HBO’s Sexual Abuse Scandal Documentary

The latest entry in a genre one wishes weren’t so burgeoning is HBO‘s Surviving Ohio State, following in the sadly necessary footsteps of documentaries about sexual abuse in the athletic departments at Michigan State (Athlete A and At the Heart of Gold) and Penn State (Happy Valley).

When Surviving Ohio State was announced, anticipation hinged on the participation of producer George Clooney and the possibility that exploring the abuses of Dr. Richard Strauss and alleged negligence by authority figures at Ohio State might topple Jim Jordan, Ohio Congressman and Trump lapdog.

If your interest in Surviving Ohio State revolves entirely around Jim Jordan-related schadenfreude, you can probably skip it. Jordan, who refused to participate in the documentary for self-evident reasons, comes across as heartless and negligent, but the doc lacks any sort of smoking gun likely to dissuade his dedicated constituents, who have known about all of these allegations for each of the last three times they’ve voted for him. 

Jordan, unfortunately, also proves to be a distraction to the filmmakers, especially in the documentary’s second half. Caught up in the they-said/he-said-in-previous-statements disagreements, director Eva Orner largely fails to explore the institutional side of the scandal. I shouldn’t come away from a documentary like this fixated on the name of a single assistant wrestling coach (one who was not and has not been accused of anything criminal) and completely unable to name the Ohio State president, athletic director and key administrators under whose watch these abuses occurred. 

For the first half of its 108-minute running time, Surviving Ohio State is, as its title suggests, a compelling examination of the survivors of abuse and the mechanisms through which large-scale abuse can occur at a major university.

Per a 2019 independent investigation, from 1978 to 1998 Dr. Richard Strauss abused at least 177 male students at Ohio State. Strauss had particularly close ties to a number of Buckeyes sports programs, including fencing, hockey and the wrestling team, coached by Russ Hellickson, with two-time NCAA champ Jordan as his primary assistant. The accusations from athletes involved Strauss’ inappropriate examinations, his tendency to take regular, extended showers in several athletic locker rooms, and grooming behavior escalating ultimately into rape. For some of that time, Strauss worked at the Student Health Center and thus had access to the entire student body, and although he was relieved of certain of those duties after complaints, he retired from Ohio State entirely on his own terms.

A group of wrestlers from the mid-90s are Orner’s primary points of entry, and this group of survivors proves crucial to both the strongest aspects of the documentary and the distraction that leaves it less effective than it could be.

At least a half dozen of those wrestlers tell their stories to the camera, accompanied by filler re-enactments — a shower head spurting water, the hallway leading to a medical examination room — that add very little. The stories themselves are candid and graphic, the haunted men today contrasted with vintage footage of wrestling matches and the various athletes in their high-achieving youth. 

Well aware of skepticism from online trolls who have wondered how veterans of a combat sport could allow this sort of “victimization,” the men talk about the surprise and shame that led them not to respond in the moment and to remain silent about the incidents for decades. It’s the film’s way of setting up the psychology of male survivors and, perhaps more than that, of explaining why the OSU scandal hasn’t received the instant attention and sympathy that greeted revelations from generations of female gymnasts about Michigan State and United States national team doctor Larry Nassar.

The truth is that Jordan’s involvement has contributed to what visibility the Ohio State situation has had. All of the wrestlers present in this documentary have made it clear that Strauss’ behavior wasn’t a secret, and that the coaches all knew about the inappropriate showers and concerns about the examinations, taking little action in Hellickson’s case and no action in Jordan’s case. Jordan has belligerently and vehemently denied that he knew anything at all, which makes him at best an oblivious caretaker of young men.

The wrestlers, plus at least one referee with a story of his own, are completely persuasive, and Orner is able to give a sense of pervasive rumors about Strauss’ creepiness. But that’s been the story since these allegations against Strauss came out back in 2018 — and other than one small, thoroughly speculative detail about Jordan’s actions well after the scandal broke, no new information is provided and no dots connected regarding Jordan or Hellickson or anything else.

The frustration of Surviving Ohio State is how fixated it becomes on Hellickson and Jordan and unnamed figures at the university — Hellickson and the board of trustees, like Jordan, declined to provide any response — without that smoking gun or that key piece of dot-connecting. 

Given how potent the survivor interviews are and how negligible the details are on the systemic failures, Surviving Ohio State would have been better with more focus on the former and less unsubstantiated insinuation — however persuasive — about the latter. 

The documentary is extremely effective at giving voice to those survivors and providing context and understanding for their silence — and that’s extremely important, especially alongside those documentaries about what happened at Penn State and Michigan State. It may not be as sensational and buzzy as bringing down a major university or a sitting congressman, but since Surviving Ohio State won’t do either thing, it’s worth praising the potency of what it does well.