Speaker 1: Content warning.
Speaker 2: This episode features topics related to sexual assault and abuse.
Speaker 2: For those in search of help, there are resources in
Speaker 2: our show notes for today's episode.
Speaker 3: We're always going to have predators, but it's the good
Speaker 3: people who stand by and do nothing that allow them
Speaker 3: to flourish, and that's certainly what happened here.
Speaker 2: Audrey Nafsinger is a top sex crimes prosecutor for the
Speaker 2: DA's office in Ventura County, California. But in nineteen ninety,
Speaker 2: she was a twenty three year old law student at USC.
Speaker 2: During a visit to the Student Health Center on campus,
Speaker 2: Audrey was sexually assaulted by doctor George Tindall, a kyn
Speaker 2: ofcologist who worked there and for more than twenty five years.
Speaker 2: Tindall continued to pray on USC students while on the payroll.
Speaker 3: I'm one of the first people that saw him. I'm
Speaker 3: sure he perfected his craft over time, but I was
Speaker 3: young and naive, and I trusted him.
Speaker 2: It's February twenty eighteen, six months since we published the
Speaker 2: blockbuster story about Carmen Pulliafido, former dean of the Medical
Speaker 2: School at USC. We're still deep into our reporting on
Speaker 2: Pulliafido's involvement in the death of Dori Yoder's baby. When
Speaker 2: reporter Harriet Ryan gets an anonymous tip urged her to
Speaker 2: look into a quote creepy kinnecologist, Harriet and Matt Hamilton
Speaker 2: start to dig.
Speaker 4: You're so like desperate for any kind of information. Everybody
Speaker 4: had their own perspective, and usually at the end that
Speaker 4: person would say, you should also talk to this other
Speaker 4: woman or this other man, but don't tell them that
Speaker 4: he talked to me.
Speaker 2: Slowly, but surely, over months, we start to catch some breaks.
Speaker 2: We speak the low level employees of the clinic who
Speaker 2: decide to risk their jobs to give us a scrap
Speaker 2: of information on Tyndall. We find survivors and ex staffers
Speaker 2: who have spent years feeling guilty for not doing more.
Speaker 2: We tracked down administrators who knew there were complaints about Tindall,
Speaker 2: and we find the nurse who put everything on the
Speaker 2: line to take Tyndall down. What we learned is horrific
Speaker 2: and not just Tyndall's crimes. Again, like with Puliaffido, we
Speaker 2: discover that USC just.
Speaker 1: Let it happen.
Speaker 2: This is Fallen Angels, Episode nine, The Golden Handshake. For
Speaker 2: the next four months, we knock on doors and gather leads,
Speaker 2: and we begin to see the patterns. Tindall clearly had
Speaker 2: an mo one after another. Women share their stories with us,
Speaker 2: and even though they span decades, a lot of the
Speaker 2: details start to sound familiar.
Speaker 4: One of the key things is that he was making
Speaker 4: the same comments to woman after women, which was he
Speaker 4: was saying like, oh, you're so tight, you must be
Speaker 4: a runner. And he was doing ungloved exams like he
Speaker 4: was making the women who came in like have these
Speaker 4: long discussions with him in his office with the door close.
Speaker 4: A lot of them are like Asian international students. He
Speaker 4: would like show them a picture of his young Asian wife,
Speaker 4: and he had a map of China and to point
Speaker 4: out where they were from.
Speaker 1: Here's Audrey Nasseger again.
Speaker 3: He pulled out a camera and had me hold my
Speaker 3: body parts in certain positions so he could take pictures
Speaker 3: and dim the lights. I felt like I couldn't say no.
Speaker 4: I think something that a lot of men don't understand
Speaker 4: is that the whole thing is so mortifying for a
Speaker 4: young woman that you could do almost anything during exam
Speaker 4: and they would not complain, Like you could bring in
Speaker 4: a giraffe in the middle, and then the the draft
Speaker 4: could leave and they'd be like, oh, I guess that's
Speaker 4: what happens during a gynocological exam. I just can't wait
Speaker 4: until this is over, Like it's so cringey, the whole thing,
Speaker 4: and especially when you're like a seventeen year old girl
Speaker 4: and a much older man who's a medical professional.
Speaker 3: He said, I had a disease that no one's ever seen.
