Vaughn not done fighting

Jon Vaughn’s blue-andwhite camper has been parked outside the home of the University of Michigan’s president since early October. He says it won’t be moving anytime soon.

The former star running back for the university’s football team says a $490 million settlement the school recently announced is not enough by itself to remedy the sexual abuse he and more than 1,000 other students say they suffered at the hands of the university’s late sports doctor Robert Anderson.

“We’ve only really scratched the surface and touched the tip of the iceberg on how insidious this atrocity is,” Vaughn said Friday. “That’s why I’m staying. The entire truth has not come out.”

Anderson has been accused of molesting students over more than three decades. He worked as director of the university’s Health Service and as a physician for football and other athletic teams from 1966 until his retirement in 2003. He died in 2008.

In 2018, a former athlete made an allegation of sexual abuse against Anderson and police launched an investigation. Then in early 2020, five more former patients lodged accusations against the late doctor. It was then that a spokesman acknowledged that some university employees were aware of accusations against the doctor even prior to 2018.

The university established a hotline in 2020 for students to come forward.

Vaughn, who played for the Wolverines during the 1988-1990 seasons, said he was given 50 prostate exams by Anderson, the first when he was an 18-year-old freshman in 1988. During the recruiting process, he said, football coaches knew his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and told Anderson.

“He made the comment, ‘I see you had cancer in your family history,’” and asked, “‘You have any other relative with cancer?’” Vaughn said. “In that exam, he then raped me digitally for the first time.”

Vaughn said Anderson, the only doctor whom scholarship athletes could see at the university, usually started his exams with noninvasive procedures such as taking his blood pressure and checking his heart.

“Then he would tell you he needed to do a testicular cancer screening and a prostate cancer screening,” the former football player said.

As an athlete you go through exams “‘cause you want to get the pass to play,” he said, noting that while at Michigan, he and other players “were in a constant state of being uncomfortable but learning to compartmentalize things to get the job done.”

Vaughn rushed for more than 1,400 yards in two years and nine touchdowns in his final season with the Wolverines. In 1990, he was picked by the Patriots in the fifth round. During a four-year NFL career, he also played for the Chiefs and Seahawks.

But he said the repercussions of what Anderson did lingered.

“You don’t want to go to the dentist” and “you don’t want to go to the doctor” because of trust issues, he said. This fall, he discovered a lump on his neck, and ultimately ended up going to a doctor. It turned out to be cancerous nodules on his thyroid gland.

PAUL SANCYA/AP Signs are shown outside the University of Michigan’s President’s House on campus Thursday in Ann Arbor, Mich.