OMG. That was so hilariously bad.
Joel Ferguson is vice-chair of MSU Board of Trustees, and the first university official to sit down for an on-camera interview since the scandal broke.
“So far, have you seen or heard anything that would suggest to you that anyone at Michigan State University didn’t handle this in the right way?” asked Channel 7’s Ross Jones.
“I have not seen one thing yet,” Ferguson said.
“But if Coach Klages was told as early as 1997 about this and didn’t do anything, isn’t the university at fault?” Jones asked.
“I wouldn’t say that at all,” Ferguson said. “That’s a bad decision that she made, and it has to be stretched to us by all the folks chasing ambulances, because there’s no payday by her.”
The ambulance chasers, according to Ferguson, are attorneys like Grewal.
“You can tell Mr. Ferguson, if this was his daughter, his granddaughter, would he be saying the same thing?” Grewal asked. “I doubt it."
There is also evidence that the school failed to act as quickly as it could to learn the extent of Nassar’s potential abuses. He was fired by MSU back in September, the same time dozens of victims started to come forward.
But it was only this month on March 2 that athletic director Mark Hollis reached out to about 3,000 past female student athletes, asking if they had any information about Nassar’s abuses. What took Hollis so long?
“That’s a direct question for Mark,” Ferguson said.
“But Mark Hollis works for you, sir,” Jones responded.
“But that’s the point, that’s something he did,” Ferguson said.
“And as his boss, do you think he should have sent this letter out months ago?” Jones asked.
“I’m not even going to…I’m very happy with Mark Hollis’s performance here as the athletic director,” Ferguson said.
Through a spokesman, Hollis declined a request for an interview. Grewal says Hollis’s letter should have been sent when Nassar was fired.
Despite the evidence tonight suggesting MSU could have acted sooner, Ferguson insists that when the school’s investigation is all said and done, MSU will be cleared.
“MSU’s going to look great. And MSU wants to get to the bottom of this also,” Ferguson said.
“But if MSU wanted to get to the bottom of it, there were plenty of people, according to these victims, who could have. We’re talking about the coach, we’re talking about other doctors, who accusers say were told and they didn’t do anything."
“That’ll play out,” Ferguson said.
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Interesting how Ferguson already *knows* MSU is going to "look great" when the school's internal investigation is completed and published. Sounds like their strategy is to deflect and diversify the blame.