MSU Faces Scrutiny Over 17-Month Delay in Reporting Doctor’s Alleged Misconduct
Attorneys and advocates are lambasting Michigan State University as more information comes out about the school’s actions and inactions in response to accusations from patients that a university doctor sexually assaulted them during appointments.
During a Sept. 11 news conference with university police, MSU alerted the public that former MSU doctor Arpit Saxena, 40, faced reports from two female patients who say the physician sexually assaulted them during their medical appointments. At least four women have come forward so far with their accounts of abuse, some contacting attorneys and outlining in court documents their narratives of Saxena abusing them under the guise of medical care.
The Michigan State University Department of Police and Public Safety implores anyone who would like to report criminal activity by Saxena to contact university authorities at 844-996-7873 or tips@police.msu.edu.
There’s much that is unknown at this time about all the ways MSU could’ve prevented sexual abuse from happening on their watch, said Megan Bonanni, an attorney for one of these former patients accusing Saxena of sexual assault, but one failure is already clear.
First reported by the Detroit Free Press, MSU took 17 months from when they removed Saxena from seeing patients on April 7, 2025 to alert the state Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs that an incident had been reported to university police.
The school had a legal obligation under the state Public Health Code to alert the state licensing department within 30 days that Saxena faced disciplinary action that resulted in his clinical privileges being adversely affected, Emily Fitzgerald of the LARA Office of Communications told East Lansing Info in an email.
This means for those 17 months, Saxena would’ve had no red flags crop up under his license from his time at MSU if other employers sought to check his background. Other health facilities would have no indication that he faced accusations of sexual assault at MSU and he could have continued seeing patients elsewhere.
“That is a delay that is inexcusable,” Bonanni said.
There was also a four-day gap in between when MSU Police say they got the initial report of sexual assault from a patient and when they say Saxena was removed from seeing patients on April 7, 2025, Bonanni pointed out. Within that timeframe, a different court filing for another Jane Doe asserts that another female patient was sexually abused by Saxena under the guise of medical care.
It’s a story that some in the Greater Lansing community say they’ve seen play out on MSU’s campus before, harkening back to the Larry Nassar scandal. The disgraced MSU and USA Gymnastics doctor was effectively sentenced to life in prison three times over in 2017 and 2018. Hundreds of women and girls gave their accounts publicly of the sexual abuse they endured by Nassar when they were patients.
Bonanni represented Nassar survivors who received a $138.7 million settlement from the U.S. Department of Justice for failures in investigating reports of Nassar’s abuse, and she said the news of another doctor at MSU facing similar allegations strikes a chord for those who were involved in the various Nassar cases.
“We are committed to keep making institutions accountable, and we’re back because this is very important to our current clients and our former clients. This re-traumatizes people, it’s disappointing to have the honest feeling that this isn’t a surprise,” Bonanni said. “I was hopeful at the end of the Nassar litigation that policies would change, the university’s approach to these problems would change, and this 17-month delay is just solidifying that no, things really haven’t changed. They very well should have taken him off the job immediately. They should have promptly investigated and reported to LARA. Those three things didn’t happen.”
The Court of Claims filing Bonanni filed alongside fellow attorney Lisa Esser, said their client sought help from Saxena on Jan. 9, 2025 for hip pain after childbirth, only to be assaulted during her appointment. The filing expressing intent to pursue a civil claim against Michigan State University for failing to take reasonable measures to prevent her abuse, outlines that Bonanni and Esser’s client thought Saxena’s actions were uncomfortable and unusual, but she was operating with the understanding that Saxena was giving proper medical care.
“It’s extremely confusing because on one hand, you’re taught to trust a doctor fully,” Esser said. “You come to see the doctor. You think ‘no way in the world would the doctor ever harm me. They’re only here to treat me, for good, to make me feel better. They would never do anything nefarious during an exam.’”
During MSU Police’s Sept. 11 news conference, MSU Police Chief Mike Yankowski said the department responded to the first report of sexual violence by Saxena more than a year ago on April 3, 2025, at an MSU Health Care facility as the patient told law enforcement she had just left her appointment with Saxena where she said he had assaulted her.
Due to the seriousness of the allegation made by the patient, Yankowski said Saxena was removed from seeing patients four days later on on April 7.
But that wasn’t enough to protect other patients, said an attorney for a woman who reported that she was sexually assaulted the day after that first report of sexual assault was received by police. According to the Detroit Free Press, Lawrence P. Nolan, the attorney representing another victim, said his client was reduced to tears and confusion after her appointment on April 4, 2025, returning to the MSU Health Care clinic a month later to ask another physician if what Saxena had done was medically appropriate or rape.
In his notice of intent to sue filed in the Court of Claims on behalf of his client in November 2025, the Detroit Free Press reports that Nolan wrote that his client said that during her appointment Saxena “inserted a bare, gloveless finger” into her vagina. Prior to that moment Saxena did not get consent for genital examination, nor asked if she would like a chaperone in the room.
It’s MSU Health Care’s policy that patients are entitled to informed consent for all sensitive examinations and it is required that patients be offered a chaperone for “all sensitive examinations, treatments, procedures, or consultations.” The policy outlines that patients can decline to have a chaperone, but they have to sign a written waiver.
