Pervert let off hook

Police department could have stopped sports doctor sooner

A POLICE department in the Lansing, Michigan, area missed an opportunity to pursue criminal charges in 2004 against Larry Nassar and will publicly apologise to the victim who accused the doctor of molesting her during treatment for an abnormal spine, an official said Wednesday.

Meridian Township will make the apology Thursday to Brianne Randall-Gay and an- nounce changes in how it handles sexual misconduct investigations, township manager Frank Walsh said.

Nassar, who was a sports doctor at Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics, convinced police he had performed a legitimate procedure with his hands and even provided a PowerPoint presentation to explain.

The case was dropped, al- lowing him to continue to molest girls and young women, including Olympians, for years until his arrest in 2016. A total of 265 women and girls have said they were assaulted.

“We missed it. We’re not going to hide it. We were deceived,” Mr Walsh said. The township released the 2004 police report on Ms RandallGay’s allegations against Nassar. Mr Walsh said the township was told to withhold it from the public until Nassar was sentenced last week to 40 to 175 years in prison for sexually assaulting young women and girls in Ingham County.

In 2004, Ms Randall-Gay was 17 when she and her mother visited Nassar to discuss treatment for scoliosis, a curvature of the spine.

Ms Randall-Gay had a back problem. But she told police Nassar had removed her underwear, forcibly cupped her genitals with his hand and rubbed her breasts.

“She thought it was ‘weird’ and it ‘freaked her out’,” the police report says. Nassar told police he applied pressure to the “perineum”, using a formal word for an area between the legs, and said it was done to manipulate a ligament, according to the report.