More former men’s basketball players for Indiana University have come forward alleging sexual misconduct by a former team physician, while stating school officials, including the late head coach Bobby Knight, were aware of the situation. 

Last fall, former Hoosier players Haris Mujezinovic and Charlie Miller filed a lawsuit against Bradford Bomba Sr., who died last month. The suit claimed the two were sexually abused by Bomba during their time playing for Indiana. 

That lawsuit, which was filed in October, now has five ex-athletes named in it, while 10 additional men are planning to pursue litigation against Indiana, per ESPN. 

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“I have two sons who are the same age that I was when that happened to me,” Mujezinovic, who played for the Hoosiers in the late 1990s, said in an email to ESPN. “At the time, I viewed myself as an adult, but now I realize, looking at my own kids, how young and powerless me and my teammates actually were.

“The adults within the basketball program who were entrusted with our care knew what was happening to us. They joked about it and let it continue.”

Bomba routinely gave male athletes rectal exams during their physicals despite no medical recommendations to do so, according to the lawsuit. Bomba worked as the men’s basketball physician for almost 30 years. 

FORMER INDIANA BASKETBALL PLAYERS SAY TEAM DOCTOR SEXUALLY ABUSED THEM WITH UNNECESSARY PROSTATE EXAMS

Longtime trainer Tim Garl was listed as a defendant in January after another former player, John Flowers, joined the lawsuit. Flowers said Garl was aware of Bomba’s “invasive, harassing, and demeaning digital rectal examinations.”

“After his first physical, Flowers’s teammates told him he had ‘passed’ Dr. Bomba, Sr.’s ‘test,’ and that he would not have to undergo a digital rectal examination again,” the lawsuit states. “Garl laughed at Flowers and his freshman teammates and made jokes at their expense regarding the digital rectal examinations they endured.”

Bobby Knight was one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all-time. (AP)

Players allegedly complained about the exams, some of which said they wished to have a different physician look at them in the future. However, Knight and Garl continued to have players see Bomba. 

Another player, Butch Carter, who played for Indiana in the late 1970s, wrote in a letter that he told Knight he never wanted to see Bomba again. The letter is in the lawsuit, though Carter is not a part of the lawsuit. 

An outside investigation was done to look further into the allegations, and it found that rectal exams are a normal part of a physical. Indiana also released a statement in September 2024 saying they would be conducting an independent review.

Indiana hired the law firm Jones Day to conduct the investigation, which involved speaking with “100 individuals,” going through “10,000 emails,” and reviewing “more than 100,000 pages of physical documents spanning six decades,” according to the report released on April 25. 

With Bomba’s death last month, and the outside investigation clearing him of sexual misconduct, the legal path for these players will be a difficult one. 

A general view of the IU logo on the official Adidas basketballs as seen when the Indiana Hoosiers played against the Michigan State Spartans on Jan. 22, 2023, at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Indiana.  (Brian Spurlock/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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But Michelle Simpson Tuegel, who is representing the 10 men prepared to file their lawsuit, states two of her clients have stories contradicting those findings, saying Bomba’s actions were not sexual, per ESPN. One of the men, who played in the late 1990s for the Hoosiers, claimed Bomba “fondled his genitalia” during a physical. 

“My ten clients and numerous other players from the 1970s to the 1990s were subjected to completely unnecessary penetrative exams and other forms of sexual misconduct by team physician Brad Bomba Sr. for his own sexual gratification,” said Simpson Tuegel in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Since these men bravely began to come forward last fall, Indiana University has repeatedly tried to avoid responsibility, falsely asserting that what happened to them doesn’t constitute abuse. That should be decided by an Indiana jury rather than the University and its hand-picked private law firm. My team and I will do everything in our power to ensure these survivors have their day in court.”

Indiana University told Fox News Digital it does not comment on litigation. Additionally, the university pointed to the Jones Day investigation results as reference.

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The Indiana Fever improved to 3-4 on the 2025 WNBA season after their 85-76 victory over the Washington Mystics on June 3.

