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‘We were powerless’: inside the devastating Ohio State sexual abuse scandal
A college physician allegedly abused at least 177 male students during his tenure, a story revived in a harrowing new film that highlights how he got away with it
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.
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 the Ohio State 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 was still given emeritus status.
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