Lawrence G. Nassar, the doctor convicted of sexually abusing young gymnasts, was stabbed multiple times in the chest, back and neck in federal prison in Florida where he is serving a 60-year sentence, according to two people familiar with the situation .
Mr. Nassar, 59, is in stable condition after being attacked by another inmate at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, a sprawling prison complex in central Florida, they said.
It is not clear when the fight took place or what prompted the attack. A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which manages the complex, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The episode adds to a long and troubled case of a once-prominent sports doctor accused of molesting and assaulting dozens of young women and children, including Michigan State University athletes, Olympians and members of the U.S. national gymnastics team. United – under the guise of providing treatment and examinations.
In a scathing 2021 report, the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI initially botched the investigation, allowing Mr. Nassar to assault multiple young women.
Mr. Nassar was convicted on federal charges in 2017. He was sentenced to an additional 40 to 125 years by a Michigan judge a year later after pleading guilty to three additional sexual assault charges. A federal judge ordered the sentence carried out at the same time and remanded him in federal custody.
The incident is also the latest in a string of suicides and violent attacks against some of the most notorious inmates at the chronically understaffed Federal Bureau of Prisons. Last month, Theodore J. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, who killed three people and wounded 23 in a series of bombings from 1978 to 1995, died by suicide in a federal prison medical center in North Carolina.
In 2018, James Bulger, a Boston gangster known as Whitey, was brutally beaten to death in federal prison after being transferred to a West Virginia prison in 2018 after a cascade of management failures and protocol violations left him unattended and vulnerable to attack, the inspector general discovered. A similar environment of dysfunction was pervasive in the Manhattan federal prison, where financier Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in 2019, the inspector general said in a report released last month.
Last year, 13 female athletes who were sexually assaulted by Mr. Nassar each asked the FBI for $10 million, claiming the agents mishandled the investigation, allowing him to continue to abuse more victims.
The athletes in the lawsuit were abused by Mr. Nassar when they were at the Twistars gymnastics club, outside of Lansing, Mich. John Geddert, who owned Twistars and referred injured athletes to Mr. Nassar, fueling a cycle of abuse, committed suicide in 2021 after being accused of human trafficking.
Some of the athletes, who were middle or high school students at the time, were attacked after the FBI was first notified of the abuse allegations in 2015, the women’s attorneys said.
In 2021, the department’s inspector general sharply criticized the FBI’s handling of the case, saying Mr. Nassar had abused 70 or more young athletes since July 2015, when USA Gymnastics first reported the allegations. against him at the FBI’s Indianapolis office, until August 2016, when the Michigan State University Police Department received a separate complaint.