Speaker 3: I think I was in my early twenties when I
Speaker 3: saw him, but I believed him. I mean I took
Speaker 3: him at his word as a doctor. He said he
Speaker 3: could give me several treatments, or he could give me one,
Speaker 3: but if we did one, it would be painful. And
Speaker 3: I said, well, let's just do one. I mean, who
Speaker 3: was to keep coming back over and over. I remember
Speaker 3: him looking really unhappy that that was my decision, and
Speaker 3: he tried to talk me out of that, and I
Speaker 3: remember thinking, why are you trying to talk me out
Speaker 3: of this? He used that ruse on a lot of women,
Speaker 3: the exact same diagnosis on a lot of women, to
Speaker 3: get them to keep coming back again and again.
Speaker 2: Lucy g a USC grad student, since there was something
Speaker 2: very wrong with the way Tindall was treating her, and
Speaker 2: her suspicions were confirmed as soon as she was treated
Speaker 2: by another doctor.
Speaker 5: I actually had a complication, and so Tindall told me
Speaker 5: that he would have to send me to us TECH
Speaker 5: USC's off campus hospital to see a gynocologist there. While
Speaker 5: I was at the clinic there, gynecologists told me she
Speaker 5: needed to retest me because sometimes they make mistakes. But
Speaker 5: the on compas clinic and I asked the gynecologist at Tech,
Speaker 5: I said, don't you need to relax my baginal muscles?
Speaker 5: And she said, oh, we don't do that here, and
Speaker 5: she was clearly taken aback.
Speaker 2: As Harriet begins looking into Tindall, she learns that he
Speaker 2: had left USC in twenty sixteen, but still had his
Speaker 2: medical license and he could still be out there of
Speaker 2: treating patients. And Harriet's anonymous source tells her they're afraid
Speaker 2: Tindall is trying to get his old job back at USC.
Speaker 2: At first, we can't tell if the university pushed him
Speaker 2: out because of the abuse, but then we find that
Speaker 2: actually there have been formal complaints about Tyndall going back.
Speaker 3: Decades before I saw him. Somebody had complained in writing,
Speaker 3: and so they were molested and the university said, we'll
Speaker 3: give you your money back for the exam.
Speaker 4: There had been a discussion of going to the police
Speaker 4: within the clinic, keeping caught taking photographs of girls genitals
Speaker 4: and like Henman Fire.
Speaker 2: After that, the more we learned, the more people are
Speaker 2: willing to say. Harriet and Matt Hamilton had spoken to
Speaker 2: a number of people who worked with Tyndall at the
Speaker 2: Student Health Center, including a longtime nursing supervisor named Cindy Gilbert,
Speaker 2: but she was hesitant at first to go on the record.
Speaker 4: I remember talking to her early on, but she was
Speaker 4: like very guarded. I mean, I think a lot of
Speaker 4: times people want to see you work. They're like, are
Speaker 4: you just gonna like make me do everything for you?
Speaker 4: Are you're going to go out and work? And like,
Speaker 4: we talked to her, she didn't want to be on
Speaker 4: the record, and then we went out and worked, and
Speaker 4: when we came back, you know, again we had a
Speaker 4: lot more people, We had a lot more accounts.
Speaker 2: Sidney Gilbert had worked at the Student Health Center for
Speaker 2: many years. She was committed to USC, but she and
Speaker 2: the other nurses had seen Tyndall's abuse go unchecked again
Speaker 2: and again they were the ones trying to steer women
Speaker 2: to other doctors and console his traumatized patients. She and
Speaker 2: the other nurses had pleaded with doctor Larry Einstein, the
Speaker 2: head of the health clinic, to take action, and Ninstein
Speaker 2: had a very good idea what Tindall was doing.
Speaker 6: Here's Matt had heard from many people at the clinic
Speaker 6: who were alarmed by his use of a camera to
Speaker 6: photograph students' bodies or genitals in ways that seem to
Speaker 6: deviate from standard medical practices, and at one point doctor
Speaker 6: Tindall was barred from using this camera.
Speaker 2: Ninstein had also heard graphic complaints from students about Tyndall's
Speaker 2: deeply troubling behavior. He reprimanded Tyndall and ordered him to desist,
Speaker 2: but Tindall was defiant. Feeling he was out of options,
Speaker 2: Ninstein informed USC's vice president of student affairs.
