Zachary the USC Whistleblower
The student-turned-staffer tried to get ‘SC to do the right thing, but when they hesitated, he alerted the Feds.
Zachary Ellison is a well-spoken journalist, a Trojan, and a whistleblower. He spent years at USC as a grad student and was quickly hired as a university staffer.
When he saw something was wrong, he tried to have it resolved and eventually called it out. He was summarily terminated.
Zachary also closely watches local Los Angeles politics and convincingly intertwines USC with City Hall in a way that may lead to the source of the infamous leak that ended the political career of the council president.
And of course, Zachary also knows a lot about the old neighborhood that encompasses USC in South Central. To hear the entire conversation you’ll want to click the play button below. Or if you want to dive into the highlights, keep scrolling.
Tony Pierce: Let’s just get right into it. What do you blow the whistle on at USC? Does USC need a whistle blown on them? It seems like they have enough scandals that come out naturally.
Zachary Ellison: Yes, they do need whistleblowers. There’s always the story that gets out, and then there’s the inside story.
USC has had a number of scandals. In fact, it’s almost become scandalized in a lot of ways. And one of the things you hear people talk about is how many scandals USC has and how they can’t keep track of them.
But if you were there, and you look through that time, and you did so in a pretty high position like I had, you learned a lot of very interesting things about USC and about the city of Los Angeles too.
What years were you at USC?
I was a graduate student and student worker from 2013 to 2015 and then I went to work for USC from October of 2015 to August of 2022.
Oh, up until recently. What were your jobs at USC?
As a student worker, I worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign
and University Relations, which fundraises from USC staff and faculty to support university community partner programs.
So you would call up alumni and say, “we need money?”
We would target mostly the faculty and the staff. We would do newsletter. I sent out emails to 16,000 faculty and staff. That was our principal form of fundraising where we raised about a million-plus dollars a year that we redirected towards the community programs.
So you would write current staff and faculty and shake them down for money to give back to their employer?
Correct. It came out of the 1992 Rodney King riots, actually.
USC decided to do something different. Its solution was to do its own United Way program, but just for the neighborhoods around University Park campus and then over at Boyle Heights around the Health Sciences Campus over there as well.
So what else did you do over there?
I went to work for the Office of the Provost in 2015.
I went to a party school. Can you explain what a provost is?
A provost is the second-highest ranking officer of the university. He is the Senior VP for Academic Affairs. He’s essentially the chief academic officer and his job is to oversee the operation of the university and campus life as well.
I was assigned to support the Vice Provost for Academic Operations. So my job was very focused on nuts-and-bolts on hiring deans, reviewing them, bringing unique programs to USC, supporting partnership programs, our veterans programs. We did a great program with Hispanic Scholarship Fund.
I coordinated literally all of the construction meetings for the biomedical sciences building
And then of course, USC has made various reform efforts over the years to try to address its scandals. So I was smack dab in the middle of a lot.
The provost had to help smooth that out?
Correct. It really goes back to 2016 to when it started going sideways with Carmen Puliafito, the former dean of the school of Keck Medicine, who infamously got caught using drugs and had a mistress. Unfortunately, an infant died.
Yeah, not only did he do drugs, but according to Paul Pringle’s book, Bad City, Carmen provided her with a bunch of drugs, even after she overdosed in Pasadena.
He would later bring drugs to her at rehab.
And he was able to get into LA County Jail to go visit people like this too. It’s certainly something that’s never been fully investigated — how he was able to access a facility like that. Crazy.
USC ended up in a lot of hot water. So I volunteered to help support the president of the academic senate and the president of the USC staff assembly in leading the reform task force, which was called the Task Force on Workplace Standards and Employee Wellness — nothing opaque there.
But it was a group of faculty and staff who began looking at ways that we could better monitor doctors, ensure better communications, and ensure people had better reporting options to go to.
And then, of course, George Tyndall happened.
He is the infamous gynecologist at the USC student health center who allegedly abused thousands of women.
Is it still “alleged”? Didn’t USC have to pay out like a billion bucks?
USC paid out over $1.1 billion over the course of two settlements. But, to date, not a single person has gone to jail. George Tyndall is not on trial yet. He is still in preliminary hearings.
He’s a free man?
He is still free man. He has been out on bail bonds since, I believe, 2020. He was arrested in June of 2019 by the LAPD. Originally, I believe, there were 23 felony charges relating to sexual abuse and then they added 12 more, for a total of 35 felonies.
OK, so ‘SC paid off all these “alleged,” I guess we have to say “alleged victims.”
USC didn’t admit any fault.
Has USC said anything nasty about him, at least?
[Former Chairman of the USC Board of Trustees] Rick Caruso has been very critical of George Tyndall. During the mayoral campaign, he would say that George needed to go to jail right away.
Rick, obviously, morally did not approve of what happened. I don’t think anybody should have.
But there’s a legal defense mechanism of the university to try to avoid holding people accountable for ignoring these reports and to try to limit the payout and the reach of the story has really continued into overdrive.
