Part 75: A Lack of Justice in Los Angeles – The End of the George Tyndall Criminal Case

February 3, 2024

Photo of former Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey and former USC interim President Wanda Austin meeting on January 7, 2019 at USC (from Twitter/X).

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

Yesterday I attended the final dismissal of the People’s case against former University of Southern California gynecologist George Tyndall at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, it was my first time attending the proceedings that have dragged on for years following the disclosure by the Los Angeles Times in May 2018 and Tyndall’s subsequent arrest in June 2019. Tyndall would soon be granted bail in August 2019, and would remain under electronic ankle bracelet monitoring while living at home in Westlake.

I had avoided attending in the past, in the hope that justice would be served to the victims in a court of law, a day that never came. So even as I’ve spoken out for the last 14 months since going public in November 2022 following my hostile termination from USC in August 2022, still I hadn’t gone to the proceedings for fear of somehow spoiling them or being accused of seeking some undue spotlight. This has never been my intention, despite the intimations received from attorneys in the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, San Francisco Office, which ostensibly continues to monitor USC for further violations.

For much of the news media, this is the final chapter in the saga, but for the victims of George Tyndall present the heartbreak of seeing justice slip away was imbued only with the desire to seek further truth about why they never got to see a man, whose misconduct in legal terms we sadly still have to say is alleged, since the Court rendered no verdict. I watched as Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller spoke with victims before the final hearing, and they prepared their statements for the final calendar date of the criminal proceedings which have dragged on now for years without providing any closure to victims.

There’s no question, Dr. George Tyndall was guilty, even as his attorney’s led by Leonard Levine insisted that Tyndall intended to take the stand in his defense, and was in fact, somehow mind bogglingly innocent of committing sexual abuse so severe that more than 700 women went to the Los Angeles Police Department to make reports with 400 plus investigations leading to 116 cases being sent to the District Attorney, and at end, charges on behalf of only 16 victims. Still keeping up the fight for justice were Audry Nafziger, Lucy Chi and Allison Rowland who wrote in October 2021 in the Los Angeles Times describing their lack of confidence in law enforcement.

After the victims spoke in court to Judge Larry Fidler, I watched as Lucy Chi confronted Mueller in the hallway of the maximum security floor. “Was there any political influence,” she said to him up close face-to-face, and I watched as Mueller’s back shot straight up and went blank after having explained to Nafziger that her request to have sensitive video and photographic evidence unsealed would have to be sent “up the chain.” As of now, that remains controversial District Attorney George Gascón, a former LAPD officer himself, who faces a crowded field for re-election in 2024 composed of other attorney’s from his office.

Towering over the proceedings was Rick Caruso, that’s who Chi meant, still a board member at USC having previously served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees following the scandal until after the June 2022 primary for which he sought election as Mayor of Los Angeles. Caruso would lose to his fellow USC alumnus, current Mayor Karen Bass despite outspending her more than 10-1 and fronting his campaign with an ongoing attack against her for having received a questionable scholarship from former USC School of Social Work Dean Marilyn Flynn, for which she would later seek a Congressional Ethics Waiver to secure approval of as a gift. Caruso and his political allies including the LAPD’s union would attack Bass relentlessly over it.

No one from USC was present at the final hearing, and to date, I remain the sole former staff member at USC besides original whistleblower Cindy Gilbert who reported Tyndall in 2016 to go public about my experiences inside the Office of the Provost. As Nafziger noted when I approached to the DA Mueller, I was a particularly high-ranking defector if you will, and it was our human resources personnel that had sought to intimidate Gilbert out of her job for raising concerns about Tyndall, who for more than 27 years as the lead campus gynecologist preyed upon the “Women of Troy” targeting the most vulnerable, and particularly women of Asian descent for victimization.

Similarly, the clinic administrators who would find boxes of incriminating photographs in Tyndall’s office following Gilbert’s report to Rape Crisis Center Director Dr. Ekta Kumar, also reported up the chain through USC Student Affairs to my direct supervisor, the Vice Provost for Academic Operations, Dr. Mark Todd who was leading the efforts underway to incorporate the Engemann Student Health Center into USC Keck Medicine, and later to create a new program to better monitor non-primary care medical practice across the universities educational enterprises. Todd in turn reported to Provost Michael Quick who as the number 2 officer of USC behind only then President Max Nikias supervised USC’s response.

