Part 37: A Crisis of Accountability at USC? Investigations and Los Angeles Journalism
Published August 26, 2023
Photo: New USC athletic director Jennifer Cohen, left, and president Carol Folt confer during Cohen’s introductory press conference on August 21, 2023. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
One year ago today I was terminated by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. I’ve been let go before, but this was something else because USC after nearly 9 years as a student and employee decided to attempt to intimidate me in order to scare me away from communicating with the outside world. This was something else, and it culminated in USC’s own security official who I have not named for credible fear of retaliation confronting its own human resources official in a way that the highest-levels of the university have suggested is unwelcome. From their perspective, I’m simply a trickster who undermined the university from the inside in a misguided and desperate effort to escape accountability.
USC was scared of me, and so the USC hit team did what does, as a July 2020 whistleblower lawsuit alleged to near perfection. Respected journalist Larry Altman in summarizing the case for KCET, the local PBS, would write:
An attorney who investigates workplace misconduct at USC has filed suit against the institution, alleging administrators destroyed or hid records in cases against the college’s top officials, maintained “shadow files” on employees, and used their accountability office as a “hit team” to retaliate against professors that spoke out against university leadership.
USC would defeat this lawsuit in Federal court on September 20, 2022 on the grounds that the claims did not fall outside the scope of its mandatory arbitration agreement, a required condition of employment. Arbitration in the case was set for March 11–15, 2024. The lawsuit also claimed that USC had destroyed evidence related to former USC gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall, who will also face trial next year. According to journalist Terri Vermeulen Keith writing for City News Service in the Los Angeles Daily News, Judge Larry Fidler arraigned Tyndall after a previous preliminary hearing two weeks ago found sufficient evidence for trial after more than 5 years.
USC denied the July 2020 whistleblower lawsuit and USC has also denied any knowledge of sexual abuse being committed by George Tyndall prior to the 2018 Los Angeles Times reporting by Paul Pringle, Matt Hamilton, Harriet Ryan and others. On August 19, 2020, USC President Carol Folt and Beong-Soo Kim would meet with the USC Academic Senate via Zoom amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, this body representing USC’s faculty to discuss among other things this lawsuit and the response to the Tyndall sexual abuse scandal for which Tyndall will face “18 felony counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person.” Kim would offer to return to meet with the Senate following the conclusion of the whistleblower lawsuit and Folt would tell faculty questions on USC’s scandal response by telling them “there is a lot going on” and that there “ “true tsunami of issues that are coming toward us.”
Carol Folt wasn’t wrong. USC would face continuing challenges, and even as USC faculty would call for an independent investigation by an outside law firm into the claims, no investigation would occur. Nor would USC ever produce the independent investigation report promised by then USC Chairman of the Board of Trustees Rick Caruso in 2018 in response to the Tyndall scandal despite announcing that it had hired two attorney’s Steve Olson and Apalla Chopra from the prestigious firm O’Melveny and Myers. One might wonder if USC committed a serious blunder by promising the entire USC community such a report, so even as USC has blamed me for attempting to expose the reality behind the “hit team” and it’s lack of compliance with its Resolution Agreement with the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, which earned me enmity from none other than USC General Counsel Beong-Soo Kim, SVP of Human Resources Felicia Washington along with others including USC Vice President of Professionalism and Ethics Michael Blanton.
USC’s most recent challenge is the forced resignation of its Athletic Director Mike Bohn after a supposed management review crossed into exactly this type of independent investigation. As journalist Ryan Kartje writing for the Los Angeles Times would report:
The university retained Gina Maisto Smith, a Philadelphia-based attorney from Cozen O’Connor, earlier this year to conduct that review, according to multiple people who attended a meeting earlier this year where the review was announced.
During the meeting, USC general counsel Beong-Soo Kim told attendees the review wasn’t targeting a specific person, but instead was meant to ensure the department had a work environment that was compliant with university policy. Smith began interviewing members of the department in March.
