Jonathan Vaughn: a portrait of healing
SARAH AKAABOUNE
MiC Senior Editor
The
following
story
contains
potentially triggering accounts and
mentions of sexual assault.
The University of Michigan made
Jonathan Vaughn a man. And being a
man is a complicated matter because
manhood is the sort of thing that
takes just as much as it gives. It can
be unrelenting and unreasonable,
hard to understand and discern,
hard to tame and forgive, while also
being equally as fragile and painfully
soft, fraught with grief and anger
and love. And Vaughn knows love,
more than anything else, because he
is a Michigan Man. A Michigan Man
is an everlasting title, it fights back,
kicks back, yells back, it endures in
life and death, in good health and
sickness, it knows conscience and
consequence, honesty and humility,
and mostly, to be a Michigan Man is
to know love. All kinds of love: tough
love and mean love, in-your-face
love, forever love and careful love
and ugly love, but love all the same.
And love matters to a man like
Vaughn because he is a father, and
there are people out in the world
that know him only as Uncle Jon and
nothing else. He’s the kind of person
that tells you to keep the change
and will save your place in line and
will hold the door open for a million
and one people all in one go. He’s
the kind of person who
keeps a bank he eternally
fills with all acts of love,
with big flashy love and
small feisty love, so that
the balance never falls
below zero, stowed away
somewhere deep within
himself.
And
because
Vaughn and thousands of
other people are survivors
of sexual assault at the
hands of the late Dr. Robert
Anderson, and when you
are a victim of abuse, when you
understand all the ways in which
trauma can profoundly snap a body
clean in half, all the ways it can make
arms and legs and minds and selves
come undone, love, keeping it and
collecting it and living in it, becomes
of the utmost importance. Because
oftentimes, love is the only thing we
have left, and the only thing that can
ever help us heal and recover.
Vaughn was recruited to play for
the University of Michigan football
team as a running back in 1989, his
senior year, from McCluer North
High School in Florissant, Missouri,
and even back then, it seemed clear
he had always been destined to be an
athlete. He thought like one, looked
like one, fought like one. But it was
at the University where he learned
how to truly be an athlete, where he
learned that it was a sense of being
that lies in something far more than
a derivation of the physical body, that
it was not just quick reflexes, keen
senses, a strong arm or too powerful
a kick, but that it was a way of living,
so much so, that in time, it became
the only way of living. During our
interviews, Vaughn speaks fondly
about his time on the team, and at
the University. It was a reprieve from
Missouri, from his abusive father,
from the small patch of dirt in the
field behind his house where he
played soccer every day, from where
he learned violence and shame and
what it meant to no longer feel safe
in your own body for the first time.
And evidently, the University of
Michigan became home, was home,
is still home, in the way that his
mother was home or his brother was
home or friends and fellow survivors
Chuck Christian and Tad Deluca and
Trinea Gonczar were home. Vaughn
was the first in his lineage to be
a part of a team in this way, to be a
Michigan Man.
He was “excited, proud and
challenged to represent, it was a
rite of passage, a privilege to play
for Michigan football,” Vaughn later
explained to me. To become known
only through his sacrifice, through
his practice and performance on the
team became the very foundation
of his identity. Game days at The
University
of
Michigan
were
merciless and frigid, denying all
basic forms of relief, prolonging an
eternal state of discomfort. And if
you spent long enough out there
on that field with Vaughn, you’d
know the turf would start to grate
in an infuriatingly special way, the
crowd would become so impossibly
loud that your ears would hurt for
days on end, your helmet and your
shoulder and knee pads would
become agonizingly heavy even
when and where they never had
been, sweat would leak into every
insufferably small crevice, and that
was simply the way things were and
would always be because this was
college football. And football, most
particularly college football, was
special in that it was meant to be
played in a way that fractured the
body into all kinds of pieces, that
broke down the individual for the
sake of one cohesive unit, because
only those that endured, only those
that stayed would be champions. And
Vaughn chose to stay. Staying meant
an eventual NFL draft, staying
meant pursuing the education his
mother had always wanted him to
have, and eventually, staying also
meant becoming a survivor of sexual
abuse over and over at the
doing of Dr. Robert Anderson.
