More than 100 ex-Ohio State athletes have accused former school doctor of sexual misconduct
Move over, Larry Nassar, there’s a new monster in the Big Ten, as a sexual misconduct scandal has rocked the Ohio State University with a tale not for the faint of stomach.
Richard Strauss, a former physician for Ohio State, has been accused by over 100 alleged victims of sexual misconduct.
A university spokesman released a statement Friday as an update to its ongoing investigation of acts allegedly committed two decades ago by Strauss, NBC News reports.
Ohio State began its investigation in April after former wrestlers spoke out, claiming Strauss groped them in a decidedly non-medical way during examinations.
Ten different wrestlers went directly to the media, describing the lewd acts to NBC News in a statement of their own.
They described unwanted and unwarranted touching and leering during exams and in the locker room during Strauss’s tenure with the school, which lasted from the mid-1970s until 1997.
Strauss died by his own hand in 2005.
One of the former victims found solace in the university beginning to believe the doctor’s victims and take the matter more seriously.
The wrestler, who asked that his name be withheld because he and his family have faced abuse in the community for his coming forward, said his reaction was “one of sadness for the victims and their families and yet great hope that the truth will come to light.”
“Each new voice sends a message that we will no longer tolerate those who use positions of power to commit sexual abuse, nor will we tolerate those who enable it by looking away. And our chorus will grow louder still until the world knows that we won’t be silenced again,” he said.
The law firm Perkins Coie has taken up the case for the victims; they have already spoken to more than 200 former students and staff and have plans to talk to another 100 in the coming weeks.
Investigators for the university are also in contact with the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office.
While criminal charges can’t be brought against a dead man — there will be no salacious media circus of a kind which surrounded the very-much-still-alive Nassar and Michigan State — any university personnel active at the time and found to be complicit may have plenty of questions in need of answer under oath.
And while Nassar’s story was largely limited to a single sport, gymnastics, Strauss had his hooks into student-athletes across 14 sports at Ohio State.
The university is not reaching out to former victims; a spokesman said this is due in part to not wanting to force people to re-live a traumatic time in their lives. They are relying instead on the victims who wish to come forward doing so in order to build their case.
Meanwhile, the next of kin of the departed doctor say they are “shocked and saddened” to learn that the man they loved as one of their own had such a disreputable life.
Cynics may say the investigation is one of the university covering its rear end; after all, five former wrestlers for the school have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging negligence on the part of the school and claiming they knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it.
Even politicians have been caught in the blast radius; Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan met with the investigators this week due to Jordan having been assistant wrestling coach at the school in the 1980s and early ’90s.
Jordan has repeatedly denied knowing anything of Strauss’s misconduct and held to that story. He has not been named as a defendant and so far appears to be under no meaningful suspicion of complicity.
Six former wrestlers for the school told NBC News they did not believe Jordan’s story; the assistant coach must have known what was going on, and Dunyasha Yetts even says he went to Jordan to report his abuse when it happened at the time.
And lest Yetts be accused of being just one voice, his teammate Shawn Dailey served as corroborating witness.
And still others claim that Jordan must truly have had his head in the sand because the doctor’s perverted conduct was a common discussion topic in the locker room.
As the story develops, the world will find out who knew what and when they knew it.
In the meantime, the school continues to investigate, and Strauss looks up from the afterlife watching it unfold.
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