Brian Garrett has said that some of the abuse he experienced and witnessed happened after Strauss lost his Ohio State clinical roles, when Strauss was operating a private men’s clinic near campus. Garrett has described the embarrassment and fear that kept him silent for years, even as Strauss continued to carry the reputation of a physician who had spent much of his career at Ohio State. His account makes the years after the university’s clinical removal impossible to treat as an administrative epilogue.
A State Medical Board memorandum from that period says Strauss’s private clinic advertised in The Lantern and offered a discount to Ohio State students. The same record identifies Strauss as the physician working there while the Board was investigating allegations involving his treatment of male patients. Ohio State had removed him from its own exam rooms, but the connection between Strauss and the student population around the university did not simply disappear.
Ohio State Still Gave Him Emeritus Status
Strauss remained an Ohio State faculty member until 1998, when his regular professor positions ended and a separate Faculty Emeritus record became active. The later independent investigation reconstructed the recommendation process that led to the title. That process unfolded after the university had already decided Strauss should no longer be treating students.
Perkins Coie identified an October 1997 memorandum from Acting School of Public Health Director Randall Harris recommending Strauss for emeritus status based on his service and professional achievements. Investigators reported that Harris knew a Student Health patient had complained about Strauss and that some form of hearing had occurred. When investigators later asked whether that history factored into the recommendation, Harris said he did not know how to answer the question.
The recommendation continued through the university in January 1998, when Ronald St. Pierre asked Vice Provost Nancy Rudd to support it. Perkins Coie reported that St. Pierre knew about the 1996 disciplinary action, while Dean Bernadine Healy later wrote that she had not approved the emeritus appointment and had not been told about the recommendation until after the Board meeting. The records show administrators entering the process with different levels of information and involvement rather than a single, fully shared account of what had happened.
Ohio State’s Board of Trustees approved Strauss as Professor Emeritus in March 1998. The available records do not establish what each trustee was told about the complaints or the clinical discipline, so there is no basis for assigning individual knowledge the documents do not show. The record does establish that Ohio State approved an honor associated with Strauss’s career after administrators involved in the recommendation process already knew parts of the history that had led the university to remove him from patient care.
The Medical Board Built A Case That Later Went Inactive
The State Medical Board did not learn about Strauss through a formal report from another practicing physician. The Governor’s Working Group that later reviewed the Board’s handling of the case found that no practicing physician came forward to report him. A Board investigator encountered the allegations while working on a separate complaint initiated by Strauss and opened a sexual-impropriety investigation.
A contemporaneous Board form records that the investigator learned Ohio State was examining allegations of inappropriate examinations of male students and that incidents of a sexual nature had been described. At the point captured in that document, Ohio State had not filed a formal complaint with the regulator even though the investigator was already pursuing the allegations. The same form records a request from a redacted university speaker that Ohio State’s internal inquiry remain strictly confidential.
The public document does not identify that speaker, and the request itself does not prove an unlawful concealment effort. What it does preserve is a moment when the regulator had already been told about serious allegations while Ohio State had not yet made a formal complaint. Helen Ninos’s memorandum records the exchange from the university side, saying the Medical Board investigator asked whether Ohio State intended to file a complaint and indicated that the Board might initiate one itself.
By early 1997, the Board investigation had progressed to an approved enforcement plan calling for continued investigation and access to patient records. The plan also recognized that Strauss had opened an off-campus clinic and was advertising to Ohio State students, which meant the regulator knew he still had a route to the same student population after the university had removed him from clinical work.
Even after reaching that stage, the case went inactive. Strauss’s Ohio medical license remained active until it lapsed in 1998, and the Board administratively closed the investigation in 2002 without taking disciplinary action against him. When the Governor’s Working Group later reconstructed the file, it said the surviving record did not explain why the case had stalled.
The regulator had also identified physicians who might have failed to satisfy reporting obligations. The investigator who opened the Strauss case believed those questions would be handled through a companion file, but that file was closed in 1997 with the notation that it had been “opened in error.” The later review could document the closure without recovering a complete explanation for how a serious investigation lost momentum.
For survivors who spent years asking why information this serious did not become a criminal case while Strauss was alive, the later reviews leave another gap that cannot be filled by speculation. The Working Group found no contemporaneous law-enforcement referral in the Medical Board file, while Perkins Coie found no such referral in Ohio State’s record. Some of the people who might have explained those decisions were no longer available when investigators returned to the history decades later.
Decades Later, The Board Questions Came Back
The later federal litigation did more than revisit what happened inside exam rooms. It also reached into Ohio State governance during the years when complaints about Strauss were escalating and the university was deciding how to respond. That is how Leslie Wexner, whose name was already deeply embedded in Ohio State institutions, became part of the Strauss discovery fight.
