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‘No amount of money is going to ever make anybody whole’: Anderson survivors search for closure in settlement process The Daily followed up with Anderson survivors about enduring a ‘chaotic’ and delayed settlement distribution process
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Correction 4/7: A previous version incorrectly stated the year in which Goldman spoke with Canham. This article has been updated to reflect that Goldman spoke with Canham in 1983, and now specifies that they spoke in Schembechler’s office. Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual harassment and abuse. In 1983, Richard Goldman reported Dr. Robert Anderson to Donald Canham, the University of Michigan’s then-athletics director, for sexual harassment. Instead of taking action, as Goldman expected, Canham dismissed his complaint. “So I go to the athletics director (Canham), and I say, ‘This is happening, what are you going to do?’” Goldman said. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’” Goldman punched a nineinch hole in the wall of Bo Schembechler’s office and walked out, knowing this neglect would enable Anderson’s continued abuse of student-athletes. Decades later, Goldman opened up about his experience for the first time to his wife of 26 years. A survivor of sexual assault herself, she replied, “What are you going to do about it?” Her support encouraged Goldman to join the Anderson settlement case as a lead plaintiff. “My job was to protect all those that came after me,” Goldman said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. “And I was not being afforded that opportunity because the settlement (negotiation and distribution) was not being conducted the right way for these men to find absolution.” The settlement case against the University amassed more than 1,050 plaintiffs, a majority of them men of Color, whom Anderson abused over the course of his nearly 40-year tenure at the University. It is perhaps the case with the most sexual abuse allegations against a single person in United States history. After months spent protesting in front of the President’s House
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by the “Hail to the Victims” campaign, the survivors reached a $490 million settlement with the University in January 2022. But for the five survivors who spoke with The Daily, a year of settlement negotiations with the University did not spell justice. Richard Goldman, Chuck Christian, Jonathan Vaughn, Thomas “Tad” DeLuca and Tony Griffiths spoke about how they were individually affected by the distribution process and initial delays in receiving their settlement money. Facing a lack of transparency about the distribution process and delays in receiving his settlement, Goldman was forced to take matters into his own hands. His background in contract negotiations helped him navigate the complicated legal system to receive his settlement. Chuck Christian’s ability to pay for expensive, lifesaving cancer treatments was severely impacted by delays in the settlement distribution process. He spoke with The Daily about how his prostate cancer progressed to stage four because he initially avoided seeking medical intervention due to fear of being abused by other physicians like Anderson. “I really need to get (money) for my treatments because my treatments are $100,000 a year to keep me alive,” Christian said. “Just to stay alive, it’s going to be $1.7 million. They didn’t give me anywhere near that. They knew that the reason I had the cancer in such a bad form was because of what Dr. Anderson had done to me.” Vaughn, a former Michigan football player who was heavily involved with the “Hail to the Victims” movement, said the settlement process was retraumatizing due to a lack of communication from the University and its attorneys. “It was very dehumanizing and retraumatizing,” Vaughn said. “Obviously, attorneys do what’s best for their clients. But when you have attorneys and a Board of Regents that show no level of remorse or empathy, it was a very traumatizing and adversarial process. And you want to know why I know that and they don’t? Because they still have not talked to the people.” In an email to The Daily, University spokesperson Colleen Mastony said the University is
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committed to aiding Anderson survivors in their healing. She added that the University offers free, confidential counseling services to survivors. “The University has continued to offer confidential counseling services at no cost to Anderson survivors,” Mastony wrote. “And as the University’s Board of Regents Chair stated when the settlement was finalized, ‘Our work is not done until U-M is considered the leader in creating a campus environment that is safe for everyone.’” While all five of the survivors who spoke with The Daily have now received their settlement money, some survivors detailed how initial delays impacted their ability to process their experiences of abuse. Four survivors, including Goldman, said the process itself failed to compensate for the trauma they experienced at Anderson’s hands. “No amount of money is going to ever make anybody whole,” Goldman said. “You’re never going to be able to get rid of that nightmare of what has happened to you.” “Do you think quantifying abuse like this is the correct way to go about determining each survivor’s settlement amount?” The Settlement Allocation Methodology Protocol document, used in the Anderson settlement process by the court system to determine how much settlement money to distribute to each survivor, reads that it aims to standardize a “just, fair and reasonable distribution of the settlement fund to the survivors of Dr. Robert Anderson.” The Daily has obtained this document. Three court-appointed allocators were tasked with deciding how much of the settlement each survivor would receive. To do so, the allocators used each survivor’s abuse claim, profile form, an optional personal statement and other information submitted to the court to quantify information about the nature of each survivor’s experience in the Anderson case. First, each survivor was to receive a baseline amount depending on the nature of the abuse. Survivors who experienced anal and vaginal rape by Anderson were awarded a minimum settlement value of $550,000, while survivors
