U.S.C. Agrees to Pay $1.1 Billion to Patients of Gynecologist Accused of Abuse
The staggering sum — a combination of three sets of settlements with victims of Dr. George Tyndall — sets a record for collegiate sex abuse payouts.
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The University of Southern California’s Engemann Student Health Center.Credit...Richard Vogel/Associated Press
By Shawn Hubler and Tim Arango
March 25, 2021, 5:50 p.m. ET
SACRAMENTO — The University of Southern California on Thursday announced that it will pay more than $1.1 billion to the former patients of a campus gynecologist accused of preying sexually on hundreds of patients, marking what university officials called “the end of a painful and ugly chapter in the history of our university.”
The staggering sum — a combination of three sets of settlements with victims of Dr. George Tyndall — sets a record for collegiate sex abuse payouts, compensating a generation of young U.S.C. women.
Lawsuits arising from Larry Nasser’s sexual abuse of gymnasts at Michigan State University were settled for $500 million, for example. And Penn State paid $109 million in claims related to sexual abuse by Jerry Sandusky.
The U.S.C. claims reflected a 2018 federal class action settled earlier for $215 million, a second group of several dozen cases in which the amount of the settlement was not made public and a third settlement, which the university said was reached with the aid of a private mediator and a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.
In a letter to students and alumni, the president of the university Carol L. Folt said, “These events have been devastating for our entire community.”
Ms. Folt also said the university would fund the settlement over two years through a combination of “litigation reserves, insurance proceeds, deferred capital spending, sale of nonessential assets, and careful management of nonessential expenses.” She added that no philanthropic gifts, endowment funds or tuition would be redirected to pay the costs.
Revelations that Dr. Tyndall had abused students for years were first made public in 2018 in an exhaustive report published by the Los Angeles Times, for which the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
While the allegations of misconduct were first brought to the university’s attention in the 1990s, U.S.C. did not immediately report him to the state medical board, and he was not suspended from his job until 2016. A year later, after an investigation that led to senior leaders of the university first being briefed on allegations, Dr. Tyndall was arrested in 2019 outside his apartment in Los Angeles and prosecutors charged him with 29 counts of sexual assault involving 16 women. Through his lawyers, he has continued to deny wrongdoing.
After the university set up a hotline and website to receive complaints, more allegations from students of misconduct poured in. After the scandal became public in 2018, the university sent emails to more than 350,000 people associated with the university, including students and alumni, with directions on how to report complaints.
The scandal, which forced the university’s president at the time, C.L. Max Nikias, to resign under pressure, erupted a year after U.S.C. was embroiled in another scandal, when the popular dean of the medical school was fired after being accused of using drugs and partying with prostitutes.
Even after Mr. Nikias was forced out, scandals, big and small, continued to engulf the university, once regarded as a party school for Los Angeles’s elite before it was transformed into a top-tier university with an endowment to rival Harvard’s and a faculty that included several Nobel Laureates.
There was the dean of the business school who was forced out over his handling of workplace misconduct claims. And then 2019, U.S.C. was ensnared in a wide-scale college admissions scandal, one that involved universities across the country, in which wealthy parents were accused of paying thousands of dollars — bribes to be more succinct — to get their children, many of whom underperformed academically, into colleges with athletic scholarships. Four U.S.C. athletics officials were charged in federal court for taking bribes, and some parents went to prison.
In late 2018, U.S.C. settled a federal lawsuit stemming from the allegations against Dr. Tyndall for $215 million, although it was clear then that the university’s legal problems were not over, as nearly 500 women, at that time, were suing the university. The settlement announced Thursday compensated more than 700 women who had filed cases in Los Angeles Superior Court, the university said.
“The behavior that was discovered shocks the conscience of the university to its core,” Rick Caruso, chair of the university’s board of trustees, said in a statement. “Our institution fell short by not doing everything it could to protect those who matter most — our students, and I am sorry for the pain this caused the very people we were obligated to protect.”
