LANSING, Mich. — Former Michigan State University women's gymnastics Coach Kathie Klages was convicted of lying to police in the Larry Nassar case in 2020 but the state Court of Appeals overturned that conviction last year.
Today, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel applied for leave to appeal that ruling to the state Supreme Court, saying the Court of Appeals ruling "could set a harmful precedent for future cases."
Klages was convicted in 2020 of lying to police when she said she didn't remember two high school-age gymnasts telling her in 1997 that Nassar, a former MSU sports doctor, had sexually abused them.
The Court of Appeals overturned that investigation in December, with two members of a three-judge panel writing that Klages' testimony hadn't been important to the attorney general's 2018 investigation and that "the investigation into 'who knew what and when about Larry Nassar' was supposed to have been an investigation of potential criminal conduct, not a roving inquiry designed to expose MSU’s mistakes and to further embarrass the institution."
To convict Klages under the Michigan law in question, the prosecution had to prove that she had lied "regarding a material fact" in a criminal investigation. The Court of Appeals didn't rule on whether Klages was lying or not but found that what she said wasn't important enough to the case against Nassar.
Nessel argues in her application that a material fact is typically one that would "influence an officer’s decision how to proceed with an investigation" and that the Court of Appeals is adding another requirement that isn't in the law "that the prosecution must show that the false or misleading statement affected the charging decision, not just the investigation."
Klages’ lies, Nessel said, "hindered the investigation in two ways: (1) by blocking further questions of Klages and the Department’s investigation into the actions she took based on these 1997 disclosures, and (2) by hindering the investigation of others to whom she confided the abuse."
She wants the Supreme Court to reverse the ruling, Nessel said in a statement released Monday.
Klages' attorney Mary Chartier said in an email that "we’re not surprised that the Attorney General has filed an application with the Michigan Supreme Court.
"We fought the Attorney General—and won—in the Court of Appeals," she said, "and we’ll do the same in the Michigan Supreme Court."
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