They came from the cities and from small towns. They spanned generations and races and body types. Some looked like they could still make weight; others not so much. It was the summer of 2021, and around 30 former Ohio State wrestlers quietly converged on a high school outside Columbus for a meeting. Others joined virtually. It had the look of a team reunion, but the mood was considerably more somber. This was akin to a family intervention, a revival meeting to attempt to repair the program’s ripped fabric.
It had been three years since one of the wrestlers, Mike DiSabato, had come forward with accounts that when he wrestled for OSU in the late ’80s and ’90s, the team doctor, Richard Strauss, had sexually assaulted him. He was, effectively, the whistleblower in what would be shorthanded “The Strauss Scandal.” It would metastasize, and soon hundreds of other former OSU athletes—disproportionately wrestlers—shared their experiences of being groomed, assaulted and in some cases raped by the serial predator who was also the team doctor.
Amanda Andrade Rhoades for USA TODAY/USA TODAY NETWORK
The trauma was compounded by a sense of betrayal. Wrestler after wrestler recalled complaining about Strauss to the head coach, Russ Hellickson, and to Jim Jordan, a onetime wrestling star in Wisconsin who served as OSU’s assistant coach from 1986 to ‘94.
In some cases, the wrestlers can recount specific dialogue with striking exactitude. Dunyasha Yetts, an All-American wrestler in the ’90s, recalls complaining to Jordan that he saw Strauss about a thumb injury and stormed out of the room when the doctor attempted to pull down his shorts. Yetts recalls Jordan saying that if Strauss ever approached him in a sexual manner, he’d “kill him.” Dan Ritchie, another wrestler, says he was present when Jordan was informed of abuse from Strauss. Jordan’s response: "If he did that to me, I'd snap his neck like a twig of dried balsa wood."
In all, at least 11 former wrestlers—as well as a wrestling referee—have said the OSU coaches knew and chose to do nothing. Strauss would continue to go unchecked until the mid ’90s, assaulting athletes without consequence. Nick Nutter, an All-American OSU wrestler in the ’90s and a Strauss survivor, recounted to me in 2020, as I was reporting this story, that he and his teammates made a calculus before deciding whether to see the team doctor. “Is this injury bad enough that I’m willing to get molested for it?”
Even as Ohio State began settling lawsuits brought by survivors of Strauss in 2020, Hellickson and Jordan continued to deny they ever knew there was abuse. By this time Jordan was a Republican member of Congress representing Ohio’s Fourth District, an ascending political star rising in status and power. Jordan predictably, was asked about the allegations leveled by so many of the athletes he once coached. He was defiant, referring inquiries to a statement issued by his communications director: “Congressman Jordan never saw or heard of any abuse, and if he had he would have dealt with it.” (Jordan did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
Now, Jordan is in prime position to rise to the position of speaker of the House, third in line for the presidency. On Friday, Republicans chose him as their nominee for the position in an internal vote, though he still must win election on the floor of the full House. Jordan’s potential ascendancy has resurfaced questions about his role in the Strauss scandal and whether he is fit to lead the House of Representatives. His candidacy, up and down as it has been, has troubled a number of his former wrestlers—many are in close contact, and calls quickly rocketed around their orbit. A half dozen communicated with Sports Illustrated for this story. It is worth, if nothing else, understanding Jordan’s role in the scandal, exactly what the claims against him are and how he has responded.
The allegations and denials and fallout from the scandal created a schism in the OSU wrestling fraternity. Mark Coleman, a former NCAA champ and then early UFC star who was among Strauss’s survivors said in 2018 to the Wall Street Journal of Jordan, “There’s no way—unless he’s got dementia or something—that he’s got no recollection of what was going on at Ohio State.”
Coleman says that the Jordan loyalists were furious, and “all hell broke loose.” He walked back his claim, clarifying, “At no time did I ever say or have any direct knowledge that Jim Jordan knew of Dr. Richard Strauss’s inappropriate behavior. I have nothing but respect for Jim Jordan, as I have known him for more than 30 years and know him to be of impeccable character.”
Roommates and teammates turned against one another. One faction pointed out the perceived disloyalty of coaches denying what DiSabato called “an open secret” and, in effect, siding with a rapist and the institution over their own teammates. The other faction pointed to the perceived disloyalty of survivors, making life difficult for a revered longtime coach and an assistant coach who has ascended to the U.S. Congress.
Mike Schyck, a former OSU wrestler and Strauss survivor, was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he had the idea to bring the Buckeyes’ wrestling community together to talk out their differences. He conceived the summit at the high school. “There was so much pain,” he says. He wrote to the coaches, imploring them “to do the right thing and speak with us, maybe hear each other’s sides of the story.”
