The dismissal of criminal charges on Wednesday against Lou Anna K. Simon, a former Michigan State University president who was charged with lying to the police in connection with the Larry Nassar sex-abuse scandal, marked another setback for victim advocates who are eager for high-level accountability in such cases. The charges against Simon, however, were predicated on weak evidence and compromised by poor police work, a Michigan circuit-court judge concluded.
The charges against Simon were predicated on weak evidence and compromised by poor police work, a judge concluded.
Judge John Maurer of Eaton County Circuit Court ruled that prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to prove that Simon knew of accusations against Nassar, a former university sports doctor, years before his arrest, and that she lied to investigators during a 2018 interview.
Prosecutors charged that Simon had known of a 2014 Title IX complaint against Nassar when investigators interviewed her, but she insisted she hadn’t known the nature of the complaint — only that it was against a sports doctor.
Nassar was arrested in 2016 and eventually pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his young patients. He was sentenced in 2018 to spend the rest of his life in prison.
The case against Simon centered on what she told the police in an interview on May 1, 2018, after Nassar had already been incarcerated. She told detectives that, in 2014, following the complaint against Nassar, she learned only vague details about an investigation into a sports doctor — an assertion the police did not find credible. Maurer, however, concluded there was not sufficient evidence to show Simon had misled the detectives.
“Dr. Simon has not admitted to knowing more than she said she knew in her interview and there is not even one witness, out of hundreds interviewed, who can say they remember that Dr. Simon was told anything more than what she said she knew in her interview,” the judge wrote in his opinion. “There is no evidence that she made any prior or subsequent inconsistent statements. Under these circumstances, a careful and reasonable person would not have probable cause to believe Dr. Simon willfully misled the officers.”
In their interview with Simon, the judge added, the detectives had failed to ask basic follow-up questions that might have shed more light on what Simon knew.
“The court’s ruling completely vindicates Dr. Simon,” Lee T. Silver, Simon’s lawyer, said in a written statement, “and confirms what we have been saying from the day these charges were brought, namely, that there was not a shred of credible evidence to support these charges.”
Within a year the university lost two chief executives — Lou Anna K. Simon, sank by the scathing, heart-rending testimony of the sports doctor’s scores of victims, and John M. Engler, whose interim presidency ended amid a backlash over his bare-knuckled tactics.
Simon, who was pressured to resign as Michigan State’s president in January 2018, was among the highest-profile college leaders ever to face criminal charges in connection with a campus sex-abuse case. While different in detail, her case was often compared with that of Graham B. Spanier, the former Pennsylvania State University president who was convicted, in 2017, of child endangerment for his handling of abuse allegations made against Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach. A federal judge threw out Spanier’s conviction hours before he was supposed to report to jail.
Sexual-abuse survivors expressed disappointment on Wednesday that prosecutors had again failed to make criminal charges stick against a university leader. (Pennsylvania’s attorney general is appealing the Spanier ruling. Michigan’s attorney general intends to do the same in Simon’s case, a spokesman said.)
“What this really does is highlight the need for institutional accountability,” Rachael J. Denhollander, who was the first woman to publicly accuse Nassar of assault, told The Chronicle. “Because the reality is that oftentimes, I would say most of the time, accountability and truth and transparency are not able to be achieved solely through the criminal-justice system.”
Denhollander has pressed Michigan State to waive attorney-client privilege and release all records related to Nassar, but the university has not budged. Without those documents, Denhollander said, it is impossible to know what Simon or others may have known about a serial predator in their midst. The dismissal of charges against Simon highlights Michigan State’s “abject failure” in providing transparency and promoting a culture of accountability, said Denhollander, who is a lawyer.
Michigan State said in a statement about the judge’s ruling: “Out of respect for the judicial process, we are not going to comment on the proceedings. MSU remains committed to the changes needed that ensure a stronger, safer, and more respectful campus community for all students, faculty, and staff.”
Simon, who earned her doctorate in higher education from Michigan State in 1974, rose through the university’s ranks to provost and eventually the presidency, with no outside search conducted. She was viewed as a transformative leader, and her downfall stunned her supporters.
She retired from Michigan State last year with a $2.5-million payout. Even after her resignation, her contract gave her a professorship, a 12-month research leave at her annual presidential salary of $750,000, an additional year as a faculty member on her presidential salary, and two more years at 75 percent of that salary.
Following her resignation, John Engler, Michigan’s former Republican governor, became the university’s interim president. He was forced out in early 2019 after a tumultuous year in which he openly questioned the motives of sexual-assault survivors, including Denhollander.
Michigan State agreed in 2018 to pay $500 million to more than 300 survivors of Nassar’s abuse.
Elizabeth Abdnour, a lawyer and former Title IX investigator at Michigan State, said the dismissal of charges against Simon was regrettable.
“I am disappointed in the dismissal,” she said in a direct message on Twitter to The Chronicle, “and I think this is another instance of a system failing to hold a powerful person accountable for her actions.”
