ESPN: Sexual abuse at Michigan State extends to basketball, football programs

The fallout from the Larry Nassar scandal just got even worse for Michigan State. Yesterday, Nassar, the Spartans’ team doctor and USA Gymnastics physician, was sentenced to 40-175 years in prison for sexually abusing his patients. Earlier this week, Michigan State president Lou Anna Simon stepped down, and this morning, athletic director Mark Hollis did the same, right after he was shown a report from ESPN that just went public.

Outside the Lines is reporting that the culture of sexual abuse at Michigan State extends BEYOND Nassar and into the men’s basketball and football programs. Yes, the same basketball program headed by Tom Izzo, considered by most to be the patron saint of college basketball.

Outside the Lines also has obtained never-before-publicized reports of sexual or violent incidents involving members of Izzo’s storied basketball program, including one report made against a former undergraduate student-assistant coach who was allowed to continue coaching after he had been criminally charged for punching a female MSU student in the face at a bar in 2010. A few months later, after the Spartans qualified for the 2010 Final Four, the same assistant coach was accused of sexually assaulting a different female student.

The report details the various sexual assault charges brought against Michigan State football and basketball players over the years and ESPN’s four-year fight with the university to get unredacted copies of the police reports. The list of charges is sickening, but the lengths to which Hollis and other university officials went to cover the crimes up is just as awful. Former Spartan Travis Walton is the former player/assistant coach mentioned above, and the report also details rape allegations against Adreian Payne and Keith Appling that never resulted in any kind of punishment.

Read the entire report over at ESPN. Brace yourself; it ain’t pretty.

[ESPN]

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