HBO’s Sexual Abuse Scandal Documentary

The most recent entry in a style one needs weren’t so burgeoning is HBO‘s Surviving Ohio State, following within the sadly obligatory footsteps of documentaries about sexual abuse within the athletic departments at Michigan State (Athlete A and On the Coronary heart of Gold) and Penn State (Joyful Valley).

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

In case your curiosity in Surviving Ohio State revolves completely round Jim Jordan-related schadenfreude, you possibly can in all probability skip it. Jordan, who refused to take part within the documentary for self-evident causes, comes throughout as heartless and negligent, however the doc lacks any form of smoking gun more likely to dissuade his devoted constituents, who’ve identified about all of those allegations for every of the final 3 times they’ve voted for him. 

Jordan, sadly, additionally proves to be a distraction to the filmmakers, particularly within the documentary’s second half. Caught up within the they-said/he-said-in-previous-statements disagreements, director Eva Orner largely fails to discover the institutional facet of the scandal. I shouldn’t come away from a documentary like this fixated on the title of a single assistant wrestling coach (one who was not and has not been accused of something legal) and fully unable to call the Ohio State president, athletic director and key directors below whose watch these abuses occurred. 

For the primary half of its 108-minute working time, Surviving Ohio State is, as its title suggests, a compelling examination of the survivors of abuse and the mechanisms via which large-scale abuse can happen at a significant college.

Per a 2019 impartial investigation, from 1978 to 1998 Dr. Richard Strauss abused not less than 177 male college students at Ohio State. Strauss had notably shut ties to quite a lot of Buckeyes sports activities applications, together with fencing, hockey and the wrestling staff, coached by Russ Hellickson, with two-time NCAA champ Jordan as his main assistant. The accusations from athletes concerned Strauss’ inappropriate examinations, his tendency to take common, prolonged showers in a number of athletic locker rooms, and grooming habits escalating finally into rape. For a few of that point, Strauss labored on the Scholar Well being Heart and thus had entry to all the pupil physique, and though he was relieved of sure of these duties after complaints, he retired from Ohio State completely on his personal phrases.

A gaggle of wrestlers from the mid-90s are Orner’s main factors of entry, and this group of survivors proves essential to each the strongest features of the documentary and the distraction that leaves it much less efficient than it may very well be.

At the very least a half dozen of these wrestlers inform their tales to the digital camera, accompanied by filler re-enactments — a bathe head spurting water, the hallway resulting in a medical examination room — that add little or no. The tales themselves are candid and graphic, the haunted males in the present day contrasted with classic footage of wrestling matches and the assorted athletes of their high-achieving youth. 

Nicely conscious of skepticism from on-line trolls who’ve questioned how veterans of a fight sport may enable this form of “victimization,” the lads discuss concerning the shock and disgrace that led them to not reply within the second and to stay silent concerning the incidents for many years. It’s the movie’s means of organising the psychology of male survivors and, maybe greater than that, of explaining why the OSU scandal hasn’t obtained the moment consideration and sympathy that greeted revelations from generations of feminine gymnasts about Michigan State and United States nationwide staff physician Larry Nassar.

The reality is that Jordan’s involvement has contributed to what visibility the Ohio State scenario has had. The entire wrestlers current on this documentary have made it clear that Strauss’ habits wasn’t a secret, and that the coaches all knew concerning the inappropriate showers and issues concerning the examinations, taking little motion in Hellickson’s case and no motion in Jordan’s case. Jordan has belligerently and vehemently denied that he knew something in any respect, which makes him at finest an oblivious caretaker of younger males.

The wrestlers, plus not less than one referee with a narrative of his personal, are fully persuasive, and Orner is ready to give a way of pervasive rumors about Strauss’ creepiness. However that’s been the story since these allegations towards Strauss got here out again in 2018 — and aside from one small, totally speculative element about Jordan’s actions nicely after the scandal broke, no new info is supplied and no dots linked relating to Jordan or Hellickson or anything.

The frustration of Surviving Ohio State is how fixated it turns into on Hellickson and Jordan and unnamed figures on the college — Hellickson and the board of trustees, like Jordan, declined to offer any response — with out that smoking gun or that key piece of dot-connecting. 

Given how potent the survivor interviews are and the way negligible the main points are on the systemic failures, Surviving Ohio State would have been higher with extra give attention to the previous and fewer unsubstantiated insinuation — nonetheless persuasive — concerning the latter. 

The documentary is extraordinarily efficient at giving voice to these survivors and offering context and understanding for his or her silence — and that’s extraordinarily vital, particularly alongside these documentaries about what occurred at Penn State and Michigan State. It might not be as sensational and buzzy as bringing down a significant college or a sitting congressman, however since Surviving Ohio State gained’t do both factor, it’s value praising the efficiency of what it does nicely.