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8:03 am | August 23, 2018 | Go to Source | Author:

11:57 AM ET

Dan Murphy
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ESPN Staff Writer
- Covers the Big Ten
- Joined ESPN.com in 2014
- Graduate of the University of Notre Dame
John Barr
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ESPN.com

A judge in Ingham County, Michigan, issued warrants Thursday morning for the arrest of Kathie Klages, the former Michigan State gymnastics coach and longtime friend of convicted sexual predator Larry Nassar.

The Michigan Department of Attorney General has charged Klages with two counts for lying to a peace officer — one is a felony count, while the other is a misdemeanor. The felony is punishable by up to four years in prison if Klages is found guilty; the misdemeanor is punishable by up to two years in prison.

The attorney general has contacted Klages’ attorney and said she needs to turn herself in to be arraigned before the end of the week.

“While investigating how Larry Nassar was able to get away with sexually assaulting hundreds of individuals on and off Michigan State’s campus, Klages denied to Michigan State Police detectives having been told prior to 2016 of Nassar’s sexual misconduct,” the Attorney General’s office said in a statement released Thursday. “Witnesses have said that they reported Nassar’s sexual abuse to Klages dating back more than 20 years.”

Klages coached the Michigan State gymnastics team for 27 years before retiring in February 2017. The day before her retirement she was suspended by then-athletic director Mark Hollis because of a meeting she held with her gymnasts shortly after Nassar was arrested for criminal sexual conduct in the fall of 2016.

Former Michigan State gymnast Lindsey Lemke said Klages asked the team to sign a sympathy card for Nassar after he was arrested and, in that same meeting, an athletics department staffer discouraged the gymnasts from answering any questions about the man who served as a team doctor for the university for more than two decades.

Hollis told Klages in a letter that her suspension was a result of her “passionate defense of Dr. Nassar, [which] created an emotionally charged environment for the team.”

Klages and Nassar first worked together in the late 1980s at a youth gymnastics club in Michigan. Nassar worked with her gymnastics teams at Michigan State for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has since admitted, he used his authority as a physician to sexually assault young female patients under the guise of medical treatment.

Larissa Boyce, a former youth gymnast who attended camps on Michigan State’s campus coached by Klages, said she tried to warn Klages about Nassar’s abuse in 1997. Boyce, 16 at the time, says she told Klages that Nassar abused her. A second gymnast, who was 15 at the time and in that same meeting with Klages and Boyce, told ESPN that she informed Klages that Nassar had also inappropriately touched her during treatment sessions. Nassar had access to both teenagers in a basement training room in Michigan State’s Jenison Fieldhouse.

Boyce and the second gymnast said Klages did not believe the two teenaged girls and discouraged them from lodging any type of formal complaint against Nassar. She said that Klages didn’t tell their parents or any one else about their discussion. Boyce said she felt “silenced” by Klages.

“I said that he was putting his fingers inside of me … and that it was uncomfortable, and at that point she just said she couldn’t believe that was happening that was somebody she trusted and knew for years,” Boyce said in an interview with ESPN last year.

Klages’ attorney has previously declined to comment on any allegations made against the former coach. They did not respond immediately to requests for comment Thursday morning.

Klages is the second former university employee to be charged with a crime as a result of the attorney general’s ongoing investigation into how Michigan State handled the Nassar situation. Attorney General Bill Schuette, who is currently running for governor in Michigan, called for the investigation in February, shortly after Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years in state prison for first-degree criminal sexual conduct charges.

In March, prosecutors charged William Strampel, Nassar’s former boss as the dean of Michigan State’s osteopathic school of medicine, with four crimes including a felony for misconduct in a public office. A report issued by prosecutors at the time he was charged said Strampel used his post as the medical school’s dean to ” “harass, discriminate, demean, sexually proposition, and sexually assault female students.”

The investigation, led by a former prosecutor hired by the attorney general’s office as an independent special prosecutor, remains opens. Schuette said in February that the investigation was intended to determine if anyone at the university mishandled sexual assault allegations.

At least six different women at Michigan State say they told university officials about Nassar’s inappropriate behavior in the late 1990s and beyond. Michigan State agreed this spring to pay $500 million to settle civil lawsuits related to the Nassar case.