Cozen O’Connor describes Smith on its website as “the founder of the nation’s first practice dedicated to the institutional response to sexual and gender-based harassment, violence, child abuse, elder abuse, other forms of discrimination and harassment, workplace misconduct, and criminal conduct.”
USC’s “management” review while clearly touching on some potential leadership issues as has been reported including Bohn’s inattendance at meetings and events, along with lack of responsiveness to staff was quite obviously centered around a Title IX investigation, the law that protects gender equity in the nation’s educational institutions and extends to employees as well as students. This would be less problematic if USC hadn’t agreed to ostensibly separate its legal office, the Office of General Counsel under Kim from Title IX matters.
The agreement couldn’t be clearer, in its first section it divorces USC’s legal interest as an employer from Title IX matters in dissolving USC’s prior Title IX office and establishing a new one that since July 2020 has been led by USC Vice President Catherine Spear. The U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights pursuant to OCR Case Number 09–18–6901 writes:
A. A newly-structured Office of Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX (Title IX Office) will report to the newly-hired Senior Vice President for Human Resources. Under this structure, neither the Title IX Office nor the Senior Vice President for Human Resources report, either directly or indirectly, to the General Counsel.
So if Beong-Soo Kim is supposed to be out of it as soon as Title IX issues are discovered, and non-legal personnel are charged with leading response by the US Government, why is Kim hiring lawyers to conduct investigations that clearly relate to Title IX matters? USC’s Resolution Agreement signed by Carol Folt and Rick Caruso on February 21, 2020 agrees to this condition because in OCR’s findings they found that USC’s prior General Counsel, who retains Emeritus status, Carol Mauch Amir “may have exceeded its advisory role to the point of undermining the autonomy and independence of the Title IX Coordinator and OED [Office of Equity and Diversity].” USC failed to inform OCR of concerns regarding George Tyndall despite being required to by its prior Resolution Agreement signed January 29, 2018.
This agreement signed pursuant to OCR Docket Numbers 09–13–2294 and 09–16–2128 centered around USC’s dissemination of policies and information and the handling of student complaints. Has USC simply forgotten its obligations to divorce its legal interests from Title IX matters as required by the government? USC engaged in similar behavior in October 2021 in response to drug-facilitated sexual assaults at campus fraternities, not only did USC fail to warn its students about reports that it occurred, after canceling a student lead discussion it held a meeting hosted on Zoom by Carol Folt, Beong-Soo Kim, Felicia Washington, and Catherine Spear among others, and now keeps this recording secret. It’s not that I agree with the many USC football fans who feel that Carol Folt and her team are too woke, it’s that I don’t think they’ve learned the lesson of George Tyndall, that maintaining an atmosphere of secrecy actually inhibits reporting.
USC has failed to meet other aspects of its compliance as my whistleblowing career inside the Office of the Provost exposed catching USC failing to distribute its required Title IX Notice in September 2021 and then failing to make a reasonable attempt to update the name of its Title IX office across numerous university webpages. It’s the shocking conclusion though that sticks with me, the poker game that became my employment culminating with USC producing as a threat a complaint from an ex-girlfriend from July 2019 in August 2022. USC of course could only locate this file after much prodding, and then threatened it. To this day, despite nearly 10 months of internal investigation, USC continues to defend Michael Blanton’s right to begin his meeting with me on August 22, 2022 by telling me: “Your week is about to get worse! What happened with your girlfriend? Have a break-up?”
USC through its hired outside investigator Rebecca Speer maintains that this was some form of discipline, OCR says that’s a negative comment. My experience has been that Carol Folt hasn’t really changed the culture of USC in quietly exiting the officials the U.S. government identified (who represented only a few), but rather they maintained the prior administrations response, and the kept its retaliation machine. USC would then produce a one-sided account of me rebuking Michael Blanton for the comment. So USC still very selectively manages its investigations, along with its personal files, just like as the whistleblower described, as a “hit team.” The anonymous July 2020 whistleblower wasn’t lying. Even USC’s respected Senior Vice President of Administration David Wright and Associate Senior Vice President Dr. Erroll Southers, the newly elected President of the Los Angeles Police Commission defends this behavior from Michael Blanton and refused to even bring forward an allegation of retaliation under Title IX.
