of these people who has publicly been accused many times of not doing enough to stop Larry Nassar. It turns out are themselves Yeah. Also, you know, engaging in this sort of
Theo Scheer:misconduct. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And there was a lot of concern about different faculty members.
Theo Scheer:They mentioned and this one really stood out, and this is just I'll I'll just directly quote it because I think, that'll do it justice. Mhmm. There are several ongoing sexual harassment investigations involving prominent or nationally known faculty members, and they list 3. 2 of them are redacted. The third one is William Stramble, who
Alex:we
Theo Scheer:we even talked about. So, yeah, it's kind of an unexplored
Alex:Yeah. So presume and that's that's an MSU redaction. Right? And that things that were privileged but unrelated to Nassar, they did still retain secrecy over. But it's fascinating.
Alex:The idea that they were preparing their apparently 3 strangles out there. We only know about one of them. Yeah. Who are these others? We don't know.
Theo Scheer:Exactly. There's another one about various, the local union around here, the local 1585, union. The president at the time is someone named James Rhodes. This is in summer 2016. And he and this has been reported on a little bit, but not to the extent that they talk about it in the records.
Theo Scheer:James Rhodes, he had been accused of a woman, of sexual harassment, and he was found to be responsible for that sexual harassment by the universities, you know, the people that investigate.
Alex:What is his role at MSU?
Theo Scheer:He's the the president of the of the local union of of, like, this
Alex:sort of
Owen McCarthy:MSU, faculty.
Theo Scheer:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Alex:Of Oh, okay. We're talking like custodians, like 1585. Like staff, non faculty staff. Right. Okay.
Alex:Yeah. Anyway, go on. He's president of that union. But
Theo Scheer:what's what was unreported and what's revealed in these documents is that 2 other women also had made allegations against him. And, also, several people within the union, within the sort of the hierarchy there, allegedly also retaliated against the women, and they were then suspended after that.
Alex:Retaliated against them for reporting it.
Theo Scheer:For for reporting the the abuse. Yeah. So that was kind of a notable thing, to me. There's a lot about MSU Athletics as well, which, of course, has been a source of controversy, in this area, in in recent years. Specifically, on the basketball team, both MSU's campus police and also their office of institutional equity, they investigated a sexual assault allegation against a walk on men's basketball player, and they didn't include the name in there either.
Theo Scheer:But, there's also and this has been reported. This one did get out, but there was a series of of rapes involving the, MSU football team at the time that was a a pretty big deal. And that was a constant, bullet point on their their memos that they sent to the president, to each other, etcetera, saying, you know, we got a here's a new update into that. Watch Well, they
Alex:just really seemed like didn't want those issues to connect. They didn't want it to be Right. Football team and NASA, and it it seems like this overwhelming issue. They worked hard to disconnect those, it seemed. Yeah.
Alex:What I was fascinated when you were telling me about this is the level of minutia that they got down to, and, like, these are the kinds of things that they just dreaded as, like, a headline. Tell me about the maple syrup scandal that they were worried about.
Theo Scheer:Maple syrup scandal was was pretty crazy. In the East Lansing Farmers Market, there's this little booth called Country Mills. And, they just
Alex:local, kinda cider shop.
Theo Scheer:Yeah. Family owned, etcetera. But it was a series
Alex:Cider mill.
Theo Scheer:Yeah. It was a source of controversy, in recent years because East Lansing tried to kick them out of the farmer's market because the owner of that shop doesn't believe is yeah. Doesn't believe in gay marriage. It's it's quite homophobic. They tried to kick him out, but he in turn sued East Lansing saying, you know, you're violating my religious right?
Theo Scheer:To express my religious views by by doing this. This is just my personal belief. And he won, so he's still there. But MSU at the time was following this whole thing and they realized, oh, wait. We use Country Mills, maple syrup in our dining halls.
Theo Scheer:Uh-oh. Yeah. Right? Which could be which could be a story. So they were so cautious that they got rid of all the Country Mills maple syrup and replaced it with well, I don't know what, actually.
Theo Scheer:I'll have to ask a spokesperson about that. But It's
Alex:just fascinating the level of, like, you know, not when they bought the syrup, not when all the stuff was going on. Right. But when they were worried it could become tacked on to Nassar in a headline. Mhmm. The kind of level of control they seem to have over all this scandal.
Theo Scheer:Right. Right. That one never got out to the media. No one report out. So we're breaking it.
Theo Scheer:Here are the statements from 19 09. Yeah. The maple syrup scandal. So Alright.
Alex:Well, so you've got you you're on top of the skeletons in their closet. A couple kinda more serious things we found, and this part, definitely, I think is interesting to us that feel very current. Because a lot of this is, like, kinda old stuff that you can feel ripples of today, gives you new insight into things you know about MSU. These two stories felt, pretty contemporary. First of all, we wrote a story about this 2018 meeting with a guy named Vinny Gore.
Alex:Vinny Gore is the senior vice president for student life. It's like the department that runs the dorms and the dining halls and the clubs and all of that. Kind of anything to do with students. Goes to Vinigore. And what we got a hold of in these documents is this memo all
Theo Scheer:about this meeting, and it's all the supervisors of the campus,
Alex:Starbucks and Sparty's, which are like the MSU brand convenience stores. Yeah. And the meeting is about building a strong community and successful work environment. And I'll mostly just read from the notes. But about 20 minutes into the meeting, Gore says, who's heard of the Nassar trial?
