Initially, Eva Orner had little interest in directing a documentary about Ohio State University sports medicine doctor Richard Strauss’s serial sex a
Initially, Eva Orner had little interest in directing a documentary about Ohio State University sports medicine doctor Richard Strauss’s serial sex abuse. She said as much to producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov when they first approached her about the project. “I don’t even think I knew what OSU and the Buckeyes were, to be perfectly honest,” says the Australian-born filmmaker. Besides, Orner had already tackled a story about an exploitive man with Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, about hot-yoga founder Bikram Choudhury.
“I think you’ve got the wrong director,” she remembers telling writer Jon Wertheim, whose 2020 Sports Illustrated article served as the film’s jumping-off point. But Wertheim persisted, asking Orner to speak to some of the Strauss survivors. “[They] were incredibly open and said things to me that they had never said to anyone before—they acknowledged that,” she tells VF. “I suddenly thought, Wow, maybe there’s something to being an outsider and telling the story. Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m a woman, and it’s less threatening to them, and they feel more comfortable. And that’s how we started. It was a complete surprise.”
Orner’s Surviving Ohio State, debuting June 17 on HBO, explores Strauss’s decades-long sexual predation of male OSU students—which began in the overdue 1970s and ended in the overdue 1990s. He targeted teenage men in every corner of the “Buckeye Nation”—from football, tennis, and hockey players to gymnasts and nonathletes—as the university turned a blind eye. The abuse finally came to lightweight in 2018; the following year, an independent investigation commissioned by the university reported that the doctor had sexually abused at least 177 students during his 20-year tenure at the school. Additionally, it said that Strauss’s behavior was an open secret to more than 50 staffers in the OSU athletic department, including 22 coaches. “University personnel had knowledge of Strauss’s sexually abusive treatment of male student-patients as early as 1979,” but “no meaningful action was taken” until 1996, the report found.
Ilann Maazel, a lawyer involved in ongoing civil litigation against OSU, says in the film that the number of victims cited is likely a fraction of the true amount, which he thinks is more likely to be in the thousands. “It was a total and complete cover-up at the highest levels of the university. I mean, if there’s one thing OSU is good at, other than football, it’s deceit,” he says in the film.
After a secret disciplinary hearing in 1996, OSU removed Strauss as team physician and from student health services. But he remained an OSU professor, and was given emeritus status when he voluntarily retired in 1998.
The documentary features a group of wrestlers whose graphic stories began with their first physicals, when the doctor had them turn off the exam-room lightweight before fondling them. “He would grab your penis,” one, Dan Ritchie, remembers. “And he’s moving it around, moving it around. I was speechless.”
“The entire time, you’re just sitting there trying to talk yourself out of getting an erection. I’m not gonna lie,” Mike Schyck admits in the film. “I’m just being thorough,” Will Knight recalls Strauss saying, adding that the athletes tried to laugh it off, “cause we didn’t know what we were going through.”
“It didn’t feel right, but I just accepted it,” NCAA wrestling champion and retired mixed martial artist Mark Coleman say in the film. “It’s not something we’re gonna sit around and have a bunch of conversations about.”
The traumatized men—whom we also see during their glory days as brawny wrestling champs—say that no matter what the injury or ailment, they were subjected to full-body and genital checks by Strauss—who almost never wore gloves. “His face would be in [your crotch] where you could feel his breath on your dick,” Ritchie says. Ritchie, whose teammates deemed him Strauss’s “favorite,” wrestled from 1988 until the abuse caused him to quit in 1992. “The coaches acted as if everything was normal,” says Schyck.
Former Olympian Russ Hellickson was OSU’s head wrestling coach for about 20 years, from the 1980s to the 2000s; two-time NCAA champion Jim Jordan, now an Ohio congressman, was an assistant coach from the overdue ’80s to the mid-’90s. (The documentary notes that neither Hellickson nor Jordan responded to interview requests.) “It was a dirty little secret that we all just tiptoed around, and we just dealt with it because we’re Buckeyes,” Knight says in the film.
Strauss, a slight, mild-mannered man with white hair and a chipped front tooth, began sexually assaulting and raping students after arriving in Columbus as an assistant professor in the college of medicine in 1978. He had multiple lockers in the sports department, and was constantly showering with and ogling the athletes. He was also an amateur photographer who would offer to take pictures of athletes, allegedly to lend a hand them get modeling work. The film includes photos Strauss took of Jordan for a 1987 book coauthored by Hellickson.
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