FBI continues to fail child sex abuse victims despite reforms after bungled Nassar investigation, watchdog finds

The FBI has continued to mishandle allegations of child sexual abuse in the years after the bureau’s notorious bungling of the investigation into disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, according to an audit by the Justice Department’s inspector general released Thursday.

The FBI has continued to mishandle allegations of child sexual abuse in the years after the bureau’s notorious bungling of the investigation into disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, according to an audit by the Justice Department’s inspector general released Thursday. Because of those failures, allegations of sexual abuse against children were left unaddressed for months while minors continued to be victimized, the audit found. The audit followed up on issues that the department’s top watchdog identified as part of its scathing investigation into how the FBI investigated allegations against Nassar. In the Nassar investigation, which was opened in 2018 and resulted in a final report in 2021, the inspector general found that senior officials in the FBI Indianapolis Field Office failed to respond to the Nassar allegations “with the utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved and required.” The watchdog also found the field office made several fundamental errors when they did respond to the allegations and failed to notify state or local authorities of the allegations or to take steps to mitigate the continued threat that Nassar posed. Since then, the FBI has implemented several changes around how they report, investigate, and document allegations of child sexual abuse, the inspector general said.