In the lone video documentary to be produced to date about the case, “Breach of Trust” (2019) directed by then USC student Mishal Mahmud, Gilbert is interviewed and she recounts  “And we were told that didn’t matter, this didn’t matter, if that doesn’t matter, then we’re in the wrong place, what matters more than the students, at a student health center?” Gilbert continues, the students have the right to have people take their concerns seriously, and the staff shouldn’t have to see that constantly, and then be retaliated against if they speak up.” Tyndall’s direct supervisor, Dr. Lawrence Neinsten died at age 66 in April 2016, and had reported Tyndall numerous times both to USC’s Human Resources Division and its Title IX Office within the Office of Equity and Diversity.

I would see the people who had retaliated against Gilbert afterwards, and the looks you couldn’t imagine, in fact, I myself was fast becoming a victim of their retaliation. USC didn’t want problems, and Dr. Tyndall was a problem, so even as they went as far as to survey students about Tyndall to see if anything further was amiss, they did not notify his past patients and it would take the similarly brave actions of Los Angeles Times journalist Paul Pringle in defying his own editors to get both the Tyndall story out, as well as the preceding case of Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the former Dean of the Keck School of Medicine. USC leadership would take the action plan developed by our Task Force on Workplace Standards and Employee Wellness and present it to the USC Community after the Tyndall disclosure as response.

It didn’t work, and President Max Nikias would resign in August 2018 after major outcry including a decisive vote of no confidence from the faculty. Past Chairman of the Board John Mork had been set to step down anyway, Mork and his wife Julie had been very engaged in the campus, using their wealth to fund scholarships for USC students. Rick Caruso became Chairman of the Board, and fellow trustee Wanda Austin would become interim President. Caruso through retained both Provost Quick and General Counsel Carol Mauch Amir despite the scandal, it was they who had prepared USC’s response once they learned that Tyndall might practice medicine again and the Times had the story.

I watched as numerous unmistakable 3-hour meetings occurred between Quick and Amir on his calendar, still I had no idea what was to come. So it happened on May 16, 2018, that I learned about Tyndall from my feed on Facebook at my desk in the Bovard Auditorium Building. Later I would encounter both General Counsel Mauch Amir and the former leader of USC HR, Janis McEldowney on separate occasions as I worked to support USC’s supposed attempts to reform its culture. I had been removed from supporting Vice Provost Marty Levine, a law professor, who was Quick’s senior legal advisor because of my reaction to the news. On both occasions, Amir was beyond defiant, declaring in a room full of faculty, staff and USC leaders that conducting these operations in a transparent manner would be “too honest.”

In March 2018, I had sought a performance evaluation on the same basis as other employees within the unit that we directly supervised, Provost Shared Services which included HR support to the Student Health Center. McEldowney responsed much like her response to Gilbert, was to work with my supervisor and Provost Director of Human Resources Kelly Moy to retaliate against me after conceding that I deserved a performance evaluation like other non-exempt employees and giving me one week’s less time intentional to send a message. Moy accused me of “documentation fraud” for having questioned their suppressive response. So when I encountered McEldowney alone, she was scornful and glared at me with mistrust.

I had helped to support project management for the biomedical research building on campus funded in part and named for billionaire Gary Michelson whose name has been in the news recently because current Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked publication of a story about his dog biting a woman. Michelson’s fancy new building had the biggest group video-conferencing capacity, and USC needed consultants to help create the appearance of meaningful response. So I stood there one day operating the equipment as the leadership including Austin and Quick discussed how to respond to the scandal, Nikias’s former Chief of Staff Dennis Cornell was also present and they talked about how to navigate the scandal.

While there may not be smoking gun evidence yet to support the assertions made Nafziger, Chi and Rowland among others that there was an active cover-up, we are closer than ever before to establishing that it occurred across multiple-levels of government including ED OCR, the LAPD, and even the District Attorney’s office to “slow walk” the case as Nafziger has described. Then District Attorney Jackie Lacey, herself a USC alumnus would come to meet with Austin in the infamous meeting posted on Twitter (X) on January 7, 2019. To date, the DA’S office has resisted my requests made under the California Public Records Act for both records in relation to the case broadly, and specific to this meeting.

