The former dean of the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine was convicted in an Ingham County trial Wednesday. William Strampel was found guilty of one felony and two misdemeanors. Strampel was Larry Nassar’s former boss—the former MSU sports doctor who was convicted in 2018 for sexually abusing his patients for decades. Strampel was found not guilty of the more serious charge of second degree criminal sexual conduct. Capital correspondent Cheyna Roth was at Strampel’s trial, she joined WKAR’s Karel Vega to talk about the convictions.
Interview Highlights
The charges and convictions
“He was accused of essentially four things. There were the two charges that related to Larry Nassar, and those were misdemeanors. It was essentially failing to properly oversee him after a 2014 investigation. And then there was this misconduct of a public official charge, and this was a felony where he faces up to five years in prison. And this is the felony that he was convicted of. And essentially it boiled down to the jury agreed with prosecutors that a lot of comments that sample made to female students were an attempt to use his position as dean to get sexual favors from them. And then the final charge, which he was acquitted of, was a second-degree criminal sexual conduct charge. And that stems from a woman who came forward and said that during a school event, William Strampel grabbed her buttocks.”
An issue of power
“The prosecutor was saying, look, ‘He had this position of power and it was corrupting for him and he used that to try and get these women to do sexual favors from him. And while he may not have said specifically, ‘if you do X, I will do y,’ the prosecuting attorney Danielle Hagaman-Clark basically said, ‘Look, he's more sophisticated than that. He knew better than to do that.’ But the things that he did say, like ‘I own you’, and ‘I want you to turn around two times for me’, and ‘you look sexy in a sports car’, things like that were really these attempts by him to try and get them to give him sexual favors.”
The “locker room talk” defense
“Strampel’s attorney John Dakmak argued that, ‘look, there was no quid pro quo because the only people that ever got what they wanted out of these conversations are’—or supposedly wanted— ‘were the women,’ you know, ‘they—they got the exceptions that they went to Strampel and asked him for.’ And then Dakmak also said that ‘Look, my client is,’ you know, ‘he's a former military guy. He's—he’s old,’ more or less, ‘he's in his 70s. And he just engages in rough talk.’ At one point he called it ‘locker room talk’ and said that, ‘This is just part of who he is. He makes lewd comments to everybody that doesn't make it criminal.’”
The Nassar related misdemeanors
“Nassar was not fired, he was not really given any formal sanctions. He was sort of put on leave for a little while, while they were doing the investigation. But when he came back there were these procedures that he was supposed to follow like: wearing gloves during exams, getting permission for doing sensitive exams, having somebody in the room for certain types of exams. And the prosecutor said that it was really on Strampel, as Nassar's boss, to make sure that Nassar followed all of those procedures. And at the end of the day, the prosecution argued and the jury agreed that Strampel did not follow through on that oversight. And as a result, he was charged with the two and convicted of the two misdemeanors.”
Follow Cheyna Roth on Twitter: @Cheyna_R
