The complete WilmerHale report on Dr. Anderson is available
It's not good for the University. Link: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2021/05/11/read-comple…
MSU and UM should protect students. Incidents of abuse were reported to higher-ups and those individuals didn't do their jobs. This isn't the time to compare the University of Michigan to Michigan State. If it were, there is certainly enough reason to question whether Warde Manuel has done his job correctly.
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2886997-michigan-ad-warde-manuel-al…
From a couple different sections, but all seem damning to me:
“The same student athlete told us
that his position coach used the threat of an examination with Dr. Anderson as a
motivational tool. We interviewed the coach, who denied the allegation.”
A former student athlete alleges that he told track coaches Jack Harvey and Ron
Warhurst in 1976 that Dr. Anderson was groping the student athlete’s genitals and
that he asked to see another physician.105 The student athlete alleges that both
Mr. Harvey and Mr. Warhurst “laughed” and refused the request. In another lawsuit, a student allegedly told Mr. Warhurst about Dr. Anderson’s abuse, and Mr. Warhurst
reportedly responded to “deal with it fucker.”
“A student athlete alleges that Mr. Schembechler sent him to Dr. Anderson for
migraines in the early 1980s.104 On at least three occasions, the student athlete
alleges, Dr. Anderson gave the patient a digital rectal examination. The student
athlete allegedly told Mr. Schembechler, who instructed him to report the matter
to Athletic Director Don Canham. The patient alleges that he did so twice, in
1982 and 1983, but Mr. Canham took no action. The student athlete’s attorney
declined our request to interview his client.”
Yeah, you read this report and it's not surprising in the way coaches and staff ignored the issues because that was the culture back then. They even made jokes about it to diffuse the situation and (I'm guessing) the misgivings they had about Anderson. Like,
As noted above, former wrestling coach Bill Johannesen heard jokes from members of the wrestling team to this effect: “You go to see Dr. Anderson for a sore elbow, and he tells you to take your pants down.”
A former Athletic Department administrator heard a rumor that if students “had a broken arm, you would get your sack checked” by Dr. Anderson. At the time the administrator considered the rumor “lighthearted humor.” In hindsight, the administrator thinks that student athletes may have been trying to be heard when they made light of the situation.
A former equipment manager told us that there was “always locker room talk” about Dr. Anderson and that the “big joke was that Dr. Anderson had a big finger.” He also heard what he called another “locker room joke,” that “[Dr.] Anderson always made you drop your pants.”
Like, those are all "jokes" but it's heartbreaking to read them because behind those jokes were athletes who were trying to to "tough" but also felt violated by this doctor and this was likely a way to cope with it. Had even one of these coaches or administrators taken the theme of these jokes (this doctor constantly touches the genitals of athletes regardless of the reason they came in) seriously, this abuse would have ended way earlier and a bunch of victims spared. I'm not trying to be melodramatic but it's depressing to see this same story retold over all of these incidents and one consistent theme is how often people who could have/should have stopped it didn't because they either didn't believe the victims or didn't seem to really care.
Very well stated... as we've seen with OSU, PSU, MSU, and now UM... their are absolute monsters among us, in positions of authority, abusing young adults in plain sight of most of the "trusted" individuals those parents sent their kid to play for. Hopefully all the victims have been able to move on in their lives after the abuse, it's just shocking to me how prevalent abuse was in the 70's and 80's, and how so few of those in charge did anything to correct it. Not a good look for the B1G, or the schools implicated.. they owe the athletes more than they can ever repay.
It is shocking but also not that surprising. This same pattern played out at so many schools that is clearly was something culture just sort of "accepted" to an extent, or at the very least ignored the warning signs. And it's not just sports - the Catholic church's history of ignoring sexual predation by the clergy jumps out, but even now you see stories about famous and powerful people getting away with abuses for years because people don't want to believe someone they respect/like/admire/fear could be guilty.