In fact, the DA’s office recently wrote back that, “Disclosing the identity of persons with whom the Governor has met and consulted is the functional equivalent of revealing the…Governor’s judgment and mental processes.” In legalese, the January 29, 2024 letter continues citing case law from the 1991 decision in Times Mirror Co. vs. Superior Court that, “While the raw material in the appointment calendar is factual, its essence is deliberative” in concluding that the “public interest in withholding the calendar and schedules is considerable and outweighs the public interest in disclosure.” The Governor in reference here is George Deukmejian, and despite widespread speculation that Rick Caruso will seek higher office in California, including the governorship that hasn’t happened, but these questions aren’t going away.

A former President of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, Caruso has repeatedly denied that anything is amiss including under deposition. Tyndall victim Audry Nafziger, now a prosecutor in Ventura County including in sex crimes cases doesn’t believe this is the case, as she re-asserted Friday at the Court, based on her experience and those of other victims with the Tyndall investigation conducted by the LAPD, it did not appear free of political influence. Nafziger told me that one police detective had even conceded as much to her, only to watch her tip to the Los Angeles Times go unfollowed-up, so she stood there on Friday speaking to the assembled press in the Court’s media room.

“Why is it that not one person is investigated at USC by the LAPD? Why is that?" she would tell the television cameras. Chi related how she had been told by the LAPD that all of the Tyndall victims had to be interviewed before they could make an arrest. Tyndall’s defense attorney Levine for his part maintained that the COVID-19 outbreak along with the fact that Tyndall had been granted bail in the first place, helped lead to the more than 5 plus year timeline of the case from start to this present state of unfinished business. Part of the Resolution Agreement signed by USC stipulates that it must increase transparency in reporting on Title IX cases.

Still yet, the machinations within USC that helped to lead to this situation in the first place remain entirely in place. In the last week, following my reporting in December that I had obtained a Title IX Notice of Investigation against a student with a significant public profile, I’ve had two former employees from the same Rape Crisis Center, now known as Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP) come to me with similar allegations of preferential treatment for rich and powerful students, and a near total lack of accountability at USC for students commit sexual misconduct even yet today under USC President Carol Folt.

At the hearing, a young woman approached me to ask whom I was and whether the victims would come to campus for a vigil. She seemed unsettled, I walked with her out of Court, only to walk back to my car to find I had snagged a parking ticket for staying 20 minutes too long after the meter. Allegations such as these at USC go back as far as the 1980s, and USC more than ever has not earned the trust of its students, staff and faculty in handling such matters. USC still retaliates, and it still has a terrible problem with sexual violence. Is there another Dr. George Tyndall at USC? I certainly hope not, but the question of change, and the lack of justice in these proceedings remain.

"I've put my trust in the system,” Nafziger told the media before noting that prominent Scientologist Danny Masterson, "Danny Masterson got two trials and we got none," said Nafziger. "I'm very happy for his survivors, that he got justice, but we got nothing, and it didn't have to be that way." As we sat earlier awaiting the judge, Nafziger had whispered to me “George Tyndall should have died rotting in jail,” and I couldn’t agree more. The miscarriage of justice in this case, and the ongoing cover-ups of rapes, of literal sexual violence of the worst degree at USC continues to go unpunished, and an atmosphere of fear permeates the place.

We all love USC, it’s our alma mater, but the institutional betrayal that the victims of George Tyndall feel, that I feel, and the memories of what happened and even more alarmingly how USC sought to evade accountability at every term remains. Allison Rowland spoke last noting that that victims present were older and more established, “we don’t have careers, we don’t have to worry about getting fired, getting weird comments at work, people thinking we’re unreasonable, we can only do this because we have the luxury of having survived enough years to be able to have some standing.” She continued, “there are so many hundreds of women who don’t have that luxury.”

The Media Room perhaps could have held 100 people, and were all the known victims of George Tyndall’s assaults to have stood there they could have filled the room 7 times over. I stood there in my best black and white, like the Office of the Provost of old, and Chi noticed my attentive posture and came up to ask me if I had law enforcement experience, and so I told her, “I was a park ranger.” In speaking with one of the RSVP counselors this week, the question came up of just how we bring accountability to this issue at USC, and so we discussed, just as I did with the victims, doing more to bring their voices to front,” and to put the pressure where it belongs right back on USC.

