U.S. to Pay Victims of Larry Nassar $100 Million Over FBI Failures

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department has agreed to pay approximately $100 million to 100 victims of the former national women’s gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, over the FBI’s failures to take seriously the reports brought to it of his potential abuse of star athletes.

The deal will resolve the last remaining legal claims against the constellation of institutions who botched their responses to Nassar—and bring the total price-tag of legal payouts over liability for  his actions to almost $1 billion.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s settlement was reached in the fall and has been accepted in principle by the women and girls who had filed administrative tort claims against the agency in 2022, but hasn’t yet been finalized, according to people familiar with the matter.

The claimants include Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Maggie Nichols and Aly Raisman, the elite gymnasts who were first identified in the summer of 2015 as having been potentially abused by Nassar—as well as dozens of patients sexually assaulted by him for more than a year after the FBI was alerted to the gymnasts’ concerns.

Michigan State University, where complaints about Nassar had been dismissed and buried several times, agreed to settle claims with hundreds of victims for $500 million in 2018, and paid a $4.5 million fine to the U.S. Education Department for violating federal crime-reporting guidelines and failing to protect students.

USA Gymnastics and the U.S. OIympic & Paralympic Committee, accused of fostering a toxic environment in which Nassar was unsupervised and gymnasts were afraid to speak out, agreed to settle claims for $380 million in 2021 with hundreds of athletes assaulted over three decades.

The Justice Department’s inspector general detailed multiple failings in the FBI’s handling of the gymnasts’ complaints, which were brought to the Indianapolis field office on July 28, 2015, by USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body.

Indianapolis agents were unsure if the allegations against Nassar represented a possible federal crime, according to the report. They were also unsure how to handle concerns that had been brought to them in Indianapolis—the city where USA Gymnastics is headquartered—when there were no allegations of Nassar treating gymnasts there.

According to the report, the Indianapolis agents didn’t formally document their meeting with the USA Gymnastics officials, which came after the gymnastics body had conducted its own five-week internal inquiry into concerns about Nassar. And after the meeting, Indianapolis agents spoke with only one gymnast: McKayla Maroney, conducting the interview over the telephone.

The report says that the interview wasn’t properly documented until February 2017, which is around the time The Wall Street Journal first documented the delays in the investigation. Agents didn’t follow up with other gymnasts.

The report also says that the Indianapolis agents failed to transfer the Nassar allegations to the FBI’s resident agency in Lansing, Mich.—under the Detroit field office—the most likely place to investigate potential federal crimes that had been committed in the area, even after they had been advised by an Assistant U.S. Attorney to do so and they told USA Gymnastics that they had.

Nor did the FBI contact state or local enforcement or take any other action to mitigate the risk to gymnasts that Nassar continued to treat.

Nassar continued to see patients for almost 14 months after USA Gymnastics went to the FBI. He was publicly accused of assault in the fall of 2016, and by early 2018 had been sentenced to an effective life sentence in prison on sexual abuse and child-pornography charges.

The U.S. government payout is of a scale similar to agreements reached over mass shootings.

In 2023 the Justice Department negotiated a settlement of $144.5 million over a case in Sutherland Springs, Texas where 26 worshipers were killed and 22 others injured, after 75 claimants argued the Air Force was negligent when it failed to transmit to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System information about the shooter that would have prevented him from purchasing guns.

In 2021 the Department agreed to pay $127.5 million to 40 survivors and families of 16 of the 17 people killed in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., over the FBI’s failure to investigate tips warning the shooter had guns and planned to attack.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at [email protected] and Sadie Gurman at [email protected]