The allegations about Mike Bohn are troubling, they include accounts of USC employees confronting him about his behavior. So it was, that I confronted Michael Blanton for his comment, and then USC’s security official and I questioned by former supervisor USC Vice Provost Mark Todd and Associate Vice President Melissa Gerdes-Leonard about this action. They had no explanation for this behavior and displayed the most incriminating behavior, indeed USC’s human resources representative had told us cavalierly that the “USC Department of Public Safety lacked the resources to keep the campus safe” after telling me that a uniformed police officer was awaiting me should I object to strongly to the threat.
In accusing me of undermining the Title IX process by seeking accountability, USC undermines its own credibility and so it has been no surprise that both USC and the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights have also sought to maintain that the Resolution Agreement is being upheld. Even as USC dragged its feet for years on making it possible to report issues confidentiality through its performance evaluation process on the electronic Workday system, both USC and OCR maintain that the Agreement is being fully upheld. Nothing could be further from the truth. In forgetting the lessons of the past, and in placing its lawyers in charge of Title IX related investigations, USC betrays that agreement and it shows the consistent theme since Caruso’s takeover in May 2018, that secrecy and accountability are compatible.
No one wants to violate anyone’s privacy, but the legal interest of the university can’t shield the truth fully, no one needs the details, but the lack of clear explanation from USC’s leadership again should set off alarm bells. I’m not against Carol Folt, but I do fear that she has failed to learn from the downfall of former President Max Nikias, that you can’t out-run problems or the truth. So it was that this last Monday, USC for the first time hired a woman to be its new Athletics Director, Jennifer Cohen from Washington University, a well-respected individual. Los Angeles Times journalist Dylan Hernandez attempted to question Folt about the handling of the Bohn matter yet again, Folt having refused to sit for interview, and got the brush off. Hernandez would write: “Nonetheless, is this the kind of behavior a university wants from its leader, especially a university that dramatically improved its academic standings in the last couple of decades to where it is no longer viewed as the University of Spoiled Children?
It’s not that anyone wants USC to violate Mike Bohn’s privacy rights, or to unfairly march its own past leadership to accountability, it’s that the pattern that’s developing here is exactly the opposite of the “safety and transparency” that Rick Caruso had promised in 2018. Yes, they removed Mike Bohn after complaints, and yes George Tyndall will go on trial, and perhaps USC will lose in in arbitration to the July 2020 whistleblower, and perhaps even they might come around to respecting me for exposing the behavior of the supposed hit team. I’m not holding my breath though, and every day OCR doesn’t respond to my pending complaint, it just makes you wonder. Is it really possible that more than 5 years after George Tyndall, USC still hasn’t learned its lesson yet. When you snuff the whistleblower as they did to former USC nurse Cindy Gilbert, and to myself, and you don’t reveal any details as part of your investigations, just what do you expect to happen? The press to go quiet and people in the community to be unconcerned. They say that whistleblowers suffer moral injury, that strikes at the heart, and compels us to take dangerous actions.
People question whether the second discussion we had on August 26, 2022 about whether or not USC’s Senior Vice President of University Relations had knowledge of or possession of scandalizing recordings happened. Was it simply that the writing was on the wall? I’m simply a great intelligence analyst, who dreams things up. Did Santos Leon, the alleged executioner of the now infamous leak that resulted in the Los Angeles Times winning Pulitzer Prizes for the aftermath act alone? The former Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO Director of Public Finance Leon is allegedly behind this act and has been the subject of search warrants by the Los Angeles Police Department last month. I’m not sure, a year has elapsed, but I do think there are unanswered questions. The LAPD and LA Fed internal investigations both remain ongoing, and we can only await further updates on responsibility for the leak.
