Lawrence G. Nassar, the doctor convicted of sexually abusing young female gymnasts, was stabbed multiple times in the chest, back and neck at the federal prison in Florida where he is serving a 60-year sentence, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Nassar, 59, is in stable condition after he was 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 altercation occurred or what prompted the attack. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which manages the complex, did not immediately return a request for comment.
The episode adds to a long, troubled case of a once-prominent sports doctor accused of molesting and assaulting dozens of young women and children, including athletes at Michigan State University, Olympians and members of the U.S. national gymnastics team — under the guise of providing. treatment and examinations.
In a scathing 2021 report, the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI initially bungled the investigation, allowing Mr. Nassar to prey on more young women.
Mr. Nassar was convicted on federal charges in 2017. He was sentenced to an additional 40 to 125 years by a judge in Michigan a year later, after pleading guilty to three additional counts of sexual assault. A federal judge ordered that sentence to run concurrently and returned him to federal custody.
The incident is also the latest in a series 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 injured 23 in a bombing spree from 1978 to 1995, died by suicide at a federal prison medical center in North Carolina.
In 2018, James Bulger, a Boston mobster known as Whitey, was brutally beaten to death in a federal prison after he was 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 found. A similar environment of dysfunction pervaded 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 sought $10 million from the FBI, alleging that agents botched the investigation, allowing him to continue abusing more victims.
The athletes in the lawsuit were abused by Mr. Nassar when they were at the Twistars gymnastics club, outside Lansing, Mich. John Geddert, who owned Twistars and referred injured athletes to Mr. Nassar, fueling a cycle of abuse, killed himself in 2021. after he was accused of human trafficking.
Some of the athletes, who were middle school or high school students at the time, were targeted after the FBI was first made aware of the abuse allegations in 2015, lawyers for the women 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 allegations against him to the Indianapolis field. office of the FBI, until August 2016. , when the Michigan State University Police Department received a separate complaint.