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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Robert Anderson's survivors1 are seeking justice from the university that ignored them for decades
Let’s begin with the people whose names we don’t know.
The hockey player on scholarship who picked the University of Michigan over other Division I programs because it was his favorite and first choice.
The wrestler3 who grew up in a large family in a blue-collar neighborhood, where a university coach sat on the couch of his parents’ home and promised the team would take care of their son.
The track and field athletes. The golfer. The volleyball player. Tennis. Football. There’s the equipment manager who calls that part of his life a “golden time.”
What all these men have in common: medical exams with a respected physician that took a dark turn.
That doctor was Robert E. Anderson. Since February, when the Detroit News broke the story of the first man to speak out about how Dr. Anderson abused him, hundreds have come forward. Their stories span more than three decades, beginning in the 1960s. Some women, too, are among his accusers, including a member of the first women’s varsity tennis team. Anderson’s reputation was so well known, he had a nickname: “Dr. Drop-Your-Drawers.” Coaches and other university officials knew, some said, and not only did they not intervene—they joked about it.
It’s not just students, either. Community members are among the John and Jane Does in legal filings. There are pilots who were directed to Anderson’s door by the Federal Aviation Administration for mandated4 check-ups. Others saw him for life insurance physicals. And still others sought out Anderson in the Vietnam era because he was known for delivering evaluations5 that kept men out of a bloody6 war.
Anderson died 12 years ago. He was a bespectacled 80-year-old man with a square face, a receding7 thatch8 of white hair, and a shining reputation. At his funeral in Ann Arbor9, football coach Lloyd Carr called him “a tremendous asset in this community.”
The doctor is not here to answer for his actions. Most—but not all—of the people accused of enabling him are gone too.
What, then, does justice look like?
At other universities where students were vulnerable to sexual predators10 under the guise11 of medical treatment—Michigan State, Ohio State, and the University of Southern of California, just for starters—that abuse was magnified when leaders failed to acknowledge, investigate, and correct the failures of the institution.
The University of Michigan appears eager to write a different story. It doesn’t dispute that Anderson was an abuser. Indeed, the chair of the board of regents said that he too was harmed by the doctor, back when he wrestled12 for the university. The university has apologized.
Michigan also trumpeted13 a hotline for survivors to receive free, confidential14 counseling. And it hired a D.C. law firm to do an investigation15 that it describes as independent, promising16 to make the report available to the public the same day the university receives it.
But many survivors and advocates say this isn’t enough. The University of Michigan gave Anderson both opportunity and credibility, even after administrators17 and coaches became aware of his actions. Scores have filed lawsuits18, though many held out space for less adversarial ways to find truth and reconciliation19.
“For the university to do what they have done, which is basically just to say, ‘gee, I’m sorry,’ that is not enough,” said Robert Julian Stone, the first to publicly share his story.
When it comes to abuse, time collapses20. It doesn’t matter if someone’s so-called exam was decades ago; the horror and helplessness last. It affects your intimate relationships, your sense of self, even your health. In Stone’s case, it was the beginning of an enduring aversion to doctors. Another survivor2, Chuck Christian22, who played football for Coach Bo Schembachler, also avoided medical care after Anderson’s abuse, especially prostate checks. His terminal prostate cancer was diagnosed late.
In searching for the fairest resolution of complex harms, restorative justice experts say much depends on the questions we ask. The legal system asks: “What is the rule? Who broke it? How hard should we punish them?” said Rick Shafer, who oversees23 a conflict resolution program at Michigan State University.
Conversely, a restorative justice model asks: “What happened? Who was affected24, and how? How do we make things right?”
Those questions are especially pertinent25 when the perpetrator of decades of violence is no longer around. Sarah Klein, who was one of the first accusers of Larry Nassar and is now a lawyer representing Anderson survivors, said the conversation is no longer just about whether the accused is guilty or innocent, or how long a prison term should be. It’s about how systematic26 sexual abuse, spanning more than a generation, happens in the first place.
“The answer,” said Klein, “is never ‘he did it in a vacuum and nobody ever knew about it.’”
“You go to Dr. Anderson.”