Wexner served on Ohio State’s Board of Trustees from 1988 through 1997 and became chair in May 1996, during the period when Strauss was under formal review and losing his clinical roles. Ohio State also listed Wexner as vice chair of the Board’s Personnel Committee in 1995. Those positions place his Board service inside the relevant chronology, although the public record does not establish that he personally saw Strauss’s complaints or personnel records.
Plaintiffs subpoenaed Wexner for a deposition in 2026. In a sworn declaration supporting his effort to block or limit that deposition, Wexner denied communicating with Strauss or about Strauss during his trustee tenure and said he did not recall later discussions about him. Ohio State also opposed the deposition, arguing that discovery had not identified Wexner as a witness or connected him to any plaintiff’s encounter with Strauss.
A federal court required Wexner to sit for the deposition because his Board tenure and leadership responsibilities made his testimony relevant to discovery about what the Board knew and how it monitored sexual-harassment compliance. The order was about relevance for discovery and made no finding that Wexner knew about Strauss’s abuse. Wexner later sat for the deposition, whose transcript has not surfaced publicly in the sources reviewed for this investigation, so his unavailable testimony is not characterized here.
The deposition fight also became part of a broader dispute over Wexner’s continuing name on Ohio State facilities. Steve Snyder-Hill asked the university to remove Wexner’s name from the Les Wexner Football Complex, and Strauss survivors later joined broader protests involving Wexner-named facilities. By late August 2026, Ohio State said roughly 500 Wexner-related naming requests remained under review.
Another governance question involved John Zeiger, who chaired Ohio State’s Board while lawyers from his firm represented Wexner in the Strauss subpoena litigation. Survivors publicly called that overlap a conflict, although no court or university ethics finding located in this investigation establishes that Zeiger committed an improper conflict. Ohio State’s own Board rules describe a process for screening and managing potential conflicts that can include recusal, while the public materials reviewed here do not identify whether that process was used for Zeiger in connection with the Wexner representation.
The current naming controversy also reaches Ohio State’s documented financial history with Jeffrey Epstein. A 2020 university review confirmed $260,000 in gifts from the J. Epstein Foundation to the Wexner Center for the Arts between 1990 and 1997, and another record suggested that a higher amount may have been pledged. The university also corrected an earlier description of a 2007 $2.5 million COUQ Foundation payment connected to the Les Wexner Football Complex and concluded that the money came from Wexner family entities rather than Epstein personally.
Those financial records help explain why survivors joined a wider challenge to the Wexner name at Ohio State. They do not establish that Wexner knew about Strauss, and the Strauss evidence reviewed for this investigation does not connect Strauss’s abuse to Epstein’s abuse network. The naming controversy and the Strauss litigation therefore overlap around Ohio State without becoming evidence of the same abuse network.
The Question Of Jim Jordan’S Knowledge Remains Disputed
Former Ohio State wrestlers have alleged that Jim Jordan knew about Strauss’s behavior while serving as an assistant wrestling coach. Dunyasha Yetts has said he directly told Jordan and head coach Russ Hellickson, while another witness later alleged in litigation that he told Jordan after encountering Strauss in a shower.
Jordan has repeatedly denied knowing about sexual abuse by Strauss and has said he would have acted if he had known. Former athletic director Andy Geiger later testified under oath that he believed Jordan probably knew because discussion among wrestlers was active, while also making clear that he did not know that as a fact. Public filings and unsealed testimony have quoted portions of Hellickson’s deposition concerning problems discussed in Larkins Hall, but Hellickson’s full deposition remains sealed and Jordan’s own 2025 deposition remains sealed as well.
Perkins Coie did not publicly identify Jordan as an official it found to have known about specific complaints. The public evidence about his knowledge therefore remains disputed, and that boundary should remain clear even as former wrestlers continue to stand by their accounts. Ohio State’s documented failures also began before Jordan joined the wrestling staff and extended beyond that program, which is why the political argument around his name cannot be allowed to consume the history the men were trying to expose.
Survivors Brought The Old Files Into Public View
The modern reckoning accelerated in 2018 when former athletes and students began speaking publicly about experiences that had once existed in isolation. Mike DiSabato became one of the most visible early whistleblowers, and other men brought forward accounts from different parts of Strauss’s Ohio State career. Their stories gave the public a reason to return to documents that had existed for years without ever being assembled into a complete account while Strauss was alive.
Once those files were read beside survivor accounts, older records stopped looking like isolated administrative events. Snyder-Hill’s 1995 complaint could be read beside the earlier Student Health complaint, while the Athletics material showed that concerns had also been moving through another part of the university. Garrett’s account extended that history into the years after Strauss lost access to university clinics, when his private practice still gave him a route to young men around Ohio State.