Speaker 6: So there's an email from doctor Larry Ninsteen to his
Speaker 6: boss Michael Jackson in two thousand and four, subject line
Speaker 6: is confidential, and he says that he's quote increasingly concerned
Speaker 6: about doctor Tindall, and at the end of his email
Speaker 6: he says, I have not personally seen any threatening behavior
Speaker 6: or violent behavior from doctor Tindall, but he says I
Speaker 6: believe he was in an employment position before he went
Speaker 6: into medical school. That quote included possessing a gun. So
Speaker 6: he's suggesting that doctor Tyndall owns a firearm and that
Speaker 6: somehow might factor into response from the university if they
Speaker 6: were to question his conduct.
Speaker 2: But the official response to Einstein's confidential report was to
Speaker 2: do nothing, and Jackson is since denied he was ever
Speaker 2: informed about Tyndall's abuse. In twenty ten, after yet another
Speaker 2: student reported that Tyndall had abused her, Einstein informed a
Speaker 2: lawyer in USC's Office of General Counsel. He also notified
Speaker 2: the school's Title nine coordinator in the Office of Equity
Speaker 2: and Diversity or OED, the General Counsel, and the OED
Speaker 2: did nothing.
Speaker 4: I think the concerns of women, female employees and students
Speaker 4: were not.
Speaker 6: Respected.
Speaker 4: I think that their concerns should have set off and alarm.
Speaker 4: I just don't think that their concerns were taken seriously.
Speaker 4: And the other thing is just that I think us
Speaker 4: he just has this like had this culture of like
Speaker 4: no bad news, like nobody wants to hear any bad news.
Speaker 6: Just solve the.
Speaker 2: Problem, whether or not us he wanted it. This was
Speaker 2: bad news that wouldn't go away. Cindy and her colleagues
Speaker 2: continue to pressure nine Steen to do more, and he
Speaker 2: complained again to the OED.
Speaker 6: Doctor Ninsteen had reported that several staff and a student
Speaker 6: had actually made allegations that doctor Tindall was making inappropriate comments,
Speaker 6: and the complaint that came in was classified as harassment
Speaker 6: along sexual and racial lines. He had apparently mentioned that
Speaker 6: Mexicans are taking over and that prompted this big investigation.
Speaker 6: Tindall himself was not interviewed, and less than two months
Speaker 6: after this complaint reached OED, they closed it saying there
Speaker 6: was insufficient evidence and basically kicked it back to doctor
Speaker 6: Einstein to handle it. And it's clear that doctor Einstein
Speaker 6: wanted to take further action, he was told he hadn't
Speaker 6: reached the threshold reached fire Tindall, so he continued to
Speaker 6: work at the clinic, but the concerns of nurses and
Speaker 6: medical staff just continued to intensify and a lot of
Speaker 6: this came to a head in June twenty.
Speaker 2: Sixteen, Cindy could not take it anymore. She was done
Speaker 2: with trying to solve this with HR bureaucratic divisions and
Speaker 2: finally reported Tindall to the director of USC's Great Crisis Center.
Speaker 2: And that's right at this time that Tyndall took a vacation, there.
Speaker 6: Was a fruitfly infestation in the student health clinic. So
Speaker 6: there was a swarm of insects. No one really knew
Speaker 6: where it was coming from, and it leads Cindy Guilt
Speaker 6: and a colleague to doctor Tyndall's office. They unlocked the door.
Speaker 6: They eventually find rocken fruit and food under Tyndall's desk.
Speaker 2: With Tindall out of the office, Cindy and her colleague
Speaker 2: could look around. The place was filthy, covered in trash,
Speaker 2: dirty needles, decaying fruit.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't the worst of it. While they're looking
Speaker 1: for other.
Speaker 6: Sources of rotten food in his office, they find a
Speaker 6: box of images of patients genitals. They were from nineteen
Speaker 6: ninety one nineteen ninety two. There was identifying information of
Speaker 6: some patients on them. There was no reason for him
Speaker 6: to have this stack of patient images just sitting in
Speaker 6: his office.
Speaker 1: These images were impossible to ignore.
Speaker 2: US's administration now had no choice but to finally deal
Speaker 2: with Cindy's repeated complaints about sexual assaults.
Speaker 6: They called doctor Tyndall. He's basically banned from campus on
Speaker 6: some sort of paid leave, and they initiated this investigation
Speaker 6: into doctor Tyndall.
Speaker 2: The investigators uncovered more than enough evidence to fire Tyndall,
Speaker 2: report him to the Medical Board and to the police,
Speaker 2: but instead USC allowed Tyndall to challenge the findings in
Speaker 2: an appeal.
Speaker 1: The school kept.