Forget the cultural ferment27 of Ann Arbor in the late ‘60s. In those years, the scarcely controlled chaos28 at the University Health Service came down to bland29 old problems: not enough space, not enough money.
In early fall of 1968, UHS chose Dr. Robert E. Anderson to turn it around. Anderson was a physician for the football team who had also worked at the student clinic for a couple years. A native of L’Anse, Michigan, a village in the western Upper Peninsula, Anderson had been both valedictorian and president of his high school class. He got his medical degree at the University of Michigan, and did his residency at a Flint hospital. While in private practice, he developed a program to provide free exams to high school athletes.
As UHS director, Anderson did not immediately solve the space and money woes30. But he made some changes. Evening clinics started seeing more patients. Admin offices were repurposed as exam rooms, and closets repurposed as offices. A space in the basement was remodeled as a small immunization clinic. A day room was set up for in-patients, where they could play cards, read, or watch a color television.
In Anderson’s account of his first year on the job, he made note of another change.
“Since the Director doubles as a physician and administrator,” Anderson wrote in 1969, “a former conference room was remodeled to form the administration suite31 connecting with the physician’s office and examining room.”
Two years later, a student named Robert Stone walked into that room.
A dark-haired, dark-eyed young man with a neatly32 trimmed goatee, Stone loved being in Ann Arbor, especially in a time of profound social change. He studied English, theatre, and speech, and at every turn, he met smart and engaged people.
Coming to college had been a big change. He was the only child of two Detroit factory workers who raised him late in life. As a brainy kid with no interest in sports, he felt like a Martian at home. “By the time I had finished tenth grade,” Stone said, “I had gone further in the educational system than either of my parents.”
To get through school, he spent his summers at the Uniroyal factory, inspecting 640 tires a day, eight hours a day, five days a week, four months a year. At school, he washed dishes in the cafeteria of the Mosher-Jordan dormitory. When one of his dorm friends decided33 to pledge a fraternity, Stone decided to pledge too.
His junior year, Stone dated two people, a woman and a man, and he enjoyed being with them both—but that was confusing. “It was not really possible to be bisexual in our society,” Stone said.
Right around the time Stone ended his relationships, one of his sexual partners told him he might have been exposed to an infection. Stone didn’t have symptoms, but, concerned, he called a gay friend for advice.
“What do I do?” Stone asked.
“Oh, no problem,” the friend said, as Stone remembered. “You go to Dr. Anderson.”
The friend gave him the direct number to Anderson’s office, saying that the physician “takes care of all the gay guys in Ann Arbor and he doesn’t make any of those nasty referrals to the public health department.”
This was important. The American Psychological Association considered homosexuality a mental illness, and, according to the law of the state of Michigan, it was a crime.
“Tell him I sent you,” the friend added.
Stone took the number and called the office. He got an appointment two days later.
When he arrived, Anderson called him into his consultation34 room—a nice space facing west, with light pouring through Venetian blinds. A photo of Anderson with his wife and children beamed up at him. After Stone explained why he was there, Anderson steered35 him to the adjacent exam room.
Here, as Stone remembered it, Anderson asked him: “Well, first, let me, let me ask you, if you know how to identify the signs of the sexual infection.”
Stone was a little taken aback. He wasn’t inexperienced. He knew he didn’t have symptoms. And yet, the doctor began lecturing him about whether he knew how to pull back the foreskin on his penis to see if there is discharge.
“Well, wait, I’m circumcised,” Stone interrupted. “So really, that’s not an issue for me.”
“Well, let me show you,” Anderson said, as Stone recalled. Despite Stone’s objections that this wasn’t at all necessary, Anderson unfastened his belt. “Let me show you on my penis.”
With his pants hanging loosely below his hips21, the doctor sat on the examination table and pulled back his foreskin. He asked Stone to come over for a closer look.
Hesitatingly, Stone got up from his chair and stepped closer. Then Anderson laid down on the exam table, took Stone’s hand, and moved it over his penis.
Okay, Stone told himself, his mind racing36. I know what this is, and I know what it isn’t, and it certainly is not a medical examination. ...You need to get yourself out of this situation as quickly as you can.