Owen McCarthy:And
Alex:then he tells the students in some way, shape, or form, we've all been affected. Then he talks about his neighbor who he says was a patient of Nassar's, but he says in her case, this was a legitimate medical procedure. And then he makes this comment, and this is a quote. He says, a very large majority of the women did not understand that it was a medical procedure, he says, of Nassar's patients who, you know, we know were repeatedly sexually abused under the guise of medical treatment.
Alex:Yeah.
Alex:Then he defends Louanna Simon. He says to the students, he says, you know that Lou Anna resigned. What many people don't know is that it's not that she didn't care. She's just introverted. She was such a good president.
Alex:She did so much for this university. She shouldn't have been forced out. She was unrightfully forced out. And then the notes say that he tried to, like, open it up to the group, and he says, how can we combat this in our community? How do we stop this?
Alex:And it was quiet, and no one responded. And it says that he called on a bunch of people, and they, quote, didn't know how to answer the question. And then one of the workers asks him, what is being done on your level? What are you doing? And what happens is that one of the people in this meeting is a survivor of Nassar's abuse and reports it to the OIE, reports it to Gore's bosses, and says that, you know, she leaves this meeting crying.
Alex:She says, this is her quote, I didn't understand why he was talking about it. No one asked him to justify Nasser's actions. And Gore, in some meeting with his supervisor, says that, you know, it it was not taken as I had intended. I reached out to Vinigar. I asked him how he intended for it to be taken.
Alex:He said that he, didn't remember the statement or the context. He declined to answer that question. But that was interesting one because a lot of this stuff feels very far away. It feels like people who have passed through MSU and are now gone. But, you know, that's a story about a guy who is, like, maybe one of the most senior people at MSU today.
Alex:Yeah.
Alex:And
Alex:so that's because it kinda feels much more current.
Owen McCarthy:You have something else that's that's sort of current, sort of
Alex:I do. Do. And this one's real in the weeds, but I promise you, listener of the 19 09, it's it's very important stuff. Yeah. There is this odd moment during the Nassar crisis where MSU is simultaneously investigating through their title 9 office allegations against Nassar and preparing to defend themselves from civil litigation stemming from Nassar's abuse.
Alex:Right? So, normally, that kind of stuff happens like one and then the other, but in this case, it's happening all at once. And MSU's lawyers edited the findings of the supposedly independent, Title 9 investigations to and these were their words. I made a few more edits which are targeted towards phrasing and issues that are important from our broader litigation defense strategy. So they're basically editing these supposedly independent investigations in order to enhance their litigation strategy in court, which, all the experts I talked to, and you can read the story for kinda more of the nuance about it, they say is not good.
Alex:One of the experts, actually Denhollander, who is not only a lawyer and an expert on this stuff. She's actually one of the women who was abused by Nassar whose case was edited for MSU's litigation. Yeah. And she was sort of appalled by it. But I think it's interesting because MSU tells me we stopped doing this in 2019.
Alex:We're not doing it anymore. It's old news. Right? We don't do that stuff. But there's an independent investigation ordered by MSU's board into title 9 cases in 2023 that says they're still doing it.
Alex:So I find that fascinating. It'll be subject maybe of future state news reporting, but that's another story that I know seems very procedural and in the weeds, but I hope the fine list of the 19 09 will kinda get into because I think it's a very important topic. Wow.
Owen McCarthy:Yeah. No. I was just gonna add sorry. One last thing on that. I mean, it it seems to me you're you're more I think you follow this title 9 stuff and report into more than I have.
Owen McCarthy:But just my observation is, you know, you know, you had to explain to this listener, here's why you should care. From my point of view, you know, a university, you know, launches a title 9 investigation to bring some sort of truth to a to a matter. And if they're changing the findings to, you know, for a legal strategy, that seems alarming to me. So Yeah.
Alex:I mean, the whole thing is just under the guise of, like, title 9 is this, like, independent investigatory arm, and this really seems to challenge that. Yeah. But, anyway, this has been a long episode. It seems like the kind of episode that would come from guys reading 6,000 documents and being really eager to talk about it. Thank you guys for reading all of them with me and for coming on and talking about it, writing all these stories.
Alex:This has been exhausting, but, I mean, I'm very proud of the work that we've turned out.
Owen McCarthy:Me too.
Alex:And, yeah, I think that's all for now, but we will be back next week with fresh reporting from the great minds here at State News. Until then, you can find all 12 stories that we discussed on statenews.com. They have their own special little landing page with a beautiful graphic by Zach Balcov, one of our designers. It's actually not a graphic. He made the Hanna administration building out of printed copies of the documents.
Alex:It's pretty awesome. I mean, we told them we feel like these documents are this revelatory new lens by which to view the MSU administration. Yeah. He took that literally in the best way possible. Sure did.
Alex:But, yeah, thank you Theo and Owen for coming on the show. Thank you to our amazing podcast coordinator Taylor for making it sound so nice. And most of all, thank you for listening. For the 19:09, I'm Alex Walters.