A former football player, Chuck Christian, has revealed how an alleged sex abuse by a doctor while he was a teenager, stopped him from going for medical check-ups despite seeing blood in his sperm 15 years ago.
Standing at 6-foot-4, Christian who now has stage 4 cancer, was a player at one of the US’ most decorated college football programs, and alleges a former team doctor while he was a Michigan Wolverine, Dr. Robert Anderson (pictured below) sexually abused him by allegedly performing unwarranted prostate checks on him and other athletes.
According to Christian he was assaulted by Dr Anderson while as a University of Michigan student-athlete in Anderson’s exam room.
15 years ago, when a physician prepared to perform a prostate exam after Christian discovered blood in his semen, he simply walked out of the doctor’s office because he didn’t want a re-occurrence of the assault he experienced as a teenager.
“Nobody’s going to do that again,” he thought as he ran away from the urology clinic. “That’s why I didn’t go get the exam because of my fear of these digital exams that Dr. Anderson used to give me.”
Doctors told him in 2016 he had three years to live, but he just passed the four-year mark, he said, explaining that he opted for alternative treatments over chemotherapy and radiation.
Today, Christian, 60, and a married father of three, has stage 4 prostate cancer that has spread to his spine, tailbone, hips, ribs and shoulders. He says he wishes he would’ve realized sooner that his fear of doctors stemmed from the trauma he ”suffered from Anderson’s assault”. He says he’s speaking up so other former athletes don’t make the mistake he made, of waiting too long to get checked.
“I want to help all the student-athletes that have been through what I went through,” Christian told CNN. “Do not let any doctor or trainer do to you what they did to us, because it’s wrong and it’s illegal.”
A Washington, DC law firm, paid by the University of Michigan, is investigating Anderson, who died in 2008.
“Every person in our community should expect to feel safe and supported,” university President Mark Schlissel said earlier this year. “The allegations that were reported are disturbing and very serious.”