The chaperone policy was one of the changes MSU made in the aftermath of the Nassar scandal with guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to address prevention of sexual violence on campus. But the new policy wouldn’t have helped the Nassar victims and didn’t help Saxena’s patients, Valerie von Frank, a parent of a Nassar survivor, and executive director of Parents of Sister Survivors Engage said.
Nassar got away with sexually abusing patients, several of whom said he inserted his gloveless fingers into their vaginas, under the guise of non-sensitive exams, von Frank said.
“The person has to announce that it’s a sensitive procedure, which by definition takes away the element that they’re using, that these two doctors have used, the current one it’s alleged, but it’s the surprise and the sort of intimation that this is routine and it’s not special and it’s not a sensitive exam, that’s what they have used. That’s what Nassar used to get away with what he got away with,” von Frank said.
The university’s four-day delay in removing Saxena from patient care, is also a red flag to von Frank, recalling that before the public became aware of allegations of sexual violence by Nassar in 2016, MSU received a report in 2014 that a patient said Nassar had sexually assaulted her. For 16 months during the investigation, Nassar continued to see patients, and other patients would later come forward with reports of sexual abuse from that time period.
During the Sept. 11 press conference, Chief Yankowski said MSU Police concluded their criminal investigation and submitted it to the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office on Aug. 28, 2025. On Sept. 3, 2026, Yanakowski said the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office authorized a felony warrant for Saxena’s arrest.
Saxena was arrested the night before the Sept. 11 press conference, Yankowski said, at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, after authorities had attempted to make contact since Sept. 4.
MSU did not return a request for comment on the university’s timeline and why it didn’t alert LARA to the reports against Saxena until Sept. 9, of 2026.
It wasn’t until Sept. 14 or later that MSU notified Bonanni and Esser’s client that Saxena had been accused of sexual assault by patients, their Court of Claims filing reads.
It was only upon receiving that notice that Jane Doe reevaluated what she had experienced during her January 2025 appointment and “understood for the first time that she had been sexually assaulted,” the filing reads.
“They didn’t talk to any of the former patients. We know that, and so what they were doing for 17 months is a complete mystery, and I cannot think of any justifiable reason for that delay. And they have a legal obligation to make that report to LARA in a timely fashion, and they have failed,” Bonanni said.
Even a short delay in institutions addressing sexual violence can have serious consequences, Abbie Tykocki, volunteer advocate at Michigan State University Center for Survivors said to ELi in a written statement.
For there to be meaningful prevention, there is a need for a culture that readily challenges attitudes and power structures that allow sexual violence to carry on. And as systemic failures come to light, these failings need to act as an opportunity to identify how violence has taken a foothold and implement systems that work to fight it.
“This never should have happened, and it is outrageous that it did. I am continually in awe of the courage of survivors who share their experiences in hopes of preventing harm to others,” Tykocki said. “No institution can guarantee these incidents will never happen again, but MSU should always be working to make misconduct harder to conceal, reporting safer, and institutional action faster.”
Though MSU has touted policy and institutional changes to prevent further sexual abuse, they really have never done anything that was outside of liability management, said Tashmica Torok, a local advocate and former head of the Firecracker Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provided services to survivors of childhood sexual abuse during the era of the Nassar abuse.
When she heard of the abuse former MSU patients were reporting, Torok said she called her own doctor to confirm if having a chaperone present for sensitive examinations was a standard practice, and her doctor said it was. MSU has failed to even come up to normal patient safety standards and has certainly not exceeded bare-minimum protections, Torok added.
“I have never had the experience of finding out that an institution has caused harm and seeing them radically change the conditions that allowed that harm to happen in the first place,” Torok said.
Michigan State University, for all of the work that survivors have done for years both during the Nassar fallout and before, has not learned from its past mistakes, Torok said.
And MSU’s actions not only impact the MSU community, they can harm other communities, Torok said. By not alerting the state licensing department that Saxena had been pulled from patient care, MSU contributed to the issue of health systems failing to report abuse by doctors, which can allow them to go elsewhere to continue abuse.
The Greater Lansing community has seen this all before, von Frank said, and after survivors and families mobilized to call on MSU to take accountability for Nassar’s abuse when The Indianapolis Star first broke the news of his actions to the public in 2016, it is hard to see history repeat.
In the coming days the public may learn more about Saxena’s behavior at MSU and what policies may have failed, von Frank said. But the fact that the first report wasn’t treated as an emergency that warranted immediate pause on Saxena’s access to patients, has been a hard reality to grapple with.
“I just find it almost beyond belief that that was not one of the first things that they did,” von Frank said. “I think, as parents and part of the survivor community, the retraumatization, in part, is that we felt like those of us who have been working on this, feel as though we’ve given 10 years, almost a decade of our lives to try to make improvements, to help others out of this, to make things better, so it wouldn’t happen again and it’s almost like a decade of our lives wasted, and effort and pain and time, resources that now they just are almost meaningless because MSU didn’t do the basic right thing.”