Absolutely this. This extends to child sexual predators, sexual abuse against athletes, against actors and actresses, against employees, etc. People were afraid to talk about, were afraid to go against the establishment, afraid to go against those in positions of power who ostensibly controlled their futures. Most of the people who commit these sort of serial crimes over the course of years or decades also have carefully cultivated personas and reputations which they've spent years creating and refining and are often quite charismatic. They make it difficult for you to believe that someone so successful, so genial, so capable could be so monstrous.
That said, you can see that many of these crimes coming to light in recent years are a product of the times. Because it wasn't talked about, because it only came up under hushed tones, because people believed that only a certain type of person could be capable of doing something so heinous, it's also likely that people thought much of the jokes and rumors and reports were overblown or "locker room talk" as someone (not naming any names) once put it. Sexual abuse just wasn't very widely known in the 70s or even 80s. If it was, it was thought of as deviant behavior that only those outside the "mainstream" would engage in; certainly not respected members of society like doctors and priests and executives. We now know that not to be the case, but it was a different time.
“Absolute monsters” is an unfortunate description. There are many among us who have harmed and been harmed (amongst whom I am included) by sexual abuse.
Until we see the humanity of the abusers (I count in my life both a family member and a neighbor as my abusers) we will not be able to have frank discussions and the openness it takes to protect the vulnerable among us.
Those discussions too need to happen to allow the abused to heal and not allow their abusers control their lives (moving from victim to survivor, not as “warrior victim” but a whole person with depth and individuated experience, which can be quite confusing) and help those who are tempted to abuse to seek confidential help, not as monsters, but people who need help, and mostly who want help too.
I have a complicated experience.
I’m a lawyer who both defends abusers in criminal cases and who also sues abusers for money damages. It’s much more complicated than dehumanizing anyone. Most abusers have been abused themselves. Most survivors do not go on to abuse, but heroically find the path to forgiveness, or, more commonly, to suppress and weaponize their pain. Weaponizing does not heal this kind of pain. I’m speaking from my experience as a survivor and the secondary trauma I have experienced and witnessed in my life, through my varied clients and family.
I remain firmly convinced until we recognize the abusers amongst us as harmed, too, but human, we will never have the openness to have the conversations with each other to slow, and hopefully stem, the generational, cyclical damage.
The work of healing is not easy, nor is accepting that temptations will occur. But until the tempted can seek and obtain help, confidentially, and feel free to open, the cycle will continue.
You're a far better person than I, I commend you for your thought, nuance, and perspective.. It's (admittedly) difficult for me to reason why predators act the way they do, but I'll defer to someone (like yourself) who has experience in the matter. As a father, I can't imagine anyone abusing my child, nor the animosity I would hold if I were to ever learn of anything like that.
Hopefully, in the modern age, most of these egregious institutional abuses are behind us.
Whoever is going through responses and negging critical comments about Bo really needs to reconsider some things
There's a couple of them, which isn't surprising. But yeah, if you read this report and somehow still think Bo is above criticism you can, and I want you to neg this post with all your heart, fuck off.
As you can see from my previous posts, I'm one of those being pretty critical of Bo...and getting some decent negs. But whatevs.
My stance. The only thing we can do to be different than the similar abuse scandals at PSU, MSU, and OSU is to quickly and acutely separate ourselves from those involved. For us, this would include Bo. It's hard to say it, but if he knew, then Bo is no different than JoePa. We need to remove all Bo statues now, and there should be no push back. If there is push back, then we are no different than those PSU students protecting JoePa. Imagine that?!
One of the reasons I've kept this thread in a tab from the time I first saw it is that I assumed there would be a contingent of the blog that may choose to remember Bo Schembechler in a particular way despite this report, and that they would make that choice known via the voting or a potentially unfortunate post. So far, it seems to be just the voting.