who experienced fondling were awarded a minimum settlement value of $90,000, per the document. Then, a survivor could be granted additional “points” based on other factors that attempt to assess how much the Anderson abuse affected them, including “Post-Abuse Mental and Physical Suffering” and “Post-Abuse Educational, Employment Issues, and Expenses.” According to the document, each additional “point” was initially estimated to be worth about $7,000. The Daily reached out to the three court-appointed allocators in the Anderson settlement case. William Bettinelli and Matthew Garretson did not respond to The Daily’s request for comment. Gerald Rosen responded, declining to comment. A lawyer experienced in dealing with cases concerning the sexual abuse of studentathletes spoke with The Daily about the protocol’s failure to consider how trauma affects survivors differently. The attorney requested anonymity, citing fears of professional retaliation. In this article, he will be referred to as Daniel. “One of the main problems is that one person’s survivable incident could scar somebody in a way that they never recover,” Daniel said. “I can understand why survivors would think, ‘Was it all worth it?’” While the settlement allocation methodology protocol is a standard way of splitting funds among survivors in the legal system, Daniel explained it does not account for how survivors will cope with their abuse being quantified. “To a certain extent, it is dehumanizing because they’re put on a grid,” Daniel said. “You will feel depersonalized for the purposes of calculating damages. And there’s an emotional price to be paid for that realization.” DeLuca told The Daily the Settlement Allocation Methodology Protocol made him feel he was accepting “dirty money” because of the way it numericized his abuse. “There was a process where you have to describe what happened to you and how it affected your life,” DeLuca said. “The settlement to me was a dirty word. The money was dirty.
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… How can I take this money?” Recounting his personal experience, Vaughn said the settlement process, too, was traumatizing. “Most people will never understand what it’s like to go through a process that gives you a human value of the rape that you sustain to play a sport,” Vaughn said. “To then have such an onerous settlement process and distribution process is extremely traumatizing.” Goldman further illuminated the delicate balance between awarding survivors settlement money while also recognizing each survivor’s individual experience of abuse, especially in a case with more than 1,000 plaintiffs. “You got to do something like (the settlement allocation document) because everybody’s story is different,” Goldman said. “Do you think quantifying abuse like this is the correct way to go about determining each survivor’s settlement amount? I don’t. And this is not just this case, this is every sexual assault (settlement).” Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, University of Georgia Law School professor and author of “Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation,” told The Daily she believes the legal system is incapable of recompensing survivors of abuse. “I think in any sort of tort case, how do we compensate somebody for something that is so fundamentally wrong?” Burch said. “And I think it’s something that the tort system struggles with, not just in sex abuse cases.” Still, Vaughn credited the allocators for creating the settlement allocation distribution process document, which he believes was important in a sexual abuse case where so many men of Color were victimized. “No one really understands how difficult that job was for (the allocators) to create the allocation process and the numbers,” Vaughn said. “We knew that Michigan was never going to value us … because there was a very high amount (of victims), and the majority of victims were of Color and African American.” Part of the settlement methodology required the allocators to decide if a survivor
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would receive money from the “Common Benefit” category. This category grants extra points to survivors who took actions that “conveyed a common benefit to all plaintiffs,” including speaking with the press about Anderson’s abuse. Burch speculated about why the “Common Benefit” section was added. “(Sexual abuse) isn’t comfortable to talk about; it’s something that a lot of people don’t feel like they want to discuss publicly,” Burch said. “But by doing so, and coming forth, you’re benefiting the group as a whole. And so in that sense, I think they’re trying to do something to say, ‘Thank you, these cases wouldn’t have been possible without you.’” But not all survivors had the ability to speak outwardly about their experiences of abuse, rendering them ineligible for money from the “Common Benefit” category. Griffiths was allegedly advised by his lawyer not to speak with the press, meaning he did not qualify for the “Common Benefit” category. Though Burch explained this is common because attorneys are inclined to control the release of information in mass tort cases, Griffiths said he believes he lost out on settlement money because he was not permitted to speak outwardly about his experiences. “Me being a victim of the doctor, I’ve also become a victim of the system, more so the lawyers’ strategies that have a side effect on me,” Griffiths said. “(It’s) not to say that I was not compensated properly, but I was not allowed to speak as a victim. And that had an effect on the point system for me, which decreased (the money) I could have received.” “It just felt like it was never going to happen because we were waiting and waiting.” Before a survivor could receive their full settlement amount, all money owed to Medicare, Medicaid and the IRS, as well as any pending bankruptcies, must have been paid in full. Settlement management companies ARCHER Systems and ARX Management were appointed by the court to investigate debts and coordinate payment once any
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