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