MSU trustee: Nothing new in documents

Knake finishes review of Nassar scandal files

LANSING – It took nearly a year for a Michigan State University trustee to review 9,000 documents related to the Larry Nassar scandal. She said she didn’t find anything new.

Trustee Renee Knake in January began reviewing about 9,000 documents related to Larry Nassar, a former MSU doctor and convicted sex offender who sexually abused hundreds of women and girls under the guise of medical treatment. The documents amounted to more than 10,000 pages of communications, memos and reports involving Nassar and William Strampel, former dean for the College of Osteopathic Medicine and one of Nassar’s bosses.

Knake, who is an attorney and a law professor, agreed to review the documents after months of outcry from Nassar survivors and others, who called on trustees to waive attorney-client privilege on the documents. She said her review didn’t uncover any new findings.

“What I learned in these documents is consistent with information that is already in the public domain,” Knake said during a Board of Trustees meeting Friday.

The possibility of the documents being released hasn’t been ruled out. Knake called on the board to release the thousands of documents for review by an independent firm, which would release a report once the review concludes.

An independent review of the documents would have been included in an independent investigation into Nassar’s crimes that the Board of Trustees initially approved in June 2019, before killing it.

Since then, calls for board members to waive attorney-client privilege have come from the Attorney General’s office, the MSU Faculty Senate, the Reclaim MSU advocacy group and Nassar survivors and their families.

Knake said she reviewed the documents looking for information that could help the Board of Trustees create new policies or procedures to govern MSU and prevent another sexual abuse scandal.

She also searched for any information in the documents that survivors would want to know.

“I understood from conversations with survivors and others from the MSU community that it was important to them to know whether these documents contained information that could help prevent something like the Nassar scandal from ever happening again,” she said.

The documents that best would help survivors and MSU officials understand what happened, including which officials knew about Nassar’s abuse and when, are already available publicly, including a March 29, 2018, letter from MSU’s attorneys at Miller Canfield to the state House of Representatives discussing a Title IX investigation tied to Nassar and answering questions about Title IX investigation procedures.

Knake also pointed to two Sept. 1, 2020, memorandums MSU sent to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that identified more than 40 people who may have known about crimes committed by Nassar’s and Strampel’s crimes.

“Those public documents are not necessarily prescriptive, though, in thinking about all we could possibly do going forward,” Knake said. “I believe, as the survivors surely do, that we must fully embrace the reality that structures in place at the university were not an adequate safeguard against the kind of abuse that Nassar inflicted.”

If there’s nothing new in the documents, why can’t they be released now?

That’s what Amanda Thomashow, an MSU graduate and Nassar survivor who reported him to police and MSU in 2014, wants to know. She wants to see the documents for herself and doesn’t trust anyone at MSU and said even officials with good intentions could overlook a vital detail or piece of information.