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 tocollege 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 thewell-heeled Big Ten conferenceand 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.
Eva Orner – the Australian documentary director behind Netflix’s Bikram and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side – got an up-close view years ago on her first flight from Los Angeles to Columbus, home of the Buckeyes and theOhioState campus. “We stopped somewhere,” she recalls. “There wasn’t a direct flight, and it was a game day weekend. When I got on to the connecting flight, everyone was in Buckeyes paraphernalia. I walked around the city, and everything was Buckeyes. I went to the game and watched the tailgating. It’s like a fever or a cult. It’s an incredible thing and a positive thing – but then when a story like this comes out, it can be very challenging.”
Her latest documentary, Surviving Ohio State – which premiered at Tribeca and releases on HBO – unpicks one of the most overlooked scandals in sports: It trains a harsh, unflinching light on Richard Strauss, the once-respected physician who abused at least 177 male students while working in Ohio State’s athletics department and student health center from 1978 to 1998. According to Ohio State’s own campus crime data released in 2021, the school logged more than 2,800 instances of alleged sexual misconduct by Strauss – including more than 170 total allegations of rape. Many of the survivors were violated during routine checkups in a pattern of abuse that spanned at least 15 sports – from football to fencing. (Male student-athletes nicknamed Strauss “Jellypaws” and would warn one another to “watch your nuts” before exams.) An independent investigation concluded the university had been aware of complaints about Strauss’s conduct as early as 1979 – when the women’s fencing coach raised the issue. But the university didn’t take meaningful action against the doctor until 1996; that year, Strauss was finally suspended from clinical duties, but remained a tenured faculty member until his retirement in 1998 – at which point he wasstillgiven emeritus status.
That would seem to make Strauss an even bigger scourge than Larry Nassar – the former Michigan State University and US women’s gymnastics team physician servinga de facto life sentencefor sexually assaulting at least 265 young women and girls under his treatment from 1996 to 2014. But where Rachael Denhollander, Maggie Nichols and the other elite gymnasts who blew the whistle on Nassar were celebrated as heroes, the men who came forward with their allegations against Strauss were greeted with skepticism and ridicule. “I don’t think we’re used to seeing men come out publicly about abuse,” says Orner, who spent 31/2-years on the documentary – or more than twice the time she typically dedicates to her projects. “When the OSU survivors came out, they were challenged by the university legally. It’s been going on for seven years. That’s had devastating effects on them all.”
Orner’s film puts viewers in front of those survivors and challenges them to maintain their cynicism after hearing their experiences in explicit detail. Most prominent are Buckeyes such as Mike DiSabato (the Strauss whistleblower) and Mark Coleman (a former college champion turned mixed martial arts star) who fueled the success of Ohio State’s wrestling program and were held up as exemplars of a particular strain of flinty, midwestern toughness. Al Novakowski, a standout hockey player who left his native Canada to play for the Buckeyes, tells a horrifying story about one Strauss assault in which he alleges the doctor drugged and raped him after he went to see him about a muscle spasm. “I kept thinking, Who am I gonna tell?” he recalled. It’s one of many scenes that hammers home the disparity between Strauss – a former Navy officer who edited medical journals and issued early warnings about the dangers of steroid use – and the tough-guy students, who could lose their scholarship if he failed them on their physicals. Says Coleman: “We were powerless.”
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 onhim, 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 familyendorsing the independent investigationonly 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 thefourthsex 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 promptanyintervention 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.
Surviving Ohio State premieres on HBO on 17 June with UK and Australia dates to be announced