As for myself, I grew up watching Bo's teams, cheering for Bo's teams, even using the catchphrases, but like many here, I think it is time the athletic department and University at large divests itself of the man and his legacy, a legacy irrevocably damaged by his actions (or rather, inactions).
I am far from a Fox anti Cancel Culture advocate, but I do think history is very complicated.
For example my grandfather was pretty racist, but at the same time my grandfather was an extended family hero because he was the one in the 30s and 40s who was lucky enough to have machinist job and would deliver bags of groceries, etc. to less fortunate siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.
Somehow we need to come to grips with people can be great, and at the same time flawed in horrible ways. And however we present them, the greatness and the flaws should be presented too.
In this way we learn about the bad things instead of sweep them under the carpet, thus raising the bar moving forward.
You are comparing two vastly different scenarios. Your grandfather may have been racist, in a time where most white people were racist. Anderson was sexually assaulting people at a time which it was not ok to sexually assault people. That has not changed in the past 60 years. And everyone that knew of these assaults knew that it was not ok. In fact, it was criminal.
I grew up a Michigan fan in the mid 2000s so don't have much connection to Bo emotionally. I also think he was overrated af football wise. Of his 13 Big Ten titles, only 6 were outright. And in a world before divisions and conference title games; even those 6 outright big ten titles would now require a trip to the Big Ten title game before you're the champ. The sheer number isn't as impressive in context. Penn State didn't join the Big Ten until after Bo retired, Wisconsin wasn't a consistent power, MSU was down most of Bo's time (Duffy retired right as Bo started). It was the Big 2 Little 8. And no national title for what folks have built up to be a god like coach.
Now add this shocking level of negligence as a leader in charge of young and vulnerable men who lacked any sort of power back then... Raze that stupid statue and the name on the football building
1. This is not the place to discuss Bo’s football success
2. you have very little idea what you are talking about in that context anyway
3. Agreed about taking down the statue and renaming.
Bo comes across exactly how you'd think a coach from that era would respond to this situation, which is to say "awful" and the University needs to start the process of removing him from the football program's buildings, branding, etc. You don't need to forget this history (they need to learn from it, and it appears they have) or anything but this report is damning.
EDIT: I'd like to add that Canham absolutely ignored the issue as well and should also be removed from the University.
Yeah, lots of "toughen up," "deal with it fucker," and related idiocy from coaches and trainers. Many folks glamorized the "old school," but it's really just a lot of "herp, derp, I'm a moron."
I'm not surprised to see this from the coaches, but I would have been shocked to see anything else from the trainers. I realized that NOT ALL TRAINERS, but most trainers/S&C coaches + staff seem, uh, not very smart or independent minded.
Jesus this is beyond disgusting.
I absolutely loved Bo growing up I've read both Alboms Bo and Bacons Bos lasting lessons more times than I can count.
I'm ashamed that the somebody held in such high esteem could turn his head and ignore these heinous acts.
At least Joe and Bo can be friends now down in the hot place (if one believes in that).
I always thought he was overrated AF from what I read on him, though he was retiring right around the time I was being born. Hopefully this finally breaks the stranglehold his ghost has over the university for good.
Just a shitty situation for those involved.
A significant amount of hearsay and unverifiable claims made in the section about possible knowledge/interaction with AD personnel. Certainly enough for financial settlements, but probably nowhere near enough for any criminal charges against AD personnel.
Obviously in this day & age these details would scream to anyone to go to law enforcement, but I am also trying to consider what a *typical* person would have done at that time (50-60 years ago) when most of what they had to go on was rumor (jokes, innuendo, "not feeling right", etc.), and during a time when a medical doctor was given more deferential treatment (almost god-like status to some, but most in the non-medical community would probably not question their methods/techniques), and when there were few laws/rules actually governing what the appropriate response *should* be by university employees in this situation.