One of the first things that happened after George Tyndall was then-District Attorney of Los Angeles County, Jackie Lacey, went to USC and she met with then-Interim President, Wanda Austin.
In fact, there’s even a picture you can still see of them together on Twitter saying what a good relationship USC has with the DA’s office.
And so victims have pointed to this as proof that Jackie Lacey, who is also a USC alum, had a conflict of interest and sought to downplay and slow the gravity of the charges and the process.
Should we believe that Trojan alum will be loyal to their college no matter what? I love UCSB with all my heart, but if somebody did something terrible, I would do my job.
It’s been very painful for the USC community to endure this. I, for one, know people who’ve been personally victimized by him. I’ve gone to parties and encountered people who were victims too.
And I, to the extent that I accepted that there was some responsibility for the university to make the changes that had been agreed to with the government… I was laser-focused on that resolution agreement with the US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights after it was concluded in February of 2020.
I am impressed how well you are with these dates. Listeners, he’s got no notes in front of him. He’s just speaking from the heart.
So, who did you blow the whistle on?
I blew the whistle on the university’s Senior Vice President for Human Resources and the Vice President of Equal Opportunity and Title IX, who are the two officials who are tasked with making the changes as required by the US Department of Education, after the agreement was concluded in February 2020.
I had a masters in Public Administration and then about five-plus years in the Provost Office, and we’d gone through this.
And so I decided that somebody needed to monitor the things that university had agreed to change — actually change. And so much of what I saw was inaction. They did make some changes, they hired people, but a lot of the really important public-facing things that they needed to do happened very slowly.
They didn’t make changes to our performance evaluations as employees to give us a better, more direct reporting option through that process.
And then I caught them in 2021.
There’s an email that you’re supposed to send out school-wide at the start of every year, that’s called a Title IX Notice that informs you of your federal civil rights as a student at the institution. USC is required to do this at the beginning of every academic year. And so when we came back from the pandemic in 2021, this did not happen.
I had been a student at USC and it was actually on its second resolution agreement. And this was one of the things that repeatedly failed that, so I blew the whistle internally on that at USC.
Then I tried to turn around and report it to the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights — and they actually blew me off. The attorney they had assigned to monitor USC didn’t want it to come out that USC had failed to meet a basic requirement of the agreement that’s specifically spelled out.
And so that precipitated to me filing a complaint with the Department of Education to try to force them to take action. I even went to the Department of Education Office of Inspector General on October of 2021, to try to report that USC was not doing everything that it needed to do on the agreement.
And then the most unimaginable thing happened. People might have forgotten by now, but in 2021, USC had a major scandal of drug-facilitated sexual assaults at fraternity houses.
And so this resulted in a lot of pressure on USC and Department of Education.
There was even a piece in the LA Times by one of our faculty members, Ariela Gross, that criticized USC for having a toxic environment.
So the combination of, I think, the whistleblower, the student protests, and then faculty resistance, led to the DOE to hold USC to account in January 2022, for not doing everything that it said it was going to do under the agreement.
They didn’t apologize directly. They don’t do that. They sent out an email to the entire university community, noting that certain components to review — particularly files — for university employees to ensure that there was no other abuse taking place, had not happened on a timely basis after the agreement.
And so at that point, I said to the Department of Education, “come on, really? Was I really wrong there?” And that led to me having a more friendly relationship with them.
Ultimately, why do you think USC just didn’t do what they needed to do?
I think the university’s public image and reputation come ahead of everything else there for some people — including human decency. And I have had confrontations with people, face-to- face about these issues inside the senior administration.
And that is the response. It is that culture of loyalty, of unblemished perfect USC, that has become harder and harder to maintain.
It’s not maintained.
It’s not maintained, but they still want it.
When people or an institution make a mistake, a serious mistake, where they have to dole out a billion dollars, there’s two paths they can take: own up to it and say, “this is what we’re going to do to fix it;” or ignore it and hope it’ll go away even though the LA Times is right down the street and has made a living writing stories about USC scandals.
This is why it’s hard for me to believe that they choose path two. I’m under the impression these are smart people over there.
They are very smart people and they’re very well-funded, and they have very well-resourced attorneys.
Here’s another example. Lebron’s son just announced that he’s gonna go to USC next year.
So even among all these scandals, people still want to go to ’SC. Bronny could go anywhere — including UCLA — which also is pretty damn good at hoops.
Notoriety is a form of marketing. One thing we became aware of was that we thought the scandal would hurt the business and reputation of USC as an educational institution.
But in fact, it didn’t.
Applications went up. We had record highs.
Therefore don’t you think whenever the next scandal is, USC will finally say, “well, if we own up to it, it’s not going to hurt us, in fact it will stop the bleeding”?
Do you think in the next scandal, they’ll do the right thing?
I don’t think it’s binary. I don’t think it’s right and wrong. I think it’s a complicated calculation of financial and legal risk.
That was just a few of the highlights of this fascinating conversation. To hear the whole deal, click the play button above.
You can follow Zachary on Twitter and he has written prolifically about USC and these matters on his Substack.
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