Ohio State University has agreed to pay $100 million in damages to 279 former students who said a campus doctor sexually assaulted them decades ago.
NBC News reports that announcement of the pending settlement appears to be a significant step toward ending the eight-year legal battle to get Ohio State to pay damages over allegations that it knew Dr. Richard Strauss was preying on students but did nothing to stop him.
“The survivors of the Strauss abuse are all Buckeyes,” Ohio State President Ravi Bellamkonda said at a university board meeting where the settlement was announced. “We continue to be very grateful to them for their courage in coming forward, and reaching a final resolution is very important to us and is an important step forward.”
Before the latest settlement, Ohio State had settled Strauss abuse claims with 317 other survivors for more than $61 million. Both the university and its former president have publicly apologized “to each person who endured” abuse at the hands of Strauss, who died by suicide in 2005.
Ohio State has been battling Strauss-related lawsuits since 2018, when a former wrestler named Mike DiSabato came forward with allegations that Strauss sexually abused him and hundreds of other male athletes under the guise of physical exams.
The law firm Perkins Coie conducted an investigation and concluded in May 2019 that Strauss sexually abused at least 177 male athletes and other students from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s and that coaches and administrators knew about it for two decades but failed to stop him.
U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) was among the former coaches DiSabato and numerous other former wrestlers accused of having done nothing to stop Strauss from abusing them. Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State from 1986 to 1994.
Jordan has repeatedly denied any knowledge of what Strauss is alleged to have done to the athletes.
