"Surviving Ohio State" should end Jim Jordan's political career
"If there's one thing OSU is good at, other than football, it's deceit."
Surviving Ohio State, the documentary about the Dr. Richard Strauss sexual abuse scandal that debuted on HBO last night, would end Congressman Jim Jordan’s political career in a functioning society.
America is a hog nation. And it’s one thing to read in a lawyerly document that Strauss likely abused thousands of athletes and students at Ohio State over a 30-year career. It’s another thing entirely to have that human devastation laid bare in a 108-minute documentary produced by famous actor George Clooney.
The documentary covers Strauss’ reign of terror, which concludes with an independent investigation that found at least 50 former officials—including coaches, doctors and trainers—knew about the systemic abuse.
Other than Ohio State as an institution, nobody comes off worse than former wrestling coach Russ Hellickson and his then-right-hand man, Jordan.
Neither Hellickson nor Jordan participated in the documentary. It wouldn’t have gone well for them if they had. But Hellickson gave us an idea of what that might have looked like in an interview in 2018, when he discussed Strauss’ reputation for taking hour-long showers with wrestlers.
“I said, ‘Doc, you make guys nervous that you shower with them.’ And his response was, ‘Coach, you shower with your guys all the time.’ Yeah, not for an hour, Doc.
“It was obvious that Dr. Strauss liked to be in the shower room a lot with athletes. So, he was doing a lot of showering.”
Frederick Feeney, a Big Ten wrestling referee for 36 years, told a story about Dr. Strauss bizarrely showering next to him after a match. After choosing the showerhead next to Feeney in an otherwise empty room, Feeney observed Strauss masturbating. And when Feeney confronted him, Strauss said that he was merely washing himself before proceeding to touch Feeney’s ass.
Feeney left the shower, got dressed, and went to tell Hellickson and Jordan what happened.
“It’s Strauss,” Jordan is alleged to have said. “You know how he is.”
Near the end of the documentary, former wrestlers recount how roughly 20 teammates held a summit at a local high school. Over the course of hours, they recounted tales of abuse at the hands of Strauss.
After the meeting, Hellickson promised to do whatever his so-called “sons” needed from him in their quest for justice and accountability from Ohio State—starting with writing a letter.
However, that changed after Hellickson spoke with Jordan.
Hellickson “disappeared into silence… He never wrote any letter. He didn’t offer any support. He completely turned his back on us,” said one former wrestler.
Among the most damning revelations, other than Dr. Strauss likely maintained his position due to his knowledge and access to anabolic steroids that he distributed to Ohio State athletes, is that the university never fired him.
After a medical board investigation into Strauss, which only started because Strauss reported his superior to the board for “harassing” him about student complaints, Ohio State held a secret disciplinary hearing, didn’t publicly reveal the findings, and “very quietly” removed Strauss from athletic and student medical services.
However, Strauss still maintained his professorship of internal medicine and preventive medicine at the School of Public Health. And when he voluntarily retired in 1996, Ohio State granted him honorary emeritus status, which he advertised at his private practice in California before hanging himself with a cargo strap in 2005.
Ohio State, meanwhile, has publicly offered contrition while privately fighting victims every step of the way behind the scenes.
“The statute of limitations defense is sort of the last defense of scoundrels in sexual abuse cases,” said Ilaan Maazel, a civil rights attorney suing the university.
“We’ve seen it from the Catholic Church. We’ve seen it from the Boy Scouts. We see this from all sorts of organizations that are trying to avoid accountability. And that’s OSU’s defense. Basically, ‘We were so successful in hiding Dr. Strauss’ abuse, that it’s too late for you to sue us.’
"If there's one thing OSU is good at, other than football, it's deceit."
It’s hard to argue the point with Maazel by the end of the documentary.
Penn State offered victims of its sexual abuse scandal $1.4 million per person. Michigan State offered $1.2 million per person.
Ohio State, by comparison, offered a paltry $252,000 per victim. Had they taken the deal, it would have come with an agreement that the university admitted no guilt or liability.
The documentary is another warning, as if one were needed, about the perils of America’s melding of big-time athletics with institutions of higher learning.
Strauss got his start by preying on scholarship athletes with every motive in the world to stay silent about the abuse they suffered. And thanks to the cowardice of people like Hellickson and Jordan and roughly 48 other adults who were negligent in their duties, Strauss was able to escape consequences in his lifetime.
Living with that guilt would certainly explain a lot about Jordan’s entire schtick.
Because Jordan has decided to fight on the lie, that somehow, against all evidence to the contrary, we’re supposed to believe that he didn’t know what Strauss was fondling and raping wrestlers under his command.
Jordan has made a Congressional career out of painting himself as a righteous fighter. And yet, that hilarious facade crumbles in the rare instances he’s asked about specifics on camera in the documentary.
Probably because, deep down, he knows the price he has paid to maintain a career that will quickly be forgotten by the sands of history the moment he croaks. He might be an authority figure in a dusty town like Urbana, but even his Republican colleagues saw through him as a lightweight when he tried to take the Speaker’s gavel in 2024.
Hellickson and Jordan are men with families. And those families can remember them for their random acts of kindness at their funerals.
But the public?
Well, we should never let them forget the cowardice that went into making Strauss possible, since that’s the only way to ensure something like this never happens again in Columbus.
A plumber, a pastor and a professor walk into the legislature…
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