The Supreme Court handed Ohio State University a potentially costly defeat by refusing to reconsider a lower court ruling that said former students should be allowed to sue for failing to protect them from a sexual predator decades ago.
The decision came nearly a year after the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said another federal judge erred in 2021 when he ruled that the statute of limitations in the case against Dr. Richard Strauss had expired.
Strauss’s victim, Steve Snyder-Hill, said “justice has prevailed.”
“Universities will not be able to cover up and lie about the sexual assault and then turn around and tell you it’s too late (to sue) because they were so successful in covering it up,” Snyder-Hill said.
Lawyers for the survivors said that OSU had “attempted to run out of time on its responsibility.”
“We look forward to going back to trial court, having our clients’ stories heard, and collecting more evidence of the widespread cover-up of Dr. Strauss’s serial predation by OSU,” stated Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, Scott Elliott. Smith, LPA and Public Justice, said.
Ohio State expressed disappointment that the Supreme Court decided not to review the case, but said “the university remains committed to supporting survivors” and has already paid $60 million in settlement money to 296 victims.
“Ohio State is a fundamentally different university today than when Strauss was employed and over the past 20 years has committed substantial resources to preventing and addressing sexual misconduct,” OSU said in a statement.
Shortly after the decision, lawyers for the victims of the late Dr. Richard Strauss said they intended to return to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Ohio to present their case against OSU.
“We plan to testify to all OSU employees who allegedly knew about Strauss’s abuse, including employees named in the complaints,” said Public Justice Student Civil Rights Project director Adele Kimmel.
Among the employees mentioned in the complaints is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State from 1986 to 1994 and who has been accused of failing to stop Strauss from sexually abusing student/athletes he helped train.
Jordan has repeatedly denied any knowledge of what Strauss was doing.
“Our statement has never changed,” Jordan spokesman Russell Dye said in an email. “Congressman Jordan never saw or heard of any abuse, and if he had, he would have stood up to it.”
Strauss, who worked for OSU, was accused of taking advantage of hundreds of men who attended the university from the 1970s to the 1990s, mostly under the guise of performing medical tests such as hernia checks. The statute of limitation for criminal rape cases in Ohio is 20 years. Strauss committed suicide in 2005.
But U.S. Sixth Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore said in the panel’s September 2022 ruling that most men didn’t realize until 2018 that they were victims of sexual assault.
“At the time of the abuse, they were teenagers and young adults and did not know what was medically appropriate,” Moore wrote in her opinion. “Strauss gave pretextual and false medical explanations for the abuse.”
Moore added that many of the former students believed, at the time of the alleged abuse, that because “Strauss’s conduct was so well known and talked about, it could not have been abuse.”
“Similarly, many believed Ohio State would not have named Strauss the athletic team physician unless his tests were legitimate and therefore the conduct was medically appropriate, even if it was uncomfortable.”
Moore also noted that it wasn’t until 2018 that the plaintiffs say they realized that OSU administrators allegedly knew for years about the abuse but failed to stop it.
So the statute of limitations clock should have started when the alleged victims learned that the administrators were aware of Strauss’s conduct “and failed to respond appropriately.”
That was a direct rebuke of a September 2021 ruling by US District Judge Michael H. Watson of the Southern District of Ohio.
OSU had already settled $40.9 million with 162 Strauss victims in 2020 and admitted it failed to protect them when Watson dismissed all remaining lawsuits against the university.
In doing so, Watson said there was no question that the victims “suffered unspeakable sexual abuse” at the hands of Strauss and that athletic coaches and other school officials knew about it and did not stop him.
But Watson also came under fire for refusing to recuse himself from the Strauss cases after revealing that his wife has had a business relationship with OSU. It was a question from an NBC News reporter that led him to admit it during a hearing in September 2021.
The school found itself on the defensive in 2018 after former OSU wrestler Mike DiSabato and several other former wrestlers made allegations that the team doctor abused them during physicals.
A year later, an independent investigation concluded that athletic trainers and administrators at the university had known for two decades that Strauss was sexually abusing male athletes and other students, but failed to raise the alarm or arrest him.
“Many of the students felt that Strauss’s behavior was an ‘open secret,’ as it seemed to them that their coaches, trainers, and other team doctors were fully aware of Strauss’s activities, and yet few seemed inclined to to do something to stop it. ”wrote investigators from the Perkins Coie law firm in a 180-page report.
The investigators reported that “Strauss sexually abused at least 177 male student-patients.”
In the Supreme Court complaint, two former Ohio State wrestlers identified as John Doe 18 and John Doe 23 said Jordan knew the athletes referred to Strauss as “Dr. Cough.”
The coaching staff did not show “any concern despite frequent comments by athletes about genital examinations,” the complaint says.
Additionally, when wrestlers complained about Strauss and other strange men leering at them in the showers, Jordan and head coach Russ Hellickson told them to “pretend you weren’t there.”
“Because Coach Hellickson, assistant coach Jordan, and the athletic department treated Dr. Strauss’s behavior as acceptable, John Doe 23 believed that he could do nothing to address his discomfort with Dr. Strauss,” the complaint states. .
NBC News has reached out to Hellickson for comment.
