Is FBI inaction on Nassar allegations what’s going on now with KCK’s Roger Golubski?

Wednesday’s scalding Department of Justice inspector general’s report on FBI inaction in response to allegations against Larry Nassar, the doctor who sexually assaulted hundreds of young gymnasts over two decades, ought to be of particular local interest.

Why? Because there are some uncomfortable parallels with the many serious allegations against the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department that have gone nowhere for years.

Former FBI agent Alan Jennerich says he tried and failed to interest his superiors in bringing former KCK detective Roger Golubski and other officers to justice decades ago. Golubski has been accused of raping, stalking and threatening a number of mostly poor Black women, some of whom were later murdered. While looking into police corruption in the KCKPD in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Jennerich became aware that Golubski “used the authority of his position to extort sexual favors,” he said in an affidavit. But prosecutors were protective of officers, he told me, and that went nowhere.

“The FBI’s never going to do anything,” even now, he said in a recent interview. “It’s not in their interest. They irritate a police department, that’s not going to get them a promotion. They’re going through the motions, punching a ticket,” with the current investigation, he said. “Saying what’s going to stop corruption over there is like saying what’s going to stop it in Chicago,” where Jennerich was also an agent.

“It would take a thermonuclear device. And in the U.S. Attorney’s office? Some of them are married to cops. That’s just KCK. We used to call it ‘Sodom’ and ‘the land that time forgot.’ Going across I-70 over there, I’d expect to see long-necked dinosaurs eating the tops off trees. Golubski knows everything, so no one’s ever going to get him.”

KCKPD victims feel ignored

In October of 2018, then-KCK Police Chief Terry Zeigler, Golubski’s former partner, told KCTV that “the Kansas City office of the FBI has looked into the allegations.” Looked, as in the past tense.

Some victims who talked to the FBI months and months ago, without ever hearing anything more or seeing any action, feel that they put their lives in danger to do so. And now, they are no longer expecting anything to come of it.

“I gave them everything they needed to put this man in jail, and ain’t nothing going to happen,” says Niko Quinn. “I gave up on everything. I gave up on justice. I’m done.” Golubski “stalked me from ‘04 to ‘10, and he’s not going nowhere. I need to be quiet before they find me with my tongue cut out of my mouth.”

“Where is the FBI?” asks Natasha Hodge, who told agents in February of last year that she’d been raped by a different Kansas City Kansas, cop, Ed Saunders. “What has to happen?” she asked on the phone the other day. “I can’t imagine what else they could be waiting on. People have died and been hurt for life.”

Another woman who has given the FBI a lot of information about crimes committed by KCK cops including Golubski wrote the agent she’d been talking to recently. “If you guys had as many witnesses on an African American thought to be a criminal,” she told him, “you would have charged him long before now.”

One Golubski victim I’ve written about does say that she feels the FBI is serious. “They want to be 100% sure,” before moving in to arrest him. “But they are definitely trying to move him to charges. I’m scared, and they check on me, and are trying to help me relocate. They are watching him.”

I hope she’s right, but how much longer will they be doing that?

Kansas’ Jerry Moran called for DOJ investigation

The new Department of Justice inspector general’s report said that the FBI had so completely failed to investigate sex abuse allegations against then-USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar that 70 more girls and young women were victimized while they did nothing much.

Later, after reporters pressed the issue and Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, among others, called for an inspector general’s investigation, agents lied, claimed they just couldn’t find the paperwork, and generally tried to make it look as though they had bestirred themselves when they had not.

If your blood pressure could use a little kick in the seat, check out the whole 119-page report, which details how after learning about allegations from USA Gymnastics, which had already done its own belated investigation, the FBI’s Indianapolis office opened no probe, called only one of the three victims who they knew wanted to talk to them, failed to document even what little they had done, and after deciding the whole thing really should be referred to their office in Lansing, Michigan, where MSU is, failed to ever follow through on that.

Nor did they alert state or local authorities. Eight months later, when the FBI’s Los Angeles office was contacted with similar allegations against Nassar, they did open an investigation, but likewise failed to contact state or local police. And likewise, according to the IG’s report, they “did not take any action to mitigate risk to gymnasts.” How many women have to report being violated to get the FBI moving, anyway?

It was only after the Indianapolis Star wrote about the allegations on Sept. 12, 2016, that dozens more victims reported to the MSU police — who on Sept. 20, searched Nassar’s home and found 30,000 images of child porn. It was only then that this man finally lost his jobs with MSU and Holt High School. And it was only then that he no longer had access to the young athletes that he had spent his career sexually assaulting under the guise of medical treatment.

At his 2018 sentencing, the judge who said it was her honor to send him to prison for between 40 and 175 years said that in a letter to her, Nassar had described his hundreds of victims as only out for money, attention and revenge. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” he wrote.

Now, of course, the FBI is promising to learn from their grotesque failure to listen to even women with gold Olympic medals. Lawyers for the victims say the agents involved ought to face criminal charges. And Sen. Moran and others want the FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland to come and testify about how they intend to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Let’s hope it’s not happening again already, right here and right now.