LOS ANGELES _ Dr. George Tyndall arrived on the University of Southern California campus in the summer of 1989. The university had advertised for a full-time gynecologist for the student health center, and Tyndall, then 42, was an enthusiastic candidate.
"My mission will be to do everything I can to help Trojan women avoid the many preventable catastrophes that I have seen," Tyndall declared during the job interview, according to a written account he provided to The Times. "And I will do so for as long as I am mentally and physically able, hopefully well into my 80s."
USC offered a salary that was a fraction of what Tyndall's peers elsewhere earned, but he saw rewards beyond money. The job, he would later say, allowed him to shepherd female students safely to womanhood, steering them around sexually transmitted diseases, unplanned pregnancies and other hazards.
"The way I saw patients at USC _ I would think to myself, 'This is my chance. She hasn't made any mistakes yet,'" Tyndall said in an interview this spring.
Many who encountered the physician, however, saw him as less a voice of medical authority than as an eccentric who bewildered and, over time, ultimately alarmed those around him.
The 71-year-old physician's life is now under intense scrutiny as detectives probe allegations that Tyndall sexually abused hundreds of patients over nearly three decades at USC, part of the largest-ever L.A. Police Department sex crimes investigation with a single suspect. Investigators are grilling his co-workers and poring over his possessions, including hard drives seized from his cluttered home and photos of unclothed patients found in a rented storage unit.
Tyndall has denied all wrongdoing. These days a team of lawyers speaks for the doctor, who was removed from the clinic in 2016. But before the allegations became public this spring, Tyndall met with Times reporters several times at a city park in L.A. and shared details about his life and career.
"I was controversial from Day One," he said of his time at USC's student health clinic.
The interviews with him and more than two dozen associates paint a portrait of a man of obvious intelligence who excelled in college, medical school and the U.S. Navy, but struck many as socially awkward and sometimes overbearing.
He spoke to co-workers and patients like a lecturing professor. He labeled himself as a germaphobe, though his office was an unsanitary jumble of medical waste and boxes. To find a wife, he went to the Philippines repeatedly, and ultimately married a Filipina 25 years his junior.
Perhaps his most long-term and significant bond was with USC, where he worked for 27 years. Although he never attended or taught at the university, Tyndall reveled in its academic reputation and prodded patients to respect their school as "the center of the world." He could recite the contributions of university presidents and provosts as if they were figures in a U.S. history textbook.
Even after hundreds of alumnae came forward with allegations against Tyndall, USC remained central to his identity. In a May letter to The Times criticizing its coverage, he promised that when the true story came out, most "Trojans are going to be very proud of this particular member of the Trojan Family."