“Release the report” Nafziger has diligently reminded me in reference to the independent investigation report that Rick Caruso promised in writing to the USC Community in May 2018. “We commit that this investigation will be independent, comprehensive, expedient and transparent, and our goal is to have it completed by the time students return in the fall” in promising that Steve Olsen and Apalla Chopra from the major law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP would be released. That report has never come, Caruso has even denied that such a document really exists claiming that he overpromised as an eager new Board Chairman. In 2022, O’Melveny & Myers had revenue of over $1 billion dollars, and last year USC ran a surplus of $323 million dollars according to the Daily Trojan.

So why is it that two counselors, one who quit her job 6 months ago over USC’s handling of Title IX complaints, our nation’s fundamental gender equity law have come to me this week to share their stories? It’s not just the cuts to the overnight shift per diem to a Federal minimum wage made by USC to the RSVP Center quietly last October, but rather the care and concern we have for our students. As I discussed with the second counselor, “people who don’t understand why we might not give-up as school employees” in protecting our students. Even beyond the October 2021 blowout over drug-facilitated sexual assaults at a USC fraternity, it’s the routine and ongoing disregard for victims that boggles our mind. USC’s legal interest hasn’t been negated, and according to another source who I must protect, what they describe occurs in USC’s summary Title IX data.

The corruption of our public trust, the erosion of protections for students, staff and faculty has one principle purpose, to avoid litigation and too much accountability that might draw such actions. USC isn’t wrong to push alternative resolution processes, but the legacy of indifference that it reflects is nothing new, and we will expose it no matter where it may lead, or how far down the rabbit hole we must go to find it. On December 4, 2023, I submitted by CPRA request for records related to Dr. George Tyndall, and LAPD’s unit for these has responded with an estimation that they will begin “to produce the requested records by March 4, 2024, and on a rolling basis thereafter, if applicable.” As Rick Caruso told us the inauguration of USC President Carol Folt in 2019, “the truth shall make you free” in reference to the inscription on the Mudd Hall of Philosophy from John 8:32 after describing the Tyndall scandal and quoting Ghandi claiming that “redemption” had been found.

Not a single other official from USC attended the final hearing for George Tyndall, nor have they issued any statement or offered any support or event to acknowledge his passing on October 4. So long as the wall of silence remains, and so long as certain employees there will do anything necessary to keep its secrets. Even as Caruso told the crowd that “at times the university did not do enough, did not listen, did not always hear the voices that mattered the most to us,” USC’s legal operation was at work, The legal struggle would continue in both civil and criminal courts.

After more than 5 plus years since the initial disclosure, we have come to only to reach this point of a lack of justice in Los Angeles. The two vastly different legal settlements, the first a paltry $215 million class-action settlement concluded by Austin, and the later “global agreement” concluded in March 2021 of $852 million signed by Carol Folt demonstrating the power of litigation. Money isn’t what the victims of George Tyndall wanted, what I saw in court was the desire to ensure that accountability occurred where it needed to be, and not just in USC’s pocket book. A trial would have undoubtedly been tremendous negative media exposure for USC, which paid Tyndall a settlement that Nafziger believes totaled $200,000 to remain quiet.

The saddest part by far of how this has unfolded is that trust at USC in the administration is at an all-time low, and it’s not just because of this case. USC’s refusal to adequately reform its Title IX process is an open secret, business as usual like they say over at City Hall. In failing to consistently hold perpetrators of sexual assault accountable, USC seeks an easy escape, avoid legal battles with powerful young men, and hope that women go away quietly. Tyndall’s attorney Leonard Levine planned to argue that the Los Angeles Times had given rise to the allegations, that would have been a terrible defense. The truth will come out soon enough.

Link: Ex-USC gynecologist George Tyndall's case dismissed following death last year

Link: Criminal case dismissed against former USC gynecologist who died last year

Link: Op-Ed: USC and prosecutors owe the public a full account of sex abuse inquiries

Link: Breach of Trust Documentary

Link: Message on Independent Investigation and Presidential Transition

Link: Wanda Austin and Jackie Lacey Meeting

Link: The Inauguration of Carol L. Folt

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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.