With star guard Caitlin Clark being sidelined for the past three games, the Fever have struggled to make up for her playmaking abilities. While they have enough scorers to beat teams without Clark, her generational passing talent has been sorely missed and is a big reason why the Fever had lost two straight games without her before Tuesday’s win.

But Indiana emphasized passing against the Mystics, and their 21 assists compared to Washington’s 12 seemed to be the biggest difference maker.

Fever head coach Stephanie White spoke with the media after the game and praised her team’s passing prowess.

“Yeah, I mean, 21 assists on 30 made field goals is huge. That’s how we want to play. That’s how we have to play in order for us to be successful,” White said when asked about the ball movement, per the Fever’s YouTube account.

“We’ve got to get that ball moving. I think we had something like eight assists on 10 made field goals in the third quarter. That’s when we’re gonna be at our best. The ball is gonna be moving, multiple players are gonna be touching it, it finds the right shot on the floor,” White continued. “That was big time for us.”

With Caitlin Clark sure to be missing at least one more game, other players will have to step up in the passing front once again when the Fever face the Chicago Sky on Saturday.

DCS should release data about the children who previously would have received services but no longer do. Let the public evaluate whether those children should be left with no oversight.

Indiana’s Department of Child Services faces a new round of scrutiny following the death of Zara Arnold, a child with extensive DCS history who was killed by her father. Yet, just last year, DCS celebrated drastic reductions in the foster care system and improvements in child safety.

Once known for having among the highest rates of children in foster care in the country, Indiana reduced placements by 50% between 2018 and 2024. DCS attributed its “success” to the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act, a bipartisan federal law enacted during the first Trump administration.

FFPSA defunded group home and institutional placements and created a funding stream for “prevention services” as an alternative to foster care. Yet, the interventions funded by FFPSA have been slow to roll out, both because of burdensome regulations and because such dramatic shifts in the continuum of services were never supported by data. To date, there is no evidence of improved child safety or impacts on placements.

Indeed, Indiana’s flagship service — the Indiana Family Preservation Services program — is described as having “0 favorable effects” by the federal clearinghouse for evidence-based programs. 

That did not stop DCS from asserting the exact opposite last year. In federal testimony, Deputy Director of Child Welfare Services David Reed confidently pointed to Indiana’s family preservation program as “an intervention that helps keep kids safe and out of foster care.” He further claimed to have reduced racial disparities in foster care entries by two-thirds, relying on a calculation that anyone understanding basic statistics could debunk.

But Indiana did reduce its foster care population by 50% — if not through their prevention program, then how?

It wasn’t because Indiana had fewer concerned residents calling the hotline about suspected child maltreatment. Those numbers have barely budged, aside from a temporary drop during the pandemic, when children were out of the public eye. It also wasn’t because Indiana was providing services to more families when abuse and neglect was reported — the number of families receiving services has been in steep decline since 2017.

In other words, DCS did not provide more support to reduce the use of foster care. It is not intervening differently — just less.

The most likely explanation is that DCS simply raised the threshold for investigating reports of maltreatment and responding to child abuse and neglect, whether through in-home services or foster care.

Perhaps intervening less would be good if Indiana was previously over-investigating and over-intervening. If that’s the case, then DCS should be honest about it instead of claiming that its new prevention supports keeping children safe at home and, thus, drives large-scale foster care reductions.  

DCS should release data about the children who previously would have received services but no longer do. Let the public evaluate whether those children should be left with no oversight.

Like Zara Arnold, we know that other children continue to die of maltreatment. Children like Gwendalyn Cooksey, an 8 year-old girl with cerebral palsy and a history of physical abuse and exposure to parent drug use, who died of fentanyl poisoning in January. Or 5 year-old Kinsleigh Welty, who was starved to death in 2024 by her mother and grandmother only five months after the courts determined it was safe for her to return home from foster care.

New leadership should understand how DCS cut foster care in half without evidence of more, or better, services. The public deserves to know whether the children no longer served by DCS are truly “safe at home.”

Sarah Font is an associate professor of sociology and public policy at Penn State University. Emily Putnam-Hornstein is the John A. Tate Distinguished Professor for Children in Need at UNC Chapel Hill.