Does it make it right? No, and we should all use this as another opportunity to enact/reinforce policies and procedures to prevent it from happening ever again. But there seems to be a very long list of people that could/should have acted (allegedly) here - and a great deal of uncertainty about all the details. (Also a rush to judge the actions of people from different times by "today's" standards - although that seems be happening often these days.)
Largely agree, but would like to point out he remained a physician seeing athletes until 1999 and saw patients through the University into the 2000s, and this report relied on victims that spanned that entire timeframe. So saying it happened 50-60 years ago isn't true for a lot of his victims. While I do think the jokes, the "suck it up", the suffocating code of silence that obviously was in place and was doubly true for male athletes reporting sexual assaults were somewhat the by-product of their time early on, this also happened well into more "enlightened" times when staff, coaches, etc. were absolutely educated on reporting such misconduct and how to properly handle it.
I never said anything about what/how the victims should feel or what they endured, nor about the greater findings of the report.
My comment was more towards the material discussed in pages 47-51 that *did* cover the allegations of what various AD personnel knew (or supposedly knew) in that period 50-60 years ago... and to an extent some of the vitriolic reponses within our MGo community towards those AD personnel (and towards the university).
None of this is good, but that doesn't mean that *everyone* involved should be demonized either.
I agree not everyone deserves absolute demonization, and my intention wasn't to claim that was your intent. I agree with you that I think some people in this report are painted with too broad a brush, assuming they had access to all the information contained in this report at the time when clearly they didn't. Like, I absolutely believe some assistant coach may have heard "this Anderson guy is weird" and maybe made a mental note of it but if it didn't come up again likely didn't think to act, which is a pretty natural. And it's clear the University didn't have a process in place for part of that time to address it even if the person had thought to follow up.
I'm only stating that these abuses continued for decades to the point, as this report noted, it became almost commonplace to "joke" about a hernia check for a broken nose into the 90s. His abuse basically became institutionalized into an era when people really should have known better. And I'd add, again not to cast everyone into a single bucket, that even in the 60s and 70s athletes and students alike commented on how inappropriate his behavior was. Lots of people in positions of authority knew about this behavior according to this report, and even in the 60s and 70s inappropriate contact of a sexual nature was a crime. Like, it wasn't using some inappropriate language by modern standards but was more culturally acceptable at the time - sticking your fingers up someone's rectum and claiming it was medically relevant when it clearly constituted battery and was inappropriate to general society regardless of the decade.
It's just sort
Some of this is apt, but some of this ignores crucial details. Like that Anderson was sued for tortious sexual assault, basically, and the university looked the other way bc the suit was dismissed due to failure to appear. Or that a player asked Bo why a doctor is sticking his digits up his ass during a physical, when anyone who played sports, including Bo, had standard physicals and would know no rectal examination is performed. It was a different era, but no so different that bothering to care about others was a foreign concept.
It sound like many of the coaches treated it as a form of hazing, which in that era was too often winked at. It was awful then and awful now.
It’s bad for Bo and Michigan. I think his name should come off building and his statue taken down. Doesn’t undo all he did for Michigan football, but we just shouldn’t be honoring him now.
I also think the fact that a survivor went to Warde 2 years before it became public needs to be looked at. I realize we were investigating, but that stinks if a coverup and Michigan only went public with it the week the same survivor went to the Press.
The timeline was hard to follow so perhaps I missed it in my reading - I thought Warde got the letter from De Luca July 18th and pretty quickly forwarded it to OGC and then IOE. Who did Warde speak to years earlier?
Yikes!
Did you not just go through the EXACT same thing at your school??
The team, the team, the team.
Yeah well sometimes you need to stand up for what is right and forget the greater good nonsense. Bo was weak and selfish since the team was basically HIS team.
Happy to turn the page on him.
Institutions that obsess over secrecy and keeping all information “within the family” are breeding grounds for abuse.
what Michigan needs to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again Is more than just removing a statue or renaming a building. Michigan should honor the victims of its previous sins by becoming the most open and transparent university in America. That means having the most quickest FOIA responses and an end to the old Schembechler submarine
To the dipshit coming in here negging the very normal and proper reactions to this story...go find a hobby, you's a coward.