Speaker 2: Him on the payroll through twenty seventeen while they worked
Speaker 2: out an agreement. Tyndall finally chose to resign in return
Speaker 2: for a secret payoff of two hundred thousand dollars. He
Speaker 2: retained his medical license, and the administration would keep everything
Speaker 2: under wraps from the staffers who had complained, from the authorities,
Speaker 2: and from Tyndall's many victims.
Speaker 1: Here's Audrey.
Speaker 3: The lace they had to go to to finally get
Speaker 3: him fired was pretty extraordinary. The fact that other employees,
Speaker 3: primarily female nurses, have been trying to get him to stack.
Speaker 3: USC had more than enough notice and didn't care at all.
Speaker 2: But now USC is starting to care. The administration learns
Speaker 2: of our investigation and a few things happen, they changed
Speaker 2: course and decide they will report Tyndall to the Medical
Speaker 2: Board eight months after he's been allowed to resign. Another
Speaker 2: three months go by before they finally notify the police
Speaker 2: after they learned our reporting is focused on allegations of
Speaker 2: sexual assault. As USC starts to think about damage control,
Speaker 2: we're preparing to publish, and the atmosphere at the La
Speaker 2: Times is totally different.
Speaker 1: Under interim Editor in chief Jim Kirk, he.
Speaker 7: Was cracking the whip. He wanted us to be digging
Speaker 7: in to find out what USC's role was, what USC knew,
Speaker 7: what USC did or didn't do about George Tindall.
Speaker 1: Jack Leonard is one of our editors on the new story.
Speaker 7: You had top editors who trusted the reporting, They trusted
Speaker 7: the editing, and they were not afraid to go with
Speaker 7: a big, blockbuster story when they had one.
Speaker 2: Just like with Puliafido, there's still one more step we
Speaker 2: need to take. We have to at least try to
Speaker 2: interview Tyndall, give him a chance to respond to these allegations.
Speaker 2: But unlike Pulliarfido, Tindall actually agrees. In the spring of
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen, Matt and Harry had sit down with doctor
Speaker 2: George Tyndall.
Speaker 4: When we went out to his apartment building, it was
Speaker 4: like he lived there, but his name wasn't on the buzzer.
Speaker 4: You couldn't buzz his name, and like we asked like
Speaker 4: the like the super and the Scuper's like, yeah, he
Speaker 4: lives here. He doesn't want anyone visiting him. And so
Speaker 4: I wait a few minutes and I called his house phone.
Speaker 3: Left a message and he didn't pick up.
Speaker 4: But then when I got back to the office, got
Speaker 4: a call from him and he was like, I'm concerned
Speaker 4: about the message you left. You said there's allegations against me,
Speaker 4: and I was like, yeah, there are, and he was like,
Speaker 4: I think we should meet. He wanted to meet at
Speaker 4: the park near his house, the bottom of the street,
Speaker 4: so Matt no one out there. We met with him.
Speaker 4: I did not want to talk on the record at
Speaker 4: that time, but we set up another meeting shortly thereafter,
Speaker 4: and from then on he was on the record.
Speaker 6: He eventually shows up and shakes our hand. He's really tall,
Speaker 6: like I think, well over six feet, and I just
Speaker 6: remember shaking his hand and thinking it was really big,
Speaker 6: like it was it was a big hand. We've talked
Speaker 6: to everyone who's worked around him, so we've heard everything.
Speaker 6: Like people think he's just just has very poor hygiene.
Speaker 6: They talk about like his shirts and he used incratic
Speaker 6: habits and he's did smell a little bit. He wore
Speaker 6: sunglasses and like a he wore a Barrong shirt, which
Speaker 6: is like a Filipino dress shirt.
Speaker 4: We spent ten hours with him and he doesn't dispute
Speaker 4: a lot of the things. It's just like a matter
Speaker 4: of interpretation. He thinks he's like an excellent kindecologist. And
Speaker 4: there are a lot of like weird moments during that
Speaker 4: interview where Matt Hamilton bought a textbook. He was always
Speaker 4: referring to this one textbook that he used, got incological textbook.
Speaker 4: Matt Hamilton bought it on an Amazon so it talks
Speaker 4: about how to do a regular exam.
Speaker 6: And we bought it to the park.
Speaker 4: And he's like, see and he's like going through all
Speaker 4: the steps that you're supposed to do it a regular
Speaker 4: guy incological exam.