The recordings of Nury Martinez, Kevin de León, Gil Cedillo, and Ron Herrera given to us in their discussion by whistleblower “Honest-Finding-1581” get to the core of the issues with USC. The Los Angeles Times other than in its transcription hasn’t printed a single article that discusses the USC section of the recordings, and how they go through the litany of USC scandals: the drug use and controlling abusiveness of former USC Keck Medicine Dean Carmen Puliafito, Dr. George Tyndall, the “cochino” (pig-pervert) gynecologist as Nury says, the Operation Varsity Blues Admission scandal, and of course the trial of Mark Ridley-Thomas for demanding bribes from “la viejita” (little old lady) former USC Social Work Dean Marilyn Flynn, who is now highest-ranking official to face any accountability for USC’s scandals.
So it is that Nury talks with Carol Folt before the meeting on October 18, 2021, and Kevin de León talks with Sam Garrison, Caruso’s former Chief of Staff, and we hear the recording:
Kevin de León: They really went after it. I was with Gene Block yesterday from UCLA and we’re at this event for the Chinese massacre, at UCLA. They’re really combative. … When the L.A. Times gets a bug up their ass, you know, they just like… So I talked to Sam Garrison the other day, who is the GR, he reports directly to Carol Folt.
Nury Martinez: The son of Jim Garrison?
Kevin de León: Yeah, the son of Jim Garrison. He told me that a couple of reporters got Pulitzer Prizes.
Nury Martinez: The son of Jim Garrison?
Kevin de León: Yeah, the son of Jim Garrison. He told me that a couple of reporters got Pulitzer Prizes.
The reporters can keep running after Carol Folt, that’s as close as they are going to get. Even as Rick Caruso veers towards another run for mayor, and even as a trial of George Tyndall veers on for yet another years, you’ve really got to wonder about what goes on at USC. Federal prosecutors are seeking six years prison time for Mark Ridley-Thomas this coming Monday at sentencing, Flynn having gotten off with probation, home-confinement and a fine, so you have to wonder, will USC really out-run the past? People tell me that I just lost my job, and I agree after nearly 7 years it’s enough to drive anyone a little crazy, and no, I didn’t just figure out that USC is corrupt. I’m simply someone who still thinks that the Trojan Family deserves better than these games and that accountability is still possible, but it starts at the top, and then it goes down.
So it was that we learned that the unreported father of Sam Garrison, Caruso’s right-hand man, Jim Garrison is a major Democratic donor, whose given money to both Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo in the past, but not Nury Martinez. Moreover, he gives money to Caruso’s opponent Karen Bass whom Caruso and his allies at the Los Angeles Police Protective League spent millions skewering over the course of the 2022 Los Angeles elections, the fallout of which continues even as we see more than 5 years of USC scandal history slowly moving forward.
What will we learn next? I’m not sure, but I’m staying tuned, and I’m not giving in to USC so easily. They may not give the faculty the independent investigation they demanded, and they may tilt mine against me even as they assure me of fair treatment, but can USC really outrun everyone? It’s not that Paul Pringle and the Los Angeles Times had “a bug up their ass” as Kevin de León says, it’s simply that they didn’t turn away from abuse and wanted answers. Moving on doesn’t just mean forgetting, it means accountability, and that has been sadly quite lacking on a number of fronts. Justice matters the most when people believe it’s the full and complete truth. Right now, we don’t have that, and that’s the problem that can’t be outrun, not even with legs.
Perhaps the most glaring lapse from USC’s compliance with its current Resolution Agreement is that it has not sent a single annual letter to the USC community as required in Section VIII.B. which requires USC’s Title IX Coordinator Catherine Spear on an “annual basis” to “provide a written report” to its leadership “regarding the status of the implementation of the plan, including the actions taken and an assessment of their effectiveness as well as proposals for the next academic year.” USC is also required to share “similar information to the University community in annual letter to the community.” USC has not issued a single letter despite being held to account for its lack of compliance with this very agreement in January 2022 by the U.S. Department of Education Department and then again in June 2022 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.
