You can tell the Washington Post had anticipated that Jim Jordan would have already been elected Speaker of the House by the time they had published their roughly 11,000-word feature on multiple credible allegations he had ignored reports of sexual abuse of male wrestlers and other NCAA athletes at the filthy hands of now-deceased sports doctor Richard Strauss in the late 1980s and early 1990s while Jordan served as an assistant coach on the men’s wrestling team.
They probably had it pretty much ready to go on Monday when Jordan winning the full House floor vote was being treated as more or less inevitable by both the mainstream and right wing media. Then over the rest of the week it would seem they started working in a bunch of revisions to an alternate draft in case he didn’t actually end up getting there, finally dumping that version on Saturday morning after his defeat had been sealed by a secret ballot vote of the House GOP caucus.
Anyway, if it wasn’t already clear that Jordan could not have not known about the abuse, this story makes that unambiguous on a subatomic level. He absolutely knew. Everyone did, even to the point where the Post includes an anecdote of the upperclassmen telling then-incoming freshman Mike Schyck “Ohhh, Strauss is going to like you!” It wasn’t an “open secret,” it wasn’t even a secret at all.
The story details how Jordan at the time was not involved with the team outside of practice and meets, as in he rarely attended team dinners or socialized with them when not on the clock since he had four young children and was working on a master’s in education and then a JD while he was on the team’s coaching staff… all of whom also definitely knew. This wasn’t Jim Jordan alone and you could certainly see a parallel with him and some of the Penn State football guys who knew about Jerry Sandusky but didn’t want to rock the boat if Joe Paterno wasn’t going to do it. It was also a different time and what was obvious now in retrospect – even to the wrestlers themselves – was a joke to them, like “Hahaha! Strauss is such a fag!” when the word wasn’t such an unutterable slur.
Strauss was fired from the athletic department in 1996 after a closed-door hearing. He wasn’t canned from OSU as an institution however, as he continued teaching classes at the School of Public Health until retiring from his tenured position and gaining emeritus status in 1998. His suicide in 2005 does not appear connected at all to any internal, civil, or criminal investigation, as a 2019 report by law firm Perkins Coie (also of Durham Investigation fame) found that Strauss’s self-cancelation was more likely prompted by “significant escalating medical and pain problems since January 2002, which were not consistent with [Strauss’] preferred lifestyle.”
It wasn’t Strauss’s quiet defenestration, his suicide, Jim Jordan’s first House campaign in 2006, or the Penn State horror show surfacing in 2012 that stirred the Ohio State wrestlers to come forward when they did: It was in December 2017 when former wrestler Mike DiSabato and Jordan’s former fellow OSU assistant coach Mark Coleman were talking about piece of shit Michigan State doctor Larry Nassar, then about to be sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of sexually abusing at least 156 female gymnasts with that school and the US Olympics program.
“Wow, this is exactly what Strauss was doing. I just didn’t recognize before that what Strauss had done to us was sexual abuse,” DiSabato told the Post about the realization. From there DiSabato began what was at first a one-man crusade which snowballed into a lawsuit and then became the genesis of all our contrived “Jim Jordan wrestles” headlines here at National Zero.
The timing of it all though: The timing of the Washington Post’s composing of their 11,000 word feature meant to shed more light on a scandal that Jordan has never completely escaped when (they thought) he would’ve already been Speaker, the timing of Strauss sexually abusing young men in an era when the victims themselves didn’t recognize what it was and/or did not take it so seriously, and the timing of when Jordan’s complicity in the abuse surfaced in the national media.
Jordan was for just about a year or so already a household name to cable news viewers when Strauss’s abuses reached his doorstep. The above video was from April 2018 – back when he would still actually go on mainstream media to share his latest MAGA Cinematic Universe fan fictions stories about Hillary Clinton and the Deep State – the same month Ohio State hired Perkins Coie to conduct their independent investigation. Just a few months later was when The Hill reported “Powerful GOP Rep Jim Jordan accused of turning blind eye to sexual abuse as Ohio State wrestling coach,” 100 percent guaranteeing that the scandal would be politicized and tied into the forever war.