Speaker 6: He went through and he highlighted everything he did line
Speaker 6: by line. But you know, by the time it came
Speaker 6: to actual contact with women's genitalia physically, Jenny closed the
Speaker 6: book and what she described in terms of using his fingers,
Speaker 6: it was not at the textbook and that was a
Speaker 6: very big turning point, I think for Harriet and for myself,
Speaker 6: because it's like kind of a real life example of
Speaker 6: how he had convinced himself that what he was doing
Speaker 6: was appropriate.
Speaker 4: And then we started confronting him with things that, you know,
Speaker 4: eyewitnesses had said, and he was sitting right next to me,
Speaker 4: and I was just like, doctor Tundele, do you understand
Speaker 4: that people are accusing you of sexually assaulting young women
Speaker 4: for decades?
Speaker 3: He had made a lot of arguments.
Speaker 4: At that point, and we had moved past them, and
Speaker 4: I think when I just said it like that, he
Speaker 4: finally got that we were not going to be talked
Speaker 4: into adopting his point of view on his medical practice.
Speaker 4: And he got this like far away stair and they
Speaker 4: just stood up and he walked away and we never
Speaker 4: heard from him again.
Speaker 8: Use this moment to encourage you, to embolden you, and
Speaker 8: to literally push you into the rising of your life.
Speaker 2: May eleventh, eighteen, Oprah Winfrey is delivering an inspiring commencement
Speaker 2: speech to the graduates of USC's Journalism School. At that
Speaker 2: same moment, Matt and Harriet are sitting with three top
Speaker 2: USC administrators.
Speaker 6: It's commencement day, it's swarming with people. There's just like families,
Speaker 6: and everyone's in a joyous mood. And I remember, like
Speaker 6: Harry and I going to this office on the edge
Speaker 6: of campus. They had known for a long time that
Speaker 6: we had been recruiting on doctor Tangel and asking questions,
Speaker 6: So scheduling the sit down interview on commencement day at
Speaker 6: least had the effect, whether intended or not, to guarantee
Speaker 6: that any story wouldn't come out until after all the
Speaker 6: festivities surrounding graduation wouldn't at least be marred by any
Speaker 6: sort of story that put the university into bad light.
Speaker 6: They had an hour set aside for the meeting. This
Speaker 6: was a big story covering, you know, wide range of time.
Speaker 6: When you consider that we had had hours to sit
Speaker 6: with doctor Tindall but only an hour with USC. We
Speaker 6: planned to move efficiently through the questions, and USC's administrators
Speaker 6: began off by giving these like detailed bios of themselves
Speaker 6: that last like twenty minutes. I mean, we're trying to
Speaker 6: be friendly and just kind of take it in, but
Speaker 6: you know, at a certain point it was like, I
Speaker 6: don't need to know your resume, And because it was
Speaker 6: just this, it seemed like they were a filibus train,
Speaker 6: and so we immediately are like, okay, we haven't at
Speaker 6: this point forty minutes or so, we have to move
Speaker 6: into questions, and we start going.
Speaker 1: Over what they sent.
Speaker 6: Us in their responses, trying to drill down. I remember
Speaker 6: having whiplash after going through that interview and kind of
Speaker 6: debating the finer points of doctor Tindall's conduct with students
Speaker 6: and what us he knew, and why they fired him,
Speaker 6: and why they paid him money, and why they didn't
Speaker 6: report him to the Medical Board, and then walking out
Speaker 6: of that interview and you see students beaming with their
Speaker 6: parents and they're wearing the tops and gowns and taking
Speaker 6: photos and selvies.
Speaker 2: Four days after Harriet Matt's meeting, US issues a statement
Speaker 2: to the paper. The school claims it did not violate
Speaker 2: a California statute requiring hospitals and clinics to report problem
Speaker 2: doctors to the Medical Board because US was quote a
Speaker 2: school and not a hospital or clinic. With our story
Speaker 2: just about to publish, Nikias tries to get ahead of it.
Speaker 2: He emails the entire university, disclosing the allegations against Tyndall
Speaker 2: and apologizing to quote any student who may have visited
Speaker 2: the Student Health Center and did not receive the respectful
Speaker 2: care each individual deserves.
Speaker 1: But it's too late. We published four hours later.
Speaker 2: Like our story on Puliofido, the news about Tindall explodes
Speaker 2: across the country.
Speaker 6: The doctor was suspended by USC two years ago, news
Speaker 6: of that wasn't made public until today.
Speaker 9: In fact, nothing pertaining to this doctor was made public
Speaker 9: until today.