At the same time, he didn’t want the doctor to get away with staging a weird37 faux medical demonstration38 without somehow acknowledging what was really going on.
“And so I asked my one question,” Stone said. “‘Do you want to have an orgasm?’ And he said yes.”
After it was over, Anderson wiped himself with a paper towel, handed Stone a paper towel, pulled his pants up, buckled39 his belt, and went to the sink to wash his hands. Stone ran out of the room.
Robert Stone
“I was so angry,” he said. “I was white hot angry that anyone could do that to another human being, especially someone who took an oath ... to first do no harm.”
As soon as he got to a phone, Stone dialed up the guy who referred him. “‘Listen, look, this is what just happened to me.’ And I laid it all out.” The questions poured out of him: Did this happen to you? Does this happen to every gay guy who goes to see Dr. Anderson? Is this what everyone should expect? Were you aware of this?
“He didn’t say a word,” Stone said. “And that’s when I knew. Yeah. This is what happens to everyone. And he absolutely knew.”
In retrospect40, Stone thinks this friend was trying to do him a favor in an era when gay people didn’t have the same choices, or presumptions41 of safety, that straight people had. “We had to put up with some things that other people didn’t have to put up with,” he said.
In fact, Stone actually went back to Dr. Anderson for three or four more appointments. (There were no more assaults.) That’s because he didn’t have any other place to go. His family physician back in Detroit had found out Stone was gay and not only refused to treat him, but tried to send him to a place that specialized42 in the discredited43 practice of so-called “conversion therapy.” In years to come, after more terrible experiences with doctors, Stone spent half a decade as a practicing Christian Scientist. He refused to see physicians at all.
In this climate, reporting Dr. Anderson seemed pointless.
“No gay person could ever go to anyone at the university and say this [happened] and have an effective outcome, because we would have simply been disregarded,” Stone said. “And I knew that. I knew that at the time it happened. And so that’s why I didn’t say anything to anyone.”
“Dr. Drop-Your-Drawers”
As a physician who saw young patients at an agency he directed, Anderson had both access and power. Both grew as he further embedded44 himself in the university. In the early ‘70s, around the time of Stone’s assault, he taught medical terminology45 and clinical medicine in the School of Public Health. He continued working for the athletic46 department. The campus newspaper consulted him as an expert on student health. He and his wife donated to the Friends of the University Hospital Gift Fund.
In the meantime, more and more people endured Anderson’s abuse. One was a wrestler on a full-ride scholarship named Tad DeLuca.
In a 10-page letter written to the university provost more than 40 years later, DeLuca said that Anderson “felt my penis, and testicles, and inserted his finger into my rectum too many times for it to have been considered diagnostic...or therapeutic47...for the conditions and injuries I had.” This purported48 medical treatment included Anderson putting on a latex glove and giving him a prostate exam. “I was 17 years old, and I didn’t know what to make of it,” DeLuca wrote. Prostate screenings are only recommended in men over fifty, or 45 if they are at high risk of developing cancer.
DeLuca visited the doctor as a junior with a dislocated elbow. Anderson checked the elbow but also “continued with his penis, hernia and prostate checks.”
At the time, DeLuca didn’t register how unusual this was. Many people Anderson abused were scarcely old enough to have graduated from their childhood pediatrician. These were among their first medical appointments without their parents present. They may have felt disturbed and uncomfortable, but they didn’t necessarily understand how to distinguish it from ordinary grown-up medical care.
DeLuca began hearing from other athletes about how “Dr. Drop-Your-Drawers” had a habit of this kind of touching49. It shocked him. Even though his elbow still hurt—it sometimes came out of place while he was sleeping—he avoided Anderson. This prompted DeLuca, who wrestled on one of the Top 20 teams in the country, to compete with heightened caution, trying to avoid the use of his left arm. This in turn led to his teammates and coaches thinking he was slacking off.
Over the summer, Coach Bill Johannesen came down hard in a letter that accused him of wasting the year—and he sent a copy to DeLuca’s beloved high school wrestling coach, too. “I was very, very ashamed and embarrassed,” DeLuca later wrote.