Democrats, Fake News Media and Law Firm Perkins Coie Try to Take Down Honest Jim Jordan with Disgusting, Scurrilous Charges https://t.co/XTGjsuH2Ck via @gatewaypundit
— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) July 7, 2018
“I don’t believe them at all. I believe him. Jim Jordan is one of the most outstanding people I’ve met since I’ve been in Washington. I believe him 100 percent. No question in my mind… He’s an outstanding man,” disgraced former President Trump told reporters on July 5, 2018, two days after NBC broke the story. It wasn’t a hard call for the fat fuck and/or the rest of the MAGA media-GOP establishment since Jordan himself had never been directly implicated in the sexual abuse. It was just one small clusterfuck amid the bigger one consuming American politics in those years. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall summed it up pretty nicely this week:
For a few days and weeks in 2018 it really seemed like Jordan’s political career might be over. It was touch and go. Eventually Jordan weathered the storm. But it wasn’t because he made a good case, particularly. It was more that his Republican colleagues simply decided it didn’t matter. He clearly wasn’t going to resign. So whatever. It was what it was. The context is important. At the time, Jordan was just another House GOP crazy, someone most voters barely knew about it. As a matter of national politics it just didn’t matter that much. And that’s basically where the story has rested for the last five years – a punch line for Democrats on social media but not a lot more.
Marshall wrote that on Monday after Jordan clinched the GOP’s speakership nomination and the rest of the media – Marshall included at the time – were treating it as a done deal that Gym would assume the gavel. Marshall goes on to explain how Jordan would and almost certainly should expect the media to revisit the scandal, hence the Washington Post feature on his personal history in which they “interviewed 11 former wrestlers from the Jordan era at Ohio State who said Strauss used medical exams to perpetrate molestations or worse. Eight said they had clear recollections of team members protesting Strauss’s conduct either directly to Jordan or within Jordan’s range of hearing. All considered it inconceivable that Jordan did not know about Strauss’s disturbing behaviors.”
So maybe in a way Jordan dodged a bullet. He can keep pretending to investigate the federal government’s “weaponization” of law enforcement against MAGAmericans, do stupid shit like platform Robert F Kennedy Jr at his hearings, yell at the camera on Sean Hannity’s show. It’s hard to see how any renewed momentum might end up taking him down, but you never know since it’s now compounded with the freshly humiliating defeats he suffered at the hands of his own party.
While the Post’s timing was obviously meant to coincide with Jordan’s would-be ascension, there’s nothing convenient about how it all began resurfacing in 2018 whilst he was in the midst of his war on the already defeated Hillary Clinton and the anti-Trump Deep State. It happened when it did because of events far outside of Washington, DC that had virtually nothing to do with partisan politics. There was nothing politically convenient about it other than to say NBC wouldn’t have given a shit if some rural Ohio high school teacher with a JD but not a Bar membership was implicated.
And even then if DiSabato had come to his realization and Perkins Coie had opened up their investigation during the Obama Administration, would anybody outside of Ohio had known about it? Could Jim Jordan have just apologized and said “Look I heard about it in passing but I thought the guys were just kidding. I’m terribly sorry if I let anyone down” and moved on with his career? Maybe.
Jordan’s sin wasn’t ignoring the abuse. We hate to say it, but it’s hard to see how he could or even should have been held responsible. “Jordan was just a kid himself, not that much older than us,” DiSabato told the Post. That Gym’s not named in any of the lawsuits should tell you whatever dereliction he committed during his time with the wrestling program was strictly moral.
It’s the old “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” here. That this became a political thing, that all the wrestlers were lying libtards, that Matt Gaetz told fucking Lou Dobbs it was a “Deep State” plot to bring down Jordan because of the timing, that it was prompted by Larry Nassar getting caught.