Speaker 2: CBS News isn't buying the timing of Nikias's letter either.
Speaker 2: For survivors like Lucy ch it's a surreal experience. Suddenly
Speaker 2: the full extent of Tyndall's crimes are visible, and she
Speaker 2: can see them for.
Speaker 1: What they are.
Speaker 5: The only time I actually realized there was something wrong
Speaker 5: was after Billy Times article came out and I ended
Speaker 5: up calling some lawyers and one of my lawyers told me,
Speaker 5: what you just described that sexual assault. It really shocked me.
Speaker 5: It really shocked me. Like I had been talking to
Speaker 5: multiple lawyers and no one said that flat out to me,
Speaker 5: and it just blew me away. I was like, oh
Speaker 5: my god, that really happened.
Speaker 2: Now that the story is out there, USC looks for
Speaker 2: any way to dodge accountability. The administration blames Ninsteen, the
Speaker 2: head of the student Health Center who died before Tyndall
Speaker 2: was suspended in twenty seventeen. USC says nothing about Ninstein's
Speaker 2: multiple complaints to the oed to the General Council, the
Speaker 2: title nine coordinator and hr all, of which were dismissed
Speaker 2: or ignored. Here's Adry Nassinger again, So to.
Speaker 3: Cover up by people at higher levels that just do
Speaker 3: not care. I initially felt a sense of responsibility. Wow,
Speaker 3: if I had spoken out all those years ago, maybe
Speaker 3: I could have stopped those generations and women after me.
Speaker 3: But the more reporting that came out and the more
Speaker 3: I read, it was very obvious that they had plenty
Speaker 3: of notice and think here didn't matter to them at all.
Speaker 2: Six former students and patients join in a lawsuit against
Speaker 2: Tyndall and also file suit against USC for failing to
Speaker 2: fire him within a month. There are fifty two women involved.
Speaker 2: ABC's David Muir covers the fast moving story on World
Speaker 2: News Tonight.
Speaker 7: They claim it went on for years and that the
Speaker 7: university failed to respond to complaints. Tonight, there have now
Speaker 7: been hundreds of calls to a hotline that's been set up.
Speaker 6: David I spoke with a lawyer who said today he
Speaker 6: talked to thirty six other women who say they were
Speaker 6: also assaulted by doctor Tindall, and he expects that number to.
Speaker 2: Grow more and more women come forward to the La
Speaker 2: Times with their stories of abuse, the LAPD opens what
Speaker 2: will become one of the city's biggest sexual abuse investigations ever.
Speaker 10: Currently, Artie Texas had the names of fifty two former
Speaker 10: patients who have alleged inappropriate conduct by doctor Tyndall while
Speaker 10: he worked as a guidecologist at the University of Southern California.
Speaker 1: The time frame of.
Speaker 2: This Nikyas tries to return to the Puliafeidal playbook. He
Speaker 2: deflects blame, says he knew nothing about Tyndall and issues
Speaker 2: of vague apology. But this time the drum beat is
Speaker 2: just too loud, and the faculty at USC they decide
Speaker 2: they've had enough.
Speaker 11: Puliaffido was shocking and disturbing and deeply problematic.
Speaker 2: Doctor Jane John is a professor of political science and
Speaker 2: international relations at USC, as well as gender and sexuality studies.
Speaker 11: We didn't actually know all of it until much later,
Speaker 11: because much of it had been attempted to be covered
Speaker 11: up by the university, and I believed to some degree
Speaker 11: participation of the Pasadena Police.
Speaker 2: Doctor Ariela Gross was a professor of law and history
Speaker 2: at USC for twenty seven years.
Speaker 12: It wasn't until that Puliaffido story was broken in the
Speaker 12: La Times that we started to really pay attention. And
Speaker 12: I remember conversations with colleagues from the law school when
Speaker 12: the Puliaffido story came out about Wow, this is really bad.
Speaker 12: I remember firing off a letter to the president of
Speaker 12: the Academic Senate saying, isn't the faculty going to do
Speaker 12: something thing? Say something, and them saying, look, there's an
Speaker 12: investigation happening. Let's wait for the investigation. When the Tendall
Speaker 12: story broke, that's when we were like, okay, that is
Speaker 12: the last straw. We should not have been silent a
Speaker 12: year ago, and we're not going to be silent now.
Speaker 2: For doctor John, there was a feeling among the faculty
Speaker 2: that they owed this to the students.
