LOS ANGELES — The University of Southern California on Thursday agreed to pay more than $1.1 billion to former patients of campus gynecologist George Tyndall.
The monetary award is the largest sex abuse payout in higher education history, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The record sum was revealed in Los Angeles Superior Court, as lawyers for a group of 702 women suing the university told a judge they had settled their claims for $852 million, the newspaper reported. When combined with an earlier settlement of a class-action suit totaling $215 million, the settlement topped the $1 billion mark.
Tyndall, 74, has pleaded not guilty to dozens of sexual assault charges, the newspaper reported. He is awaiting trial.
⚡️ “USC to pay $1.1 billion to settle decades of sex abuse claims”https://t.co/dtwq961inl
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 25, 2021
“The sheer size of this settlement is testimony to the enormous harm that the depraved action of George Tyndall caused our clients,’' according to a statement from the law firm of Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, which represents 234 of the plaintiffs. “It also speaks to the culpability of USC in employing Tyndall for 30 years and ignoring volumes of complaints and evidence of his misdeeds.’'
USC previously had agreed to pay thousands of other current and former students $215 million in a 2018 federal class action settlement, the Times reported.
The settlement provided about 17,000 former patients who received women’s health services from Tyndall compensation of $2,500 and up, KABC reported.
University general counsel Beong-Soo Kim called the large number of women involved “the primary factor” in the amount of the settlement.
“If you look at the number from a per plaintiff basis, I think the math is very comparable with the MSU settlement,” Kim told the Times.
“Institutions don’t pay out a billion dollars because nothing happened or they’re not responsible,” John Manly, whose Orange County law firm was the co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, told the newspaper. “We were able to prove in court that USC knew for the better part of 30 years that Tyndall was assaulting patients.”
Tyndall was the university’s only full-time gynecologist at the student health clinic from 1989 until 2016, according to the Times. He was stripped of his medical license and arrested.
rsing “chaperones” told to monitor pelvic exams conducted by Tyndal complained that he used a curtain to obscure their view, according to the Times. Students told clinic employees he asked prurient questions about their sex lives and made suggestive comments about their bodies.
Cindy Gilbert, a nurse, reported Tyndall’s conduct to USC’s campus rape crisis center in 2016, prompting his suspension. At that point, the school launched an internal investigation, and Tyndall resigned his post in 2017, the newspaper reported.
Cox Media Group
