Surviving Ohio State
(USA, 107 min.)
Dir. Eva Orner
The watershed moment of #MeToo rightly inspired many people to believe women when they came forward with allegations of sexual assault and misconduct against powerful men. That reckoning, however, didn’t quite inspire the same level of support for men who spoke out against abusive men. Particularly if survivors were more “masculine” in appearance, commentators or, worse, people in the comments were generally dismissive. Despite the compelling feminist bent of the movement, voices—generally male ones—perpetuated a misogynistic attitude that robust masculine guys should have better defended themselves.
That mindset receives a fascinating case study in the scandal of the athletics department at Ohio State University. Surviving Ohio State recaps a jaw-dropper story as grown men reiterate their allegations of sexual abuse against the late Dr. Richard Strauss. The alumni recount a collective abuse they experienced across two decades of Strauss’s tenure. Oscar winner Eva Orner (Burning, Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator) effectively uses the many voices that came forward to convey the tale. The sheer scale of the abuse boggles the mind. But rather than focus on the salacious nature of the story, Orner uses the collective to tackle the system that enables and shelters predators.
Surviving Ohio Stare features several voices from OSU’s sports wrestling team, who outline the charges against Strauss. They share how the decorated sports medicine physician was published in numerous academic journals and embodied the esteem that drew them to OSU. But one after another, they convey Strauss’s unconventional exams. Survivors including alumni Mark Coleman, Adam DiSabato, Michael DiSabato, Will Knight, Al Novakowski, Rockey Ratliff, Dan Ritchie, and Mike Schyck challenge the archetype of the strong silent type and bravely come forward in a collective reckoning. It’s a familiar design as Surviving Ohio State adopts the talking heads approach used to give voice to survivors, but a tough and productive distillation of facts and feelings to convey the pain, confusion, and betrayal at the heart of such stories.
The former athletes tell about recurring jokes in the waiting room that foreshadowed something sinister. “Oh, he’ll like you,” survivors recall hearing, as other wrestlers waited around, commenting on beefcake athletes and all-American boys.
The interviewees get uncomfortably graphic, too, as they detail the specific quirks of Strauss’s exams. No matter the occasion: a routine check-up, a groin injury, or a hockey puck to the toe, they always ended the same. “Drop your drawers,” Dr. Strauss would tell the players. Each physical, they note, finished with a thoroughly intense hands-on examination of athletes’ genitals. “Just to make sure everything was okay,” Strauss would allegedly say.
Stories of silence, shame, and confusion echo throughout the interviews. All these players evoke painful memories of dreams dashed or enthusiasm deflated. Some wrestlers remember their hesitation over staying in the ring if it invited frequent exposure to Strauss. Others tell Orner how they quit or were cut from the team after trauma from abuse precipitated a decline in their performance. Or, worse, coaches didn’t believe their stories and didn’t believe in their commitment for the team. Trade “athlete” with “actress” and “Strauss” with “Weinstein” and one gets a sense of the 20-year terror.
Equally compelling is the story from referee Frederick Feeney. He tells Orner about a doozy of a post-game experience in which he hit the showers and Strauss cozied up beside while soaping up. Feeney, overcome with emotions, explains how Strauss proceeded to masturbate openly in the shower beside him. The ref, freaked out, admits that he confronted the wrestling coaches on the way out. “That’s just Strauss,” Feeney remembers assistant coach Jim Jordan saying. Frequent showers with the teams added to Strauss’s extensive rap sheet while Jordan went on to serve in the House of Representatives for the Republican Party.
The doc makes a skin-crawlingly clear case that ultimately lays the accountability on the school and system that let Strauss claim countless victims over two decades. Among them is the daughter of a forming fencing instructor, who tells how her mom listened to athletes’ concerns, filed a complaint with the administration, and refused to let Strauss examine her players. It’s telling that the lone voice from the institution was a woman speaking out against locker room culture.
While the documentary offers limited new information about a case widely covered in the press since breaking in 2018, Orner affords this story care. What’s new here are the names, faces, and emotions. It’s a compelling challenge to the peanut gallery in the comments section.
Orner, having probed a similar case in Bikram and its tale of an overly “hands-on” yogi, uses the survivors’ stories to drive towards the change for which they are fighting. The film raises an important question about the inquiry into sexual assault and misconduct at Ohio State given that Strauss died in 2005. His death leaves some people asking why bother looking into matters so hold, but the story observes the necessity of revisiting the past in the face of the #MeToo reckoning.
Surviving Ohio State uses the confessional nature of the interviewees quite effectively to convey how the survivors are only now coming to grips with the fact that they were sexually assaulted. The culture of “manning up,” keeping one’s head down, and staying silent to avoid shame evokes its own kind of violence. Doubtlessly, there are more such stories to come in the seemingly endless stream of documentaries in #MeToo’s wake.
