Two former Indiana University basketball players have sued their alma mater alleging their team doctor repeatedly sexually assaulted them and their teammates and the school did nothing to stop him.
Haris Mujezinovic and Charlie Miller, who played for the Hoosiers in the 1990s under legendary coach Bob Knight, said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for Southern Indiana that the coaches and trainers were aware that Dr. Bradford Bomba Sr. was subjecting basketball players to unnecessary prostate examinations. Knight died last year at age 83.
“Dr. Bomba, Sr.’s routine sexual assaults were openly discussed by the Hoosier men’s basketball players in the locker room in the presence of IU employees, including assistant coaches, athletic trainers, and other Hoosier men’s basketball staff,” according to the lawsuit.
Bomba, who had played football for Indiana University, was nicknamed “‘Frankenstein” by the coaches and players “due to the large size of his hands and fingers,” the lawsuit says.
Mujezinovic and Miller, who both went on to play professional basketball in Europe, are seeking unspecified damages, and they urged their former teammates in statements to come forward and join the lawsuit.
“I’m standing up for all student-athletes who have suffered abuse,” Mujezinovic, who spent two seasons at Indiana from 1995 to 1997, said in a statement. “I hope that more of our former teammates will speak out and share their stories publicly.”
Miller, who played for the Hoosiers from 1994 through 1998, echoed his former teammate.
“I will never understand why IU leadership did nothing to protect us from what I now understand was sexual abuse,” he said in a statement.
Kathleen Delaney, who represents Mujezinovic and Miller, said in the lawsuit that there could be “at least one hundred” alleged victims.
Delaney names the Trustees of Indiana University as defendants in the lawsuit, alleging Title IX violations by the school for failing to protect the students. Under Title IX, universities that get federal funding are required to have safety measures to protect students from predators. Bomba is not listed as a defendant.
Bomba, who is 88, was IU’s men’s basketball team physician for two decades. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Delaney said she alerted Indiana University in a letter last month that a former basketball player had come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of Bomba.
Asked about the Mujezinovic and Miller lawsuit, IU spokesperson Mark Bode sent a link Wednesday to his statement last month, which said the school had retained the Jones Day law firm to launch an independent investigation.
“The former student-athlete alleges that he was subjected to inappropriate prostate and rectal exams during annual physicals with Dr. Bomba, Sr., something that he also alleges was a practice for all basketball student-athletes assigned to Dr. Bomba, Sr. for physical examinations,” the statement said.
The accusations that IU turned a blind eye to allegations of a team doctor’s sexually abusing student-athletes are similar to those leveled in 2018 by former Ohio State University wrestlers who said their coaches knew that Dr. Richard Strauss was preying on them but also failed to act.
Strauss died in 2005.
Indiana University contracted Bomba to provide medical care to all its sports teams from 1962 to 1970, and from 1979 until the late 1990s he was the basketball team doctor, according to the lawsuit.
Mujezinovic and Miller said in their lawsuit that they “were routinely and repeatedly subjected to medically unnecessary, invasive, and abusive digital rectal examinations” by Bomba.
Such examinations are generally performed on men over age 40, according to American Cancer Society recommendations.
But Bomba performed them on the 20-something-year-old athletes who were sent to either him or his son, Dr. Bradford Bomba Jr., for physicals, the suit says.
The lawsuit does not accuse Bomba’s son of any wrongdoing.
“When Mujezinovic’s teammates saw that he was assigned to Dr. Bomba, Sr., they warned Mujezinovic to prepare for ‘the finger’,” the suit says. “Players also commented on the size of Dr. Bomba, Sr.’s hands and fingers.”
Mujezinovic said in the lawsuit that Bomba gave him a rectal exam during his first physical.
Then, on his second visit, Bomba “proceeded to digitally extract a stool sample from Mujezinovic, denying Mujezinovic any opportunity to provide a stool sample by other means,” the suit says.
The next year, Mujezinovic tried to avoid getting another rectal exam by hiding the lubricant that Bomba kept in his examination room on a high shelf before the doctor arrived, it says.
Unable to find it, Bomba told Mujezinovic, “If you’d like, we can do it without the [lubrication],” the lawsuit says.
“When Mujezinovic declined, Dr. Bomba, Sr. informed Mujezinovic they could ‘skip’ the rectal examination for that year,” the lawsuit says.
Miller said in the lawsuit that he was subjected to rectal exams by Bomba during each of the four physicals he had while he was playing for the Hoosiers.
“IU maintained a policy of deliberate indifference to Dr. Bomba, Sr.’s routine sexual assaults of IU’s student-athletes, both before and after Mujezinovic and Miller played for the Hoosiers,” the lawsuit says.
