SCOTUS says victims in decades-old sex abuse scandal can sue, despite Ohio State's efforts to evade litigation
The incident evidences OSU’s repeated attempts to bury sexual assault cases or avoid accountability.
The Supreme Court denied to hear Ohio State University’s appeal following the Southern Ohio District Court’s decision over the statute of limitations for negligence.
Despite its attempt to appeal, Ohio State University (OSU) will still have to answer to a decades-old sexual assault case.
On Monday, the Supreme Court denied OSU’s petition to appeal a lower court’s decision to allow students to sue the school for failure to properly respond to and protect them from allegations of rampant sexual assault by a professor and athletics physician.
Dr. Richard Strauss was an assistant professor in OSU’s College of Medicine and team physician in the athletics department. According to the Columbus Dispatch, Strauss was released in 1997 after several sexual assault allegations were brought against him. He died in 2005 by suicide.
A 2019 independent investigation into Strauss revealed the extent of his behavior, the number of alleged victims totalling 177 men.
38 of the 177 filed a complaint against OSU when they discovered that, in the words of their petition for rehearing en banc, “Ohio State was deliberately indifferent to [the victims’] heightened risk of abuse.”
Initially, the Southern Ohio District Court ruled in favor of the school, claiming that the 20 years allotted under the Ohio statute of limitations for sexual crimes had expired. However, on appeal, the Sixth Circuit Court opined,
The district court erred. The plaintiffs adequately allege that they did not know and could not reasonably have known that Ohio State injured them until 2018. Thus, at the motion-to-dismiss stage, we cannot say that their claims accrued before then. We REVERSE and REMAND for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
The Supreme Court followed after the Sixth Circuit.
In an email to Campus Reform, OSU Assistant Vice President of Media and Public Relations Benjamin Johnson stated that the school has “reached settlement agreements with 296 survivors for more than $60 million,” adding ”All male students who filed lawsuits have been offered the opportunity to settle. Ohio State has also been covering the cost of professionally certified counseling services and treatment for anyone affected, as well as reimbursing costs for preexisting counseling and treatment related to Strauss.”
OSU also made headlines recently in another case of alleged mishandling of sexual assault. As Gabrielle Etzel previously reported for Campus Reform, a more recent controversy involved two male football players who were acquitted of assaulting an unnamed 19-year-old female student, based on a “consent” video that they said was filmed based on the advice of at least one university official.
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As Etzel reported, the young woman visited one of the players at his apartment and consented to sex. While engaged in the activity, she says she withdrew consent to no avail. Another athlete entered the room and the two of them continued to harass the woman.
Nevertheless, after their trial, both players walked free because of one key piece of evidence: a video recording made after the incident, in which the victim, crying, said the sexual activity was consensual.
According to the athletes’ testimony, an OSU official had advised them to record such videos in order to protect themselves against allegations.
Ohio State noted that the athletes “were dismissed from the football program the day after their arrest in February 2020.”
When asked about whether OSU has a plan to bring sexual assault issues to light for quicker resolution, the school simply pointed back to its “well-established Non-Discrimination, Harassment, and Sexual Misconduct Policy” which offered a definition of “consent.”
