Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick has been linked to the USA Gymnastics sexual abuse scandal after previously undisclosed witness statements from a related lawsuit were obtained by a news outlet.
According to a former longtime USA Gymnastics employee, in remarks made during an explosive court deposition in June 2018, workers were instructed to report sexual misconduct complaints not to law enforcement or social services agencies, but instead forward them to the organization's own attorneys.
Among those lawyers was Swarbrick, who then worked for an Indianapolis-based law firm which represented the national gymnastics organization. Swarbrick, who was hired as Notre Dame AD in 2008, and later his successors, would then decide whether to forward the allegations to law enforcement, the employee said.
The deposition was first obtained by the Orange County Register.
The apparent policy of keeping abuse complaints in-house came down even though employees of the youth sports organization had been informed that they were considered mandated reporters of sexual misconduct involving children, and therefore compelled by law to report it, the story said. The in-house policy predated the disturbing revelations about years of abuse by the disgraced former team physician Larry Nassar.
The sworn deposition, which came as part of a series of lawsuits filed in California over the abuse allegations, was given by a former top aide to former USA Gymnastics CEO Steve Penny, who stepped down in 2017 after the scandal broke. The aide, identified as Renee Jamison, later served as a director for administrative relations, the story said.
Penny came under withering criticism before his resignation, including from from US gymnastics star Dominique Moceanu, for allegedly burying complaints.
Jamison indicated the reporting policy prevented officials at USA Gymnastics from forwarding complaints of Nassar's abuse to Michigan State sooner, and revealed earlier conversations about how to handle such reports about Nassar.
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