Child-molesting US Gymnastics doctor stabbed in prison
Larry Nassar, the disgraced USA Gymnastics physician who abused hundreds of women and children, has been stabbed during an altercation in a Florida prison, the Associated Press reported on Monday. The judge who sentenced Nasser in 2018 said that her ruling would be his “death warrant.”
Two anonymous sources told the news agency that Nassar was stabbed multiple times in the back and chest by a fellow inmate during a fight at United States Penitentiary Coleman in Florida on Sunday. One of the sources said that the former physician was in a stable condition as of Monday.
Nassar worked as a coach with the US national gymnastics team in the 1980s, and was the team’s doctor from 1996 until 2014. During this time, Nassar molested at least 265 young women and girls, including Olympic athletes and children as young as six years old. Nassar also worked with high school and college gymnasts, and in 2018, Michigan State University agreed to a settlement of $500 million with 300 additional women who accused him of sexual assault.
Nassar was arrested in 2016 when the FBI found more than 37,000 images of child pornography on his computer. While the agency was criticized for failing to take action against Nassar when allegations of abuse surfaced a year earlier, the child porn charges saw him sentenced to 60 years in prison in 2017. He was then sentenced to between 40 and 175 years behind bars on state sex abuse charges by a Michigan judge in 2018.
“I just signed your death warrant,” Michigan Judge Rosemarie Aquilina told Nassar as she handed down her sentence. Aquilina called Nassar a “monster,” and told him that he didn’t deserve “to walk outside a prison ever again.”
Litigation over Nassar’s decades of abuse is ongoing. Last year, 90 victims sued the US government, demanding $1 billion in restitution over the FBI’s failure to intervene earlier. A Justice Department report in 2021 found that this delay allowed Nassar to abuse 70 additional victims.
USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee also agreed to a $380 million settlement in 2021 for failing to protect their young athletes from Nassar.
