Ms. Folt also said that the university would finance the deal in two years through a combination of “litigation reserves, insurance income, deferred capital expenditures, sale of non-essential assets and careful management of non-essential expenses”. She added that no philanthropic gifts, donation funds or tuition would be redirected to pay the costs.
“Our team feels humble with the courage of the survivors of George Tyndall, who endured this process, and hopes that this deal will bring them a cure,” said John C. Manly, speaking on behalf of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. USC General Counsel, Beong-Soo Kim, said resolving the dispute “has been a top priority” for the university.
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.
Although allegations of misconduct were first brought to the university’s attention in the 1990s, the USC did not immediately report him to the state medical council, and he was not suspended from employment until 2016. A year later, after an investigation that led to the First briefing on the allegations of senior university leaders, Dr. Tyndall was arrested in 2019 outside his Los Angeles apartment, and prosecutors accused him of 29 sexual assault charges involving 16 women. Through his lawyers, he continued to deny wrongdoing. He has pleaded not guilty to 35 counts of criminal sexual misconduct and is on bail.
After the university created a hotline and website to receive complaints, more allegations of student misconduct arrived. After the scandal went public in 2018, the university sent emails to more than 350,000 people associated with the university, including students and alumni, with instructions on how to report complaints.
The scandal, which prompted then-president of the university, CL Max Nikias, to resign under pressure, broke out a year after the USC became involved in another scandal, when the popular dean of medical school was fired after being accused of using drugs and party with prostitutes.
Even after Nikias was forced to leave, scandals, large and small, continued to engulf the university, once considered a party school for the Los Angeles elite before being transformed into a top-tier university with an endowment that rivals that of Harvard and a faculty that included several Nobel laureates.