Chuck Christian was on some of Bo Schembechler’s best Michigan teams.

Chuck Christian near his home in a suburb south of Boston. Credit...Tony Luong for The New York Times.

“I realized that he had victimized so many of us,” Christian said in a recent interview.

As the inquiry unfolded, lawyers said it was increasingly clear that while Michigan achieved decades of success with many of the nation’s finest athletes, it also harbored a vast sexual abuse scandal.

These days, Christian grapples with questions about how long his cancer may have grown undetected because his experience with Anderson had instilled a lasting distrust of doctors.

Anderson left a stain behind,” Christian, 60, said last month.

Not long after he arrived on campus in 1977, Christian went to see Anderson, who earned his medical degree from the university in 1953.

When Christian first went for his, he expected a physical as routine as those he had undergone in high school: a hernia check and some testing of his joints.

Anderson did those, Christian said, but also — inexplicably and inappropriately, medical experts said — put on a glove and conducted a rectal exam.

They learned from other players that an intimate exam was the norm for many Michigan athletes, and Christian eventually asked his girlfriend, a nursing student whom he would eventually marry, whether the rectal procedure was unusual.

“I knew if I said, ‘No, no, don’t do that,’ it could cause him to fail me with my physical,” Christian said.

Not long after Chuck Christian’s graduation, a defensive tackle from Louisiana named Warde Manuel enrolled at Michigan.

The investigator told the man that Anderson had never actually left the university, and the official was “visibly shaken,” according to a detective’s report.

“If they had dealt with Anderson back then, he never would have violated me and all of my friends and all of the players that came after,” Christian said.

A spokesman for Michigan, Rick Fitzgerald, said in an email that the university had “great admiration for Chuck Christian and other former U-M athletes who are bravely stepping forward to share their stories.”

Lawyers have told some accusers, including Christian, not to speak to university officials or their hired investigators from WilmerHale, a law firm

Wright, a lawyer for Christian, said he was working with about 140 former Michigan students who had accused Anderson of misconduct

He elected to speak out, he said, to urge athletes who may have been abused, at Michigan or elsewhere, to report what had happened

“I didn’t forgive him for him,” he said of Anderson