Ohio State hired Perkins Coie to conduct an independent investigation, and the report concluded that Strauss sexually abused at least 177 male student-patients and that university personnel knew of complaints or concerns as early as 1979 but failed for years to meaningfully investigate or take corrective action. Ohio State released the report with underlying records and publicly acknowledged what it described as a fundamental failure to prevent the abuse, later revoking Strauss’s emeritus status as part of the institutional response.
The investigation gave the public a view the men themselves had never been given while Strauss was alive. Complaints handled in separate offices could finally be read beside one another, and decisions that had once looked like isolated administrative acts could be examined in the context of what survivors said was happening to them.
The licensing system eventually returned to Ted Grace’s handling of the complaints as well. In July 2020, the State Medical Board cited Grace based on allegations that included failing to report another licensee’s sexual misconduct and making a false, fraudulent, deceptive or misleading statement. Grace permanently surrendered his Ohio medical license in April 2021 in lieu of further disciplinary proceedings, ending the case without a contested hearing deciding every allegation.
The Men Also Had To Fight To Have Their Cases Heard
Federal lawsuits against Ohio State began in 2018, with many survivors bringing claims under Title IX. Before those cases could reach deeply into what university officials knew or remembered, Ohio State argued that the claims had been filed too late under the applicable statute of limitations. A federal trial court initially dismissed important claims on that basis.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed key parts of that decision. It concluded that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged they could not have known about Ohio State’s deliberate indifference until the university’s role became publicly knowable decades later. The U.S. Supreme Court declined Ohio State’s appeal, allowing the litigation to continue.
That procedural history can sound distant from the men at the center of it, but the consequence was personal. Survivors who had already waited years for the institutional history to become public first had to overcome the argument that too much time had passed for their claims to be heard. Once discovery proceeded, former university officials were questioned under oath and decisions made decades earlier became part of the litigation record.
Ohio State says it had already reached settlements with 317 survivors for more than $61 million before the later $100 million agreement. The newer agreement covered 279 of the 280 individual plaintiffs then remaining in the litigation and totaled $100 million in principle. Ohio State’s Board ratified those agreements, and later reporting said a special master was determining how the money would be allocated among the participating plaintiffs.
The settlement figures involve different groups and processes from Perkins Coie’s finding of at least 177 male student-patients, so the numbers are not interchangeable. One individual claim remained outside the later agreement in the public record reviewed for this investigation. Behind every total is a person whose experience reached a formal system only after the public had begun to understand what Ohio State had failed to put together while Strauss was alive.
Ohio State Says The Institution Is Different Now
Ohio State now acknowledges what it describes as a fundamental failure to prevent Strauss’s abuse and inadequate efforts to investigate complaints at the time. The university says its policies and compliance systems have changed and points to survivor services available now. Those reforms are part of the institution survivors are dealing with today.
They exist beside the historical documents survivors spent years trying to bring into the same public view. Those files show complaints remaining separated across offices while Strauss continued seeing patients after the 1995 complaints, and the later reviews found no contemporaneous law-enforcement referral in the Ohio State or Medical Board records they examined. A changed system today does not answer every question about decisions made while Strauss was still alive.
The Men Are Still Adding Their Names To The History
Tim Becker has described how shame kept him silent for years even though his later career brought him into contact with people affected by sexual and domestic violence. Kirk Dixon also waited decades before publicly describing what he says Strauss did to him as a young baseball recruit. Snyder-Hill’s history sits at the other end of that timeline because he complained immediately and left a contemporaneous paper trail.
There was never one correct way for these men to respond to what happened to them. The old files make that especially clear because a man who complained in 1995 and a man who spoke publicly in 2026 can now be read inside the same institutional history without forcing either of them into the other’s timeline. The difference between immediate reporting and delayed disclosure belongs to the men themselves, while the responsibility for what Ohio State did with information it received belongs to the institution that received it.
The fuller history exists now because survivors kept pushing information that had been separated for years into public view. Records show warnings reaching Ohio State while Strauss was alive, and the Medical Board opened a serious case that later went inactive. The men who came forward afterward made it possible to read those institutional decisions beside the experiences that gave them meaning.
Ohio State has acknowledged its failure and entered settlements with hundreds of men, but the institutional response came after survivors had already spent years living with experiences the university itself had never assembled into a complete account while Strauss was alive. The files still contain gaps around individual decisions and sealed testimony, yet they are no longer empty where the warnings are concerned. Men were reporting troubling conduct while action was still possible, and the records that survived now sit in public beside the people who spent years asking whether anyone had been told.
For a survivor who carried that question alone, the answer no longer depends only on memory or rumor. Ohio State’s own documents and the regulator’s files preserve complaints and internal discussions from the years when Strauss still had access to young men. They cannot recover every opportunity that was lost, and some decisions remain unexplained, but the surviving files now place those warnings inside the public history instead of leaving the men to carry them alone.