Part 44: Why I Wrote A Petition on George Tyndall – Will the Promised Changes Be Made at USC?
Published October 20, 2023
Photo: L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and new L.A. Police Commission President Erroll Southers at a news conference Thursday. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
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For nearly a year now I’ve almost studiously avoided depicting Dr. George Tyndall in photograph for any my stories until the prospect of a trial was so near you could imagine reaching out for it in the darkness of the human mind. Splashing Tyndall’s mug all over the Internet is just about the last thing I wanted to do, the memory is painful but as my good friend Varun Soni, the distinguished Dean of Religious Life told me once in discussing his studies of Bob Marley, it was Confrontation that was his most deeply reflecting album, a later work in his music career seldom recognized.
The memory of George Tyndall brings no peace to anyone’s mind. The lack of resolution for the USC community that still today has unimaginable pain that is what I think about late at night. All of the women suffering in silence. Since Tyndall’s death on October 4, in my mind I hope to feel that pain easing. The memory of what it was like to experience the betrayal of the news made public on May 16, 2018 to global effect. The televised interviews, the attorney’s pushing and ever slightly pushing back for and against justice, because who can tell these days what exactly is right from wrong. The news coverage to date has been dry and largely focused on the present.
The medical examination, whether to do an autopsy or not, the immediate speculation that Tyndall must have been offed, have been Epsteined as they say these days without evidence. Not even the slightest iota of anticipation, that someone might have surreptitiously assassinated him to spare us all the pain of a trial. USC’s declaration that releasing the originally promised law firm investigation report from O’Melveny and Myers, among the most prestigious international LLP’s with 18 offices, 800 attorney’s and revenue in 2022 of $1.02 billion dollars. According to USC, to release this document in the varying forms as it has been described by Rick Caruso, the former Chairman of the USC Board of Trustees as a presentation of some type just to the board.
The memos from those days still online on the Board of Trustees websites, Caruso’s 12 public statements starting with George Tyndall and Mark Ridley-Thomas before addressing the issues of antisemitism on campus and long promised governance reform that in effect amounted to a winnowing in size of the massively sized board. USC’s Board of Trustees in 2018 so openly criticized as the equivalent of tourism without deep investment, and the promises of reform executed by Caruso’s then Chief of Staff, current USC SVP of University Relation Sam Garrison. By contrast, new Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees Suzanne Nora Johnson, a former Vice Chairwoman at Goldman Sachs and an attorney by contrast who was elected following Caruso’s stepping down pursuant to his Mayoral campaign in June 2022 has issued only two public statements.
The first was her opening statement as the incoming Chairwoman, in that June 26, 2022 statement she wrote the following: “Of course, this begins with our Board, which has worked diligently to improve our governance processes over the past several years. My fellow Trustees and I pledge to hold ourselves to the highest standards of ethics and accountability as we support USC.” A statement on USC leaving the PAC-12 with UCLA for the Big-10 followed two weeks later on June 30, 2022. Since then she has yet to issue a single statement on any matter, but to her credit she did show up to introduce new USC Athletic Director Jennifer Cohen in August to replace Mike Bohn, who was removed nominally after allegations of inappropriate conduct, indeed even confrontations over it with subordinates. USC sought to put a pretty picture on this citing numerous other reasons for Bohn’s removal such as poor management practices as the AD.
USC President Carol Folt, who I know well, arrived after the departure of Max Nikias, who I also know, in the wake of the George Tyndall disclosure after the interim Presidency of Wanda Austin, an aerospace executive. President Folt, the 12th President of the Institution, and the first to hold the post permanently transferred over from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill assuming the post in September 2019. At the inauguration, I stood next to the late Earl Paysinger, the first African-American to hold a senior post in the Los Angeles Police Department as an Assistant Chief. When Tyndall had happened, Paysinger had been a member of the cabinet of President Nikias, and after the news about Tyndall broke, Paysinger had challenged Nikias over the matter during the next meeting in outrage at the alarming news.
Ever a person of sage wisdom, and with the biggest smile in Los Angeles he was an inspirational figure to me, the real deal, respected by so many. Before he died from cancer after telling just about no one in December 2019, Earl told me at an event after watching me sending me emails at a university event, “Zach, do you know what the difference is between you and me, you still need this job.” After Tyndall, people on campus were irate, the faculty vote of no confidence in Nikias had been overwhelming. Reportedly Caruso persuaded Nikias to resign the position, many at the University had deep affection for the legendary scholar and prolific fundraiser. The scandals ate away at us, Carmen Puliafito was a disaster, but it was Tyndall who broke our hearts in a way that Mark Ridley-Thomas and Operation Varsity Blues never could. Those were about money and corruption, Tyndall was about how we treated each other on campus.
