Larry Nassar, convicted of abusing female athletes, reportedly stabbed in prison

Larry Nassar, the disgraced sports physician who was convicted of sexually abusing female athletes when he worked for USA Gymnastics and at Michigan State University, was stabbed multiple times during an altercation with another incarcerated person at a federal prison in Florida, the Associated Press reported Monday.

Two people who spoke with the AP on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the incident said it occurred Sunday at United States Penitentiary Coleman in Florida, with one saying Nassar was stabbed in the back and chest. They added that he was in stable condition Monday and that an investigation is ongoing.

Nassar admitted to sexually assaulting athletes, including Olympic gold medalists Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney and Aly Raisman. In 2021, athletes reached a settlement requiring the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, USA Gymnastics and their insurers to pay them $380 million.

In 2018, several athletes testified to more than two decades of abuse, saying their claims had been ignored by coaches, trainers and other officials.

Nassar was sentenced to a minimum of 40 years and a maximum of 175 years in prison for his crimes after seven days in which more than 160 girls, women and parents gave wrenching testimony describing the impact of his sexual abuse.

“I’ve just signed your death warrant,” Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said in announcing her sentence to Nassar, who is now 59.

In a scathing report released in July 2021, the Justice Department’s inspector general found that senior FBI officials failed to properly investigate serious sex-abuse allegations against Nassar – allowing his abuse to continue – and determined that the officials gave misleading or false answers when confronted about those failures. One of the agents in question retired in 2018, and another was fired after the Justice Department report was released in 2021. Neither has been charged with a crime, despite three investigations by federal prosecutors.

Nassar previously had been attacked in prison. According to Nassar’s lawyers, he was assaulted within hours of his release into the general population at his first prison stop – USP Tucson in Arizona – in May 2018. Officials transferred Nassar first to a holdover facility in Oklahoma and then to the prison in Florida, which a former inmate has described as “a so-called special-needs prison – a ‘safe’ facility where informants, former cops, ex-gang members, check-ins (prisoners who intentionally put themselves in solitary confinement to be safe), homosexuals and sex offenders can all, supposedly, walk the yard freely.”

James “Whitey” Bulger and other noted mobsters; Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who killed two FBI agents in 1975; and a number of people convicted on terrorism charges all have been incarcerated at USP Coleman.

Last year, a Federal Bureau of Prisons review deemed the operations at Coleman – the largest correctional complex in the United States – to be “deficient,” mainly because of its 14 percent vacancy rate among its correctional officers. Earlier this year, an official with the local correctional officers’ union said the prison was short-staffed by nearly 100 jobs, a number that can reach 175 on certain days.

The Florida Department of Corrections logged five homicides at its facilities between June 2022 and June 2023. That’s down from the six-year high of 23 between June 2018 and June 2019. The federal Bureau of Prisons reported about 165 instances of inmates being found guilty of assault in 2022.