He was 20 then, and filled with emotions he couldn’t process, DeLuca shot back with an angry letter to his coach that, he said, described Anderson’s abuse. “Something is wrong with Dr. Anderson,” he wrote at the time. “Regardless of what you go in there for, he always makes you drop your drawers.”
As he later put it, “I left out very little.”
The coach kicked DeLuca off the team. "You generalize by describing the entirety of Michigan athletes as drunks, pot smokers50, drug users, and rapists," wrote Coach Johannesen in yet another letter. "I wonder, Mr. DeLuca, how such a moral, upstanding young man such as yourself could have allowed yourself to remain in a totally immoral51 situation.”
“You will not be known as an athlete," the coach added.
收听单词发音 |
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survivors
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| 幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 ) | |
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survivor
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| n.生存者，残存者，幸存者 | |
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wrestler
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| n.摔角选手，扭 | |
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mandated
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| adj. 委托统治的 | |
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evaluations
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| 估价( evaluation的名词复数 )； 赋值； 估计价值； [医学]诊断 | |
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bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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receding
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的现在分词 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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thatch
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| vt.用茅草覆盖…的顶部；n.茅草(屋) | |
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arbor
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| n.凉亭；树木 | |
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predators
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| n.食肉动物( predator的名词复数 )；奴役他人者（尤指在财务或性关系方面） | |
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guise
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| n.外表，伪装的姿态 | |
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wrestled
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| v.（与某人）搏斗( wrestle的过去式和过去分词 )；扭成一团；扭打；（与…）摔跤 | |
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trumpeted
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| 大声说出或宣告（trumpet的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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confidential
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| adj.秘（机）密的，表示信任的，担任机密工作的 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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administrators
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| n.管理者( administrator的名词复数 )；有管理（或行政）才能的人；（由遗嘱检验法庭指定的）遗产管理人；奉派暂管主教教区的牧师 | |
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lawsuits
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| n.诉讼( lawsuit的名词复数 ) | |
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reconciliation
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| n.和解，和谐，一致 | |
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collapses
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| 折叠( collapse的第三人称单数 )； 倒塌； 崩溃； （尤指工作劳累后）坐下 | |
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hips
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| abbr.high impact polystyrene 高冲击强度聚苯乙烯，耐冲性聚苯乙烯n.臀部( hip的名词复数 )；[建筑学]屋脊；臀围（尺寸）；臀部…的 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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oversees
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| v.监督，监视( oversee的第三人称单数 ) | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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pertinent
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| adj.恰当的；贴切的；中肯的；有关的；相干的 | |
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systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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ferment
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| vt.使发酵；n./vt.（使）激动，（使）动乱 | |
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chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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bland
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| adj.淡而无味的，温和的，无刺激性的 | |
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woes
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| 困境( woe的名词复数 )； 悲伤； 我好苦哇； 某人就要倒霉 | |
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suite
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| n.一套(家具)；套房；随从人员 | |
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neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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consultation
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| n.咨询；商量；商议；会议 | |
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steered
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| v.驾驶( steer的过去式和过去分词 )；操纵；控制；引导 | |
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racing
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| n.竞赛，赛马；adj.竞赛用的，赛马用的 | |
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weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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demonstration
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| n.表明，示范，论证，示威 | |
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buckled
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| a. 有带扣的 | |
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retrospect
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| n.回顾，追溯；v.回顾，回想，追溯 | |
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presumptions
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| n.假定( presumption的名词复数 )；认定；推定；放肆 | |
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specialized
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| adj.专门的，专业化的 | |
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discredited
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| 不足信的，不名誉的 | |
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embedded
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| a.扎牢的 | |
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terminology
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| n.术语；专有名词 | |
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athletic
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| adj.擅长运动的，强健的；活跃的，体格健壮的 | |
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therapeutic
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| adj.治疗的，起治疗作用的；对身心健康有益的 | |
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purported
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| adj.传说的，谣传的v.声称是…，（装得）像是…的样子( purport的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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smokers
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| 吸烟者( smoker的名词复数 ) | |
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immoral
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| adj.不道德的，淫荡的，荒淫的，有伤风化的 | |
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