The story of the exposure, documented so diligently by the Los Angeles Times Paul Pringle, Matt Hamilton, and Harriet Ryan among others driven by the brave actions of whistleblower nurse Cindy Gilbert in reporting Tyndall to the campus Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention services Executive Director Ekta Kumar. “We all feel the same. We can’t get anyone to act on it,” Gilbert recalled telling Kumar interview with the Los Angeles Times. For his part, Tyndall maintained his innocence to his death bed just as he promised “When I am on my deathbed, I want to think there are thousands and thousands of Trojan women out there whose health I made a difference in.” Tyndall told the Times he would work “well into his 80s.”
Tyndall instead died at age 76. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of allegations of inappropriate conduct, Tyndall’s attorney Leonard Levine still planned to maintain his client’s innocence saying in court saying as recently as August 13, “We got a chronology that we’ve always believed was accurate and that is that no one ever complained about alleged sexual assault or any criminal conduct until after the article appeared in the L.A. Times.” I’m glad that Tyndall didn’t live to present this insulting defense further, but I’m also disappointed that the victims will be denied their day in court and that the USC community will receive no resolution. USC President Carol Folt like Chairwoman Johnson has yet to issue any recent public statement on this matter despite making others previously concurrent to the $852 million dollar “global settlement.”
On March 21, 2021 President Folt wrote to the community to update them on this matter, adding incorrectly that “He has not practiced medicine at USC since 2016 and is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on criminal charges.” Tyndall was not under house arrest, he was simply out on bail and under electronic monitoring. As the City News Service update for the Los Angeles Daily News states on October 12 in covering the confusion over whether an autopsy would be performed or not on the body (it won’t), it notes: “Tyndall had been set to appear Friday at a hearing in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. The defense had been planning to ask the judge then to lower Tyndall’s $1.3 million bail to $250,000 and to free him from electronic monitoring, given the dismissal of the eight charges involving five other women. A determination of the cause of death has been deferred, but there is no reason to suspect any foul play has occurred in this case.
President Folt’s March 2021 memorandum notes the changes that USC has made broadly: “We also instituted greater accountability and governance with clear checks and balances, and added staff with professional expertise.” She does not contextualize it as pursuant to either the changes required by the civil lawsuit settlements or the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights pursuant to OCR Docket No. 09-18-6901 with any specificness. Instead President Folt’s changes include primarily increases in staffing, renaming of offices, establishing “a robust Division of Human Resources, Equity, and Compliance,” and significantly “a university-wide Policy on Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment and Retaliation that applies to all forms of discrimination and harassment based on protected characteristics, and applies to all students, staff, and faculty.”
Now that’s not to say it was okay to violate and discriminate against people prior to the arrival of USC SVP of Human Resources Felicia Washington, a transfer from UNC Chapel-Hill and VP of Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Title IX Catherine Spear who is somewhat famous in the Title IX and OCR world for her decades of service to OCR and in higher education, most famously at Stanford where she served as Title IX Coordinator during the infamous Brock Turner rape case. These two individuals along with USC General Counsel Beong-Soo Kim, a former Federal prosecutor and Kaiser Permanente executive, and Vice President of Ethics and Compliance/Chief Compliance Officer Stacy Giwa are responsible for overseeing USC’s compliance in these matters.
Now with all due to respect to the COVID-19 pandemic that rocked the world, it’s fair to say that USC has struggled to implement these changes and reduce the reportedly higher than average rate of sexual assault at USC. Amidst major incidents, USC reported last year in 2022 according to its required annual security report under the Clery Act 26 rapes on campus, 3 on public property, 6 on “non campus” and of those disappointingly on campus, 16 were in residence halls. This was little better in 2021 with 16 rapes on campus, 11 of which were in residence halls, with 12 “non-campus” and in 2020 a total of 22 rapes on campus, of which 8 were in dorms, 2 were on public property and 3 were classified as non-campus. This is accompanied by a troublingly increasing “fondling” problem. USC also sees significant numbers of dating violence and stalking, with a spike in the later in 2022 with 49 cases reported on campus.
Statistically speaking at least from the 2023 report, things are not going well. The changes that USC has made clearly aren’t working to address this confidence, and most disappointingly students are understandably losing faith in the internal EEO-TIX process due to its lack of transparency and the perceived controlling influence of the USC administration in limiting bad news. This in fact has been at the heart of bargaining with USC’s new Graduate Student Workers Union formed last summer with overwhelming support. Set to hold a strike authorization vote next week, the union has sought to make these issues part of the union grievance process with outside attorney’s being hired to do investigations instead of USC’s EEO-TIX office.
