Lawrence G. Nassar, the physician convicted of sexually abusing younger feminine gymnasts, was stabbed a number of occasions within the chest, again and neck on the federal jail in Florida the place he’s serving a 60-year sentence, in line with two folks with information of the scenario.
Mr. Nassar, 59, is in steady situation after he was attacked by one other inmate on the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman, a sprawling jail compound in Central Florida, they mentioned.
It is just not clear when the altercation came about or what prompted the assault. A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which manages the advanced, didn’t instantly return a request for remark.
The episode provides to a protracted, troubled case of a once-prominent sports activities doctor accused of molesting and assaulting dozens of younger girls and youngsters, together with athletes at Michigan State University, Olympians and members of the U.S. nationwide gymnastics group — within the guise of offering therapy and examinations.
In a scathing 2021 report, the inspector basic for the Justice Department discovered that the F.B.I. initially botched the investigation, permitting Mr. Nassar to assault extra younger girls.
Mr. Nassar was convicted on federal fees in 2017. He was sentenced to an extra 40 to 125 years by a choose in Michigan a yr later, after pleading responsible to a few extra counts of sexual assault. A federal choose ordered that sentence to run concurrently and remanded him to federal custody.
The incident can also be the newest in a sequence of suicides and violent assaults on a number of the most infamous inmates within the chronically understaffed Federal Bureau of Prisons. Last month, Theodore J. Kaczynski, referred to as the Unabomber, who killed three folks and injured 23 in a bombing spree from 1978 to 1995, died by suicide at a federal jail medical heart in North Carolina.
In 2018, James Bulger, a gangster from Boston referred to as Whitey, was brutally crushed to loss of life at a federal jail after he was transferred to a West Virginia jail in 2018 after a cascade of administration failures and breaches of protocol left him unattended and susceptible to assault, the inspector basic discovered. An identical setting of dysfunction was pervasive on the Manhattan federal jail the place the financier Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in 2019, the inspector basic mentioned in a report launched final month.
Last yr, 13 feminine athletes who had been sexually assaulted by Mr. Nassar every sought $10 million from the F.B.I., claiming brokers mishandled the investigation, permitting him to proceed abusing extra victims.
The athletes within the lawsuit had been abused by Mr. Nassar after they had been on the Twistars gymnastics membership, outdoors Lansing, Mich. John Geddert, who owned Twistars and referred injured athletes to Mr. Nassar, fueling a cycle of abuse, killed himself in 2021 after he was charged with human trafficking.
Some of the athletes, who had been center faculty or highschool college students on the time, had been assaulted after the F.B.I. was first made conscious of the abuse allegations in 2015, attorneys for the ladies mentioned.
In 2021, the division’s inspector basic sharply criticized the F.B.I.’s dealing with of the case, saying that Mr. Nassar had abused 70 or extra younger athletes from July 2015, when U.S.A. Gymnastics first reported allegations towards him to the F.B.I.’s Indianapolis discipline workplace, to August 2016, when the Michigan State University Police Department acquired a separate criticism.
Source: www.nytimes.com