Ohio State sets the standard in intercollegiate sports. The university’s athletics department, a statewide source of pride that includes 36 varsity sports teams (from pistol shooting to college football’s reigning national champion), rivals some Fortune 500 companies for scale. In 2024 Ohio State spent $292.8m on its sports programs, more than every school in the well-heeled Big Ten conference and every college in the country besides the University of Texas, while hoovering in more than $1.2bn in revenue over the past seven years. The Ohio State brand – flaunted through scarlet red block-O logos and buckeye tree iconography – is so synonymous with flush times inside and outside the lines that even now few really associate the university with one of most shocking and widespread sex abuse scandals in US history.
Strauss’s death by suicide in 2005, before the allegations against him came to light, robbed his survivors of their day in court. (“Most of the survivors didn’t know he had killed himself until 2018,” Orner says.) But that’s not to say there still isn’t guilt to go around. Russ Hellickson, the Buckeyes hall of fame wrestling coach, has conspicuously not supported his former students even as they allege he knew about Strauss’s perversions and didn’t stop them. The coach didn’t even object to the doctor having a locker in his team’s sacred space or showering next to his athletes. “What you’ll come to learn,” former Buckeyes wrestler Dan Ritchie says in the film, “is that this isn’t just happening with the wrestlers…”
Significantly, Hellickson’s lead assistant during much of Strauss’s tenure was Jim Jordan – the two-time NCAA wrestling champion turned Freedom Caucus congressman and Donald Trump bootlick. While Jordan would register his share of on-the-record denials at the time, a number of former wrestlers say in the film that Jordan reached out to them privately and pushed them to change their stories in hopes of making the scandal, and the growing scrutiny on him, go away.
The story bookends a shocking testimonial from Frederick Feeney, a respected wrestling referee who alleges that Strauss pleasured himself as the ref was showering after officiating a meet decades ago. “The next thing I know, I’m feeling his hand on my butt,” Feeney says to camera, choking back the emotion. “It affected me so bad that I didn’t even respond to him, when I should’ve knocked him on his ass at that point. But I didn’t. As I’m walking out [of the locker room], Russ Hellickson and Jim Jordan were both standing there. I looked at both of them and said, Strauss was in there masturbating beside me in the shower. Jim Jordan looked at me straight in my face and said, ‘It’s Strauss. You know what he does.’”
But where Michigan State went above and beyond most institutions while taking responsibility for the Nassar affair, agreeing to an historic $500m settlement that notably doesn’t further silence survivors under NDAs, Ohio State has only paid $60m and refused to own any legal liability. All the while the university, despite issuing a formal apology and revoking Strauss’s emeritus status, continues to reject the implication – derived from the independent investigation that it called for and funded – that it covered up Strauss’s misconduct. Strauss’s son releasing a statement on behalf of his family endorsing the independent investigation only makes the school look worse in the final analysis. “I had one off-the-record conversation with his son that I’m not allowed to disclose,” says Orner, the rare journalist who has spoken with the Strauss family. “And I think it’s OK to say that this was a complete shock to them when [the news] came out.”
Given that this is the fourth sex abuse case to break out at a Big Ten school in the past 14 years, you have to wonder how many more college sports colossuses are sitting on similar scandals – or if there could ever be a case extreme enough to prompt any intervention from the NCAA, which I understand is charged with (checks notes) regulating college athletics. Ultimately, the film, affecting as it is, only gives Ohio State survivors an outlet to release their emotional trauma, raise awareness and remind the world how strong they always were.
“It’s a lot of responsibility,” Orner says, recalling the anxiety she felt while screening the film for them for the first time at Tribeca. “There were a lot of tears, but it turned out to be a really cathartic thing for them, where they were sort of transformed after the screening and felt really proud and banded together as brothers.” It would be a nice ending if Ohio State didn’t still owe them and the remaining Strauss survivors a just one.
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Surviving Ohio State premieres on HBO on 17 June with UK and Australia dates to be announced