Speaker 11: You feel, if not like complicit in it, you do
Speaker 11: feel like a bit of a bystander. We couldn't protect them,
Speaker 11: we couldn't do anything to help them. We hadn't done anything,
Speaker 11: which is why we decided to do something they never
Speaker 11: told us anything. They issued a few letters which were
Speaker 11: frankly bs, a lot of denials like, oh man, we
Speaker 11: didn't know, Like nobody believes that. So we formed a
Speaker 11: group maybe fifty of us at the beginning, and we
Speaker 11: were all tenured full professors.
Speaker 12: We had decided that we would go public once we
Speaker 12: had two hundred. We were having trouble figuring out, because
Speaker 12: it's such a secretive board, how to send it to
Speaker 12: the board. And then finally somebody said to me, just
Speaker 12: email it to the president's office. Even though it'll say
Speaker 12: to the chairman of the Board of trustees, c see
Speaker 12: the President's office. Don't worry.
Speaker 6: They'll get it.
Speaker 8: You know, immediately.
Speaker 12: And the letter called for President Nikias to step down.
Speaker 2: Doctor Gross goes on national TV on NBC's The Today
Speaker 2: Show to make their case.
Speaker 13: According to The La Times, Tyndall was quietly paid off
Speaker 13: to leave the school last year. President Nikias says he
Speaker 13: understands the faculty's anger and frustration, but the university's board
Speaker 13: of trustees says it has full confidence in his leadership.
Speaker 12: That I think really freaked the board out because they
Speaker 12: were like, uh, oh, now this is really a national story.
Speaker 12: And the academic seen, which had absolutely ignored us before this,
Speaker 12: said oh, I guess we need to call a public meeting,
Speaker 12: and that was held the following day, on a Wednesday.
Speaker 11: I actually worried that no one would come, because usually
Speaker 11: when there's some kind of a scandal or something negative,
Speaker 11: the faculty just go quiet, and we go quiet, because faculty,
Speaker 11: I've been punished for speaking out. You're sort of frozen out.
Speaker 11: It's a little bit putinesque, if you ask me. And
Speaker 11: when we got there, you could barely find a sea
Speaker 11: if the room was packed. And we were calling the
Speaker 11: man to be accountable, and we wanted him to take
Speaker 11: responsibility and to say they would fix it.
Speaker 2: US's powerful secretive board has been standing behind a KIAS
Speaker 2: led by billionaire developer Rick Caruso, the board chair. They
Speaker 2: decide that for the good of the school, they need
Speaker 2: to make a change. Gruso calls on leaders among the
Speaker 2: faculty to meet with the kias and reinforce this position.
Speaker 2: Doctor William Tierney, USC's professor emeritus, remembers the meeting.
Speaker 9: Max's kind of sober. I always remember reading that when
Speaker 9: it was over with Nixon, I think it was Everett Dirkson,
Speaker 9: a minority Centator went to the White House and he said, Dick,
Speaker 9: it's over. And that's the way I felt with us
Speaker 9: is we weren't angry, but we needed him to see
Speaker 9: it was over.
Speaker 2: On May twenty eighteen, Max Nikias resigns as president of USC.
Speaker 2: The Today Show covers this development on the board's change
Speaker 2: of heart.
Speaker 9: Breaking overnight a bombshell announcement at the University of Southern California,
Speaker 9: President C. L.
Speaker 13: Max Nikias agreeing to step down in the wake of
Speaker 13: a scandal.
Speaker 4: But this isn't about face from the university's board of trustees.
Speaker 2: But as doctor two he might have predicted, Max Nikias
Speaker 2: does not simply walk away. As Nikias knows, probably better
Speaker 2: than anyone us, he likes to solve its problems with money.
Speaker 9: He talked with his lawyer and he gets a seven
Speaker 9: million dollar buyout that the board provides him. The board
Speaker 9: at that time is really at loggerheads with one another,
Speaker 9: and there are some who want him to return, you know,
Speaker 9: like he was on leave for the summer and he's
Speaker 9: going to come back in September. It was crazy, and
Speaker 9: he's still living in the president's house. How awkward is
Speaker 9: all this?
Speaker 2: You know, when Moord gets out about this most recent backsliding,
Speaker 2: six hundred and seventy faculty members sign a petition demanding
Speaker 2: the board make sure Nikias is gone by the fall semester.
Speaker 9: It was conveyed to Max. If he did not resign
Speaker 9: by whatever it was, August fifteenth or something, all holy
Speaker 9: hell would break close. Faculty would teach, I mean, it
Speaker 9: would have been nutty. So he did, but I mean
Speaker 9: seven million dollars.