In their October 16 update, the graduate student union writes “GSWs facing harassment, discrimination, and bullying should not have to turn to internal processes we have no faith in. That’s why 1500 GSWs signed a letter demanding an independent process, and that’s why we rallied for workplace justice back in August.” Despite the suggestion made to me by USC’s VP Spear and SVP of Administration David Wright that in discussing my own case publicly that I plan to undermine the Title IX process at USC, the case is the opposite. In fact, USC’s performance in this arena as drawn 2 OCR Resolution Agreements in the last decade, it is the failures of the institution and the dearth of leadership that undermines the efficacy of Title IX on campus. It’s not me making “1500 GSWs” sign a letter demanding an “independent process” that would be more survivor-centered rather than the current single-investigator model.
If you make a non-criminal complaint at USC for rape as part of the EEO-TIX process, a single person, a trained attorney will be hired to investigate your case. Reportedly many of these cases take an often absurdly long time to resolve, sometimes even more than a year. We don’t really know, USC isn’t required to disclose any EEO-TIX statistics even as it has to disclose certain information under the Clery Act which dates to 1990 and is Federal law. USC is not complying with its obligation under its Resolution Agreement to use a process for self-assessment to remediate these issues, not a single required letter has been sent since Folt and Caruso signed the agreement on February 21, 2020 with the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights.
I’ve repeatedly pressed VP Catherine Spear to do more to produce compliance with this agreement including most importantly providing appropriate information and reporting opportunities so that cases like Mike Bohn’s don’t happen where people don’t report on a timely basis and more incidents happen just as with George Tyndall. The reporting failures with Mike Bohn are just as troubling as the idea that a search firm didn’t uncover prior Title IX complaints, which are expected to be kept private, but not confidential. I’m not suggesting that USC even go as far as California Governor Gavin Newsom did with the stroke of a pen for the California State University System. Just over a month ago I spoke with two attorney’s from OCR about my case again just as I did in May, and the level of resistance, the non-acknowledgement that things are still not right at USC is troubling as when it comes from USC.
In a recent profile of President Carol Folts’ leadership at USC, student journalists writing for the Daily Trojan described her leadership philosophy as held by her staff to be “everything, everywhere, all at once.” So where is President Folt when a USC community wronged cries out for leadership? Nowhere to be found. George is dead, the lawsuits are settled, the least she and Chairwoman Johnson can do is issue a statement to recognize the moment and offer support services to the victims, of whom I am already receiving reports that they are struggling with the grief of a survivors guilt. Why did it happen to me? So as yet another night comes, and as the many woman, and men too impacted by this shameful chapter in USC go to sleep, and deep in their brains the memory of this pain and humiliation flicker, the anger, the catastrophe, the knowledge that we have failed to achieve justice.
If President Carol Folt and Suzanne Nora Johnson won’t step up to the plate here as they say, and lead from the front on this issue, I’m not sure what it’s going to take to get some notice. USC employs the esteemed Dr. Erroll Southers as its Associate Senior Vice President for Safety and Risk Assurance, who has also now become President of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, surely these issues are worth his time? The failures we have seen, whether at USC with the LAPD, or even at other universities are all interrelated. As I told the two OCR attorney’s, my philosophy on this is simple, if you want people to report things, given them tools to report, and then follow-up. I’m not sure how transparent USC can make its EEO-TIX process, but it’s not meeting its information disclosure obligations and that’s where any really good accountability effort starts. To solve any problem, first you have to do some real assessment.
USC has been told what to do, but will anyone follow-up and make them really do it? The Trojan Family deserves more and better from this current batch of leadership, this isn’t going away. So that’s why I’ve written the petition Demand Justice for the Victims of George Tyndall and Change at USC. It is an artful document of investigative journalism designed to bring the issues to the forefront and pressure for real change.
I hope you’ll take a minute to sign it and leave a comment of support. I can assure you that the victims of George Tyndall are washing, and as one member told me once, it’s a bit of a sad sorority. Don’t get me wrong, I love football and tailgates just as much as anyone, but having served in the Office of the Provost for nearly 7 years, I know that the price we pay so often as a community from the conjunction of alcohol, drugs, and sexual violence is preventable just as much as the inaction of administrators in removing the reportedly single-most prolific sexual predator in the history of sexual abuse investigations in the history of United States of America. George Tyndall is dead, let us not forget, and carry on with this good work as one Trojan family.
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Zachary Ellison is an Independent Journalist and Whistleblower in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign including on their newsletter distributed university-wide. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server, and enjoys weekends in the great outdoors.