If there was a test for accountability, USC has failed this test repeatedly in the pass and there are little signs of learning improvement, even government recommended taking places beyond President Folt trying to ride out the tsunami of problems. It’s not USC is unsafe, or people shouldn’t file complaints or being issues to light, it’s that so many people already don’t trust USC to the right thing and that the lack of transparency about the past, about USC’s ongoing Title IX issues makes it impossible to get ahead of the curve. As recently as 2019, the Los Angeles Times journalist Teresa Watanabe reported that USC “31% of female undergraduates saying they were sexually assaulted sometime during their college years.”
USC didn’t just fail with its search firm on Mike Bohn, it’s not just that he didn’t pass the background check from his prior position as Athletic Director at the University of Cincinnati, it’s that it happened again at USC. In the wake of the October 2021 drugging incident, USC launched a working group that to comedic media delight suggested hiring chaperones to stand outside the bedrooms in fraternity houses. Apparently, Bohn wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps USC’s Culture Journey hadn’t reached him, but it’s that a member of the leadership team of Carol Folt is the culprit this time. Yes, they removed him, but these repeated incidents demonstrate a continuing lack of effectiveness in checking high-profile problems. So you have to wonder what happens on a routine basis at USC, and just what exactly stops the next major incident, because from my experience, USC doesn’t want change from the inside and will deliberately act against those its views as rocking the boat. It simply uses it’s retaliation machine.
I wasn’t the perfect employee, but I was making changes, and I righteously took down an extortionate termination proceeding. If I were to allow USC to silence me, to end my questions, and to simply dispose of me as a disgruntled employee I’d be giving them exactly what they want without accountability. USC did not respond to repeated requests for comment including to its Communications unit and senior leaders. USC has previously declined to comment for this series. USC defines accountability in its Culture Journey as follows: “At all levels of the university, we set clear expectations and take responsibility for our actions, decisions, outcomes and consequences.” USC inflicted its consequences on me, so be it, but what about the USC community? What good comes from allowing them to continue with business as usual?
The truth is that we make our own answers. For USC to be successful, it doesn’t just need to win at football, put the scandals behind it, and stop new ones from happening, it needs to be accountable, it has to live up to its own principles. As an educational institution, USC isn’t just about the news, in fact, in an ideal world there would be no bad news about USC, but by running from its past USC does its own identity a disservice. USC needs to be consistent in making changes and not just when problems arise, and that means not just removing leaders when they engage in bad behavior but also when they are ineffective, and not covering-up mistakes. For the victims of USC’s abuses, silencing whistleblowers won’t stop the misbehavior, and the lawyers won’t either. The test of accountability is leadership, and that continues to be somewhat lacking.
USC as a University isn’t organized crime, or conspiracy, but sometimes those within it act in exactly that way, and in doing that, in failing to do more than issue opaque and even sometimes dishonest statements in the past as with George Tyndall, they fall short of that promise of accountability. The legal of interest of the University cannot be its sole shining beacon, sometimes it’s USC that’s going to take the hit, and it needs to stop the hits on its critics. To the extent that USC was able to traumatize me even as I was trying to hold it accountable, the real question continues to be the same as in May 2018, how do we get to the “safety and transparency” that we all want. Is the answer really just lawyers and the occasional firing? Silencing the whistleblowers will only make USC less safe, and prevent meaningful accountability through prompt, fair, and equitable investigations that withstand scrutiny.
The solution isn’t always an independent investigation, or even going to the press. What USC needs is more engagement, particularly in the operations of its staff. The issues with Mike Bohn could have been detected and stopped much sooner had reports been made consistent with USC’s policy the same as they could have been with a decades long paper trail on George Tyndall. It’s not that Mike Bohn is an evil man, and even George Tyndall maintains his innocence, it’s the lack of engagement with the USC community, the inability, or perhaps the unwillingness to answer all questions with honesty. Confrontation with the truth, to be safe place, to stop the tsunami of scandals, USC must be much more open with itself and press even when it hurts, because you can’t sail away from your problems. USC needs to do the work!
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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.