Hellickson attended the meeting. Jim Jordan did not.
In these polarized times, at least one issue does not cleave the public: sexual predation. Who among us is not repulsed by the idea of someone exploiting a power imbalance and engaging in nonconsensual sex? For that same reason—in these same polarized times—sexual deviance has been weaponized for political gain. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently appeared on 60 Minutes and, absent evidence, accused Joe Biden of supporting sexualizing and “grooming” children. Last year, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York blamed the baby formula shortage in part on “pedo grifters.”
Yet in Jordan, they had a colleague who—at least according to more than a dozen athletes he once coached—was confronted with an actual groomer, a real-life sexual predator. And what did he do?
Richard Strauss arrived in Columbus in 1978, as a highly credentialed assistant professor of medicine. He began volunteering to work with Buckeyes athletic teams and, almost immediately, began sexually assaulting and molesting male OSU athletes.
Strauss, who died by suicide in 2005, seems to have made an early determination that athletes—dependent on the school for a scholarship, dependent on the doctor to clear them to compete, fearful of being stigmatized in the locker room—were especially vulnerable to his predations. As the wrestling team’s designated doctor, he kept an office at Larkins Hall, then the school’s main physical education building. He was known to sit naked in the locker room when the wrestlers arrived from practice. He would shower when the wrestlers showered. When he treated their injuries, inevitably the examinations would end up with the athletes being fondled or otherwise assaulted.
After DiSabato’s initial complaint, OSU contacted an outside law firm and launched an investigation that would cost the school in excess of $6 million. The report detailed acts of sexual abuse Strauss had committed against 177 former OSU students. Most of the students were athletes; most of the athletes were wrestlers.
The report concluded that “university personnel had knowledge of complaints and concerns about Strauss’s conduct as early as 1979 but failed to investigate or act meaningfully.” Ohio State contested none of the findings and has reached settlements with roughly 300 survivors for more than $60 million, while more than 200 other suits against the school by Strauss survivors remain unsettled. One former OSU wrestler, Rocky Ratliff, is now a lawyer representing other wrestlers.
Jordan, however, did not soften his stance. In 2018 he was interviewed on Fox News by Bret Baier. He not only maintained that he was unaware of Strauss’s wrongdoings while an OSU wrestling coach, but he went on the offense. “What bothers me the most, is the guys that are saying this, I know they know the truth. I know they do.”
He also spoke ill of specific survivors and questioned the legitimacy of their motivations. DiSabato, he noted, “[is] out to get Ohio State. He has a vendetta against our family … he‘s got all kinds of lawsuits against him.” Yetts, Jordan told the national TV audience, “spent 18 months in prison for fraud.”
The interview enraged many OSU wrestlers. Even if both assertions against DiSabato and Yetts were true, Jordan never made clear how it disqualified allegations of sexual assault when they were in their teens and early 20s. Says one former wrestler: “If Jim wanted to lie and said he never knew [about Strauss], that was one thing. For him to throw two brothers under the bus like that, that was low.”
Says DiSabato: “Think about it. If you’re Jim, even if you didn’t know, wouldn’t you then reach out? Sorry I missed it. Are you O.K.? How can I support you? There was none of that. We were the guys he coached. It was flat betrayal.”
The summit at the high school was intense. There were tears. There was yelling. There were additional accounts of sexual assault. In the end, Hellickson, now 75, heard out the wrestlers he once coached. Multiple sources who were present tell SI the coach conceded that, yes, he had heard the concerns about Strauss and perhaps should have done more. He did not release a public statement supporting the survivors, as multiple wrestlers had hoped he would. “But,” says one former OSU All-American, “there was a sense of closure.” (Calls and texts for this story at a number listed as Hellickson’s went unreturned.)
As for the other coach who allegedly knew of the sexual assaults and failed to act? Schyck sighs. Jim Jordan, he says, recruited him out of high school, and were it not for this genial assistant coach, Schyck might have gone to Michigan, not OSU. After Schyck’s eligibility ended at OSU, he joined the OSU coaching staff and briefly overlapped with Jordan. He admired his colleague’s discipline and his rectitude.
And it’s all the more reason he toggles between anger and confusion as he struggles to process Jordan’s defiant stance. “You have two presidents at Ohio State basically admitting [Strauss’s decades-long predation]. You have all this information. And you’re a congressman within the state of Ohio, where all that happened. And these are your athletes that you recruited,” says Schyck. “Well, guess what? We were harmed. And now you don’t want to do anything with that? I’m a wrestling coach now. I have athletes. All I want is to be there for them. It just baffles me to no end.”
In the coming days, we will learn whether members of the House of Representatives elect Jim Jordan as their new speaker.