Anderson was hired in 1966
as a physician at University
Health System (UHS). He
was UHS director from 1968
to 1980 and transferred to
the athletic department after
resigning in 1981. Anderson
was a practicing physician
until 1999 and remained
a faculty member at the
University of Michigan until
2003. He died in 2008. Last
May, an independent report released
by law firm WilmerHale, also
hired by the University, concluded
a
year-long
investigation
into
sexual abuse allegations against
Anderson
and
found
that
the
hundreds of accusations against
him over a span of 37 years proved
to be widely corroborated and
credible. In practice, Anderson
typically engaged in misconduct by
carrying out intrusive procedures
often “perceived as unnecessary,
performed inappropriately, or both”
in the name of meaningful and
legitimate medical care, according
to the report. Many of Anderson’s
victims belonged to at-risk and
disadvantaged populations, and thus,
they were far less likely to report
Anderson’s abuse. During his tenure
at the athletic department, Anderson
frequently targeted student-athletes
like Vaughn, who often referred
to Anderson as “Handy Andy,”
“Dr. Handerson,” and “Dr. Drop
Your Drawers Anderson.” In 1975,
Thomas “Tad” Deluca, a former
member of the wrestling team and
survivor of Anderson’s abuse, wrote
in a letter to his wrestling coach, Bill
Johannesen, “something is wrong
with Dr. Anderson. Regardless of
what you were there for, he asks that
you ‘drop your drawers’ and cough.”
Deluca says he was kicked off the
wrestling team and subsequently
lost his scholarship a short time after.
Additionally, the report found “no
evidence that Mr. Johannesen looked
into Mr. Deluca’s complaint about Dr.
Anderson” and ultimately concluded
that
although
the
information
individuals like Johannesen received
“varied in directness and specificity,
Dr. Anderson’s misconduct may have
been detected earlier and brought
to an end if they had considered,
understood, investigated, or elevated
what they heard.”
In the years since Anderson was
publicly named in allegations of
sexual abuse, dozens of lawsuits
were filed against the University in
federal court, including two class
action lawsuits. Class action lawsuits
treat
individuals
as
a
unified
entity and are principally aimed at
prosecuting the University on behalf
of all survivors of Anderson, allowing
for a certain degree of privacy, and
therefore, in legal proceedings,
plaintiffs are commonly referred to
as John and Jane Doe, respectively.
Except for Vaughn. The night before
Vaughn chose to go public with his
involvement in the case, he spent
hours pacing back and forth in front
of his bathroom mirror, wringing his
hands, braving wave after wave of
panic attacks, his mouth dry, vision
blurry, chest too tight, in pieces
over whether it really was the right
thing to do. For more than 30 years,
Vaughn hadn’t thought about the
University of Michigan. Vaughn
never knew that Anderson’s invasive
exams were assault and abuse, that
they occurred without his consent,
that they were direly unnecessary.
“I didn’t even know what a prostate
exam was at 18” he says, because at 18
years old, the only thing he ever did
know was that his mother had waged
a ruthless and merciless war with
breast cancer and that he might just
be next. And John Doe is a nameless,
faceless, voiceless victim, the world
knows nothing else other than this
fact, it cannot see John Doe’s anger
or fear, his clogged shower drains
and unpaid bills, his family vacations
and fights over the front seat,
chipped glass and leaky faucets, his
dented bumpers and dead grass, the
world cannot see the mundane pins
and needles, strains and everyday
grievances that make us human in
John Doe. The world cannot see
love or the roaming, raging, reeling,
tangled undefinable mess we carry
that is our pain in John Doe, but it
can in Jon Vaughn. And this was
why Vaughn ultimately relinquished
his anonymity.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Michigan in Color
Wednesday, July 20, 2022 — 5
“You can’t be a survivor if you’ve
never been a victim, and you can
never give testimony if you’ve
never been given the test,”
Vaughn explains.
The world cannot see
love or the roaming,
raging, reeling, tangled
undefinable mess we
carry that is our pain in
John Doe, but it can in
Jon Vaughn.
Read more at michigandaily.com