I just finished reading the report and it is absolutely horrifying how this man’s actions were ignored or flippantly dismissed by the powers that were running the University. My heart goes out to all of the people abused by this monster, whether they have spoken publicly or not.
Take down any reference to Bo and Canham in the AD, if the guy still currently hired isn't fired fire Warde. Clear the rot, nobody is above being held accountable for ignoring this.
"the guy still currently hired"?
Have some thoughts on this but when l gave what I thought was an honest and fair opinion on Bo in a similar discussion about this awhile back I was banned and had to make a new account. I posted many many other things that were way more banworthy than that and nary a peep from the mods. It is what it is.
I don't know. I think the monster is Dr. Anderson, not Bo. (Just like I think the monster was Sandusky, not Paterno). I, too, wish that Bo (and Paterno) had genuinely recognized what was happening and done more to stop it. But the blindness they showed -- even, perhaps, the willful blindness -- to the actual harm people were trying to describe to them, does not, to me, justify the amount of outrage people are directing their way.
Bo and Joe came from a generation of men where "be tough" was the overriding principle, and, I assume, simply were incapable of understanding (or making sense of the emotional toll of what they were hearing). I'm genuinely not trying to exonerate them. But I don't think they're the monsters.
They failed. People fail.
(Though I hate having to establish my bona fides, this from someone who suffered similar abuse when younger as well).
IMO. Sorry.
I mean, apparently toughness now includes not wanting to expend your time and energy dealing examining why a doctor is digitally penetrating people for no good reason? Stop with the excuses. There is nothing in Bo’s behavior here that approximates genuine toughness. He spouted a lot of bullshit about toughness while it looks like “ease” was his primary concern. See it would been difficult, uncomfortable, for Bo to look into this. So he didn’t. There is nothing “tough” about that at all.
This is why I always get a kick out of the OPs and posts crying foul over JoePa, "bagmen" and excesses and transgressions at other schools. For a fanbase so smothered in self-righteousness, our program is just as depraved and potentially worse than the ones that we look down our noses at. Whether that comes to this, the "don't play skool" jokes (btw Cardale Jones actually graduated with a degree in finance---and as a star QB that's more than many of our skill players can say), under-the-table benefits, or staff misconduct. We need less talk-the-talk and more walk-the-walk.
There is no excuse for this disgraceful conduct being brushed aside. Even allowing for the fact that Bo was a man of his time in the '70s and '80s, and that this culture of toughness was everywhere in FBS programs during that era, does not excuse it proliferating into the 2000's. That's the worst part. The athletic department should have known better and acted accordingly. To do otherwise is negligent.
Still, neither JoePa, MSU, nor Bo were the perpetrators. Enablers? Yes. That's the problem with hero worship. No matter how high a pedestal we place people on, they are still at base-level ordinary human beings that make mistakes and have frailties and character flaws. Instead of deifying them and then delighting in their falls from grace out of schadenfreude or spite, we should stop the fawning and pay respect and homage but not erect a cult-of-personality to them. And it hasn't done much for our football program's ability to establish a new successful identity separate from Bo either. Lose-lose all around.
As for tearing down statues or renaming buildings, I don't know. That does not erase history, good and bad, and if anything, it just sweeps the bad under the rug. Stalin tried to do the same thing by removing his purge victims from pictures. Ultimately it didn't work for him either. The truth remains, warts and all. Ironic, that people have so little knowledge of history that they want to pull a page out of the book of that monster. Besides, the real question is that no matter how culpable Bo and the AD are by today's standards, how many of us would want our entire legacy to be brushed aside because our actions may be seen in a different light by future people with different standards. Better to move forward and let the Bo and Canham era die a natural death or live on in a museum where they belong.
....