Speaker 2: Really, the board still keeps Nikias on the faculty in
Speaker 2: the School of Engineering. It awards him the title of
Speaker 2: President Emeritus and names him to a prestigious position as
Speaker 2: a life trustee. It's a golden parachute, and for those
Speaker 2: like doctor Jane John, USC's response is not enough.
Speaker 11: We did not receive representation on the Board of Trustees.
Speaker 11: They promised to do an investigation, they told us it
Speaker 11: was underway, and then it was revealed last year that
Speaker 11: no investigation had taken place.
Speaker 3: There's no report.
Speaker 12: USC was not the only university to have a doctor
Speaker 12: who preyed on women's.
Speaker 1: Students, doctor Ariella Gross.
Speaker 12: Unfortunately, that's happened at a number of major universities, but
Speaker 12: USC as the word in terms of its cover up,
Speaker 12: its secrecy, it's golden handshakes for wrongdoers, and its refusal
Speaker 12: to truly investigate and figure out what went wrong and
Speaker 12: how to avoid doing it again. None of that.
Speaker 2: On June twenty sixth, twenty nineteen, Tindall is arrested by
Speaker 2: the LAPD. Almost two years later, USC settles a class
Speaker 2: action lawsuit with over seven hundred plaintiffs, generations of young
Speaker 2: USC women who have been abused by Tyndall. The payout
Speaker 2: is eight hundred and fifty two million dollars, and that's
Speaker 2: on top of more than two hundred and fifteen million
Speaker 2: US already had agreed to pay other groups of Tyndall's accusers.
Speaker 2: In the end, doctor George Tindall costs USC one point
Speaker 2: one billion dollars. It's the largest sexual abuse settlement in
Speaker 2: the history of American higher education.
Speaker 1: But it's not enough.
Speaker 5: Honestly, I remember feeling really disappointed because I was convinced
Speaker 5: that I wasn't just fighting for a restitution, and I
Speaker 5: was convinced I was fighting for somewhat at USC to
Speaker 5: be held accountable because I didn't want this to happen
Speaker 5: again to anyone else in any other university of your
Speaker 5: hospital and I remember when the settlement came out, I thought,
Speaker 5: I hope this isn't it. I hope this isn't the end.
Speaker 5: I hope there's actually a sense of justice.
Speaker 2: As a prosecutor, Audrey knows the settlement settles nothing.
Speaker 3: I'm not done because only Tyndall has been investigated, and
Speaker 3: that's not enough. It's not about the money, it's about accountability.
Speaker 3: Who signed the two hundred thousand dollars check to Tindall
Speaker 3: to make him go away quietly? Somebody on the board
Speaker 3: had to know that. I mean, they don't just sign
Speaker 3: two hundred thousand dollars checks every day. And it's just
Speaker 3: like USC to buy their way out of a problem,
Speaker 3: and nobody to be held to account other than Tindall,
Speaker 3: who's still sitting at home right now as we as we.
Speaker 2: Record this, Tindall's no longer sitting at home, and we'll
Speaker 2: get into that in our next episode. But accountability, that's
Speaker 2: another question entirely. That's coming up on the season finale
Speaker 2: of Fallen Angels. Fallen Angels, a Story of California Corruption
Speaker 2: is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with Best
Speaker 2: Case Studios. I'm Paul Pringle, This show is based on
Speaker 2: my book Bad City, Peril and Power in the City
Speaker 2: of Angels. Fallen Angels was written by Isabel Evans, Adam Pinks,
Speaker 2: and Brent Katz. Isabel Evans is our producer, Brent Katz
Speaker 2: is co producer. Associate producers are Hanna Leebowitz Lockhart and
Speaker 2: On Pajo lock Executive producers are Me, Paul Pringle, Joe Picorello,
Speaker 2: and Adam Pinkus for Best Case Studios.
Speaker 1: Original music is by James Newberry.
Speaker 2: This episode was edited by Max Michael Miller with assistants
Speaker 2: from Nisha Venkat. Additional editings, sound design and additional music
Speaker 2: by Dean White, Harriet Ryan, Matt Hamilton, Sarah Parvini and
Speaker 2: Adam Olmarik are consulting producers. Our iHeart team is Ali
Speaker 2: Perry and Carl Catle. Follow and rate Fallen Angels wherever
Speaker 2: you get your podcasts