I can't even fathom not being there for my guys

***Content warning: the following discusses instances of sexual abuse and rape.***

In January of this year, Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) voted in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which expands the ability of the Department of Homeland Security to detain immigrants for nonviolent crimes. Riley was a Georgia nursing student allegedly murdered by a Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally and had committed prior nonviolent offenses, and xenophobes and political opportunists ignore that this actual law would not have prevented this alleged murder. Riley’s own father has criticized the politicization of his daughter’s murder, but that has not deterred the bill’s proponents (because most of them see a murdered college woman as an opportunity to turn up the cruelty dial).

Congressman Jordan said when the Laken Riley Act was signed into law by the President of the TV, “This bill makes it clear: illegal aliens who commit crimes will face the full consequences, and states will have the power to hold the federal government accountable for its failed immigration policies. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are taking decisive action to protect our citizens, secure the border, restore justice, and ensure that those who break our laws are held responsible."

The smearing of immigrants as a collective criminal element is a well-disproven myth, and Jordan is likely aware of that. Like the actual Laken Riley and her family, though, he does not care.

Also in January, Jordan voted in favor of the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would ban transgender women and girls from participating in women’s and girls’ sports. The act, created to specifically punish children who make up a minuscule fraction of the population, has in its very name the misleading cloak of “protecting” cisgender girls and women. As Louisa Thomas wrote in January for The New Yorker:

But the drive to ban transgender athletes from sports has never been about numbers. In 2023, Ohio’s House of Representatives passed a bill banning trans girls from competing in girls’ sports as early as kindergarten. It was called the Save Women’s Sports Act, conjuring an image of barbarians at the gate. But, when the journalist Pablo Torre went looking for these girls who were, purportedly, breaking all the records and stealing all the opportunities, he found that, when the efforts of the measure began, there was one trans varsity athlete in Ohio: a backup catcher. (She wasn’t very good.) When the governor of Mississippi signed a bill in 2021 barring trans athletes from competing in sports according to their gender, supporters of the bill didn’t present evidence of trans athletes at public schools in the state. Around that time, the Associated Press contacted two dozen lawmakers who were sponsoring legislation to prohibit transgender girls from joining girls’ teams at public high schools, in addition to reaching out to conservative groups that were supporting the bills. In most cases, no one could cite any problematic instances of transgender participation. Many of the bills’ biggest advocates did not know whether there were any transgender athletes in their states at all.

Lindsey Gibbs also explained in January,

This was never about women’s sports.

It was about reinforcing traditional gender roles, asserting control over women’s bodies, and, most terrifyingly, eradicating transgender people from public life completely” and that “women’s sports were merely the trojan horse.”

Again, Jordan has been apprised of all this, but he does not care. He pretends he’s being brave while taking the route of the bully, which is always the mask of a coward.

Not caring about how his choices harm vulnerable people seems to be a pattern with the congressman. I was reminded of that this week when I watched the new HBO documentary Surviving Ohio State, which expands on Jon Wertheim’s 2020 Sports Illustrated piece on the university’s gross mishandling of a doctor, Richard Strauss, who preyed sexually on Buckeye athletes and students for decades despite multiple complaints made about him. The film is a tough watch, as it involves several Strauss victims speaking very candidly about the horrors they endured while others in authority, including Jordan, knew that the doctor was a predator and chose not to act, allowing students to be repeatedly touched inappropriately (and in some cases even raped) but Strauss.

Jordan is a key character in the documentary, first noted early on by OSU wrestlers as having known that Strauss was acting inappropriately when giving physicals and treating injuries and then, when former OSU athletes sued the school years later, denying any awareness of wrestlers being sexually abused while he was a coach there and lobbying them to defend him and his reputation.

One of the great Jim Jordan ironies that comes to mind during the film is that the only–only–Ohio State employee who attempted to stop Strauss’ abuse of athletes in his care was a woman. Charlotte Remenyik, who coached fencing at the school from 1978 to 1999, brought up Strauss’ predatory behavior to the university multiple times, only to be rebuffed because the school said no specific athletes had raised a formal complaint. Strauss himself tried to smear Remenyik because of how often she warned her team about Strauss. She is the only coach mentioned in the university’s 1999 report concluding Strauss had abused and raped almost two-hundred OSU students. (It’s odd that two pages online from OSU celebrating Remenyik don’t mention her standing up to Strauss and the school.)

While Jordan fights for legislation that he claims protects girls and women athletes, it was a woman who actually stepped up and risked her career to try to protect athletes when Jordan and his ilk would not, only to have her concerns repeatedly dismissed in order to not rock the Buckeye boat. 

In Surviving Ohio State, the athletes interviewed explain how Strauss groomed them, and they discuss Jordan protecting Strauss. So it is Jim Jordan who stayed mum about an actual groomer, though he sits in an even more powerful position now with the ear of the president and is not constantly bombarded with questions about his enabling of a predator.

While there are several particularly difficult, emotional points in the documentary, what still sits with me is former wrestling referee Frederick Feeney, who spoke of an interaction with Strauss following a match Feeney worked. Feeney speaks through tears detailing how Strauss touched Feeney’s butt and masturbated next to him in a shower. After leaving the shower, Feeney–who was not a student-athlete who had to worry about compromising a scholarship or bringing negative attention to his program or school, something that kept so many Strauss abuse victims silent–encountered Jordan and OSU head wrestling coach Russ Hellickson in the hallway and told them what had just happened. “Jim Jordan looked at me straight in my face,” says Feeney, “and said, ‘It’s Strauss. You know what he does.’”

Jim Jordan knew what Strauss was doing to the people Jordan was charged with mentoring and protecting.

“Early on when [the scandal] came out,” says former OSU wrestler Mike Schyck in the film, “I had an opportunity to speak to media, and I didn’t choose to, and I finally chose to because Russ [Hellickson] didn’t, Jim Jordan didn’t. And the people that you thought would be there standing up for you, they didn’t.” Near the film’s end, Schyck, who now coaches youth wrestling, tears up saying, “I can’t even fathom not being there for my guys.” 

Whenever Jim Jordan claims going forward that he is standing up for anyone via legislation (that is likely harming vulnerable people in reality), it should be noted very loudly how he did not stand up for his guys as a coach, and he did not stand up for his guys when he again had the opportunity to do so when the scandal became public. To this day, Jordan feigns ignorance.

There is a lot of bad in the country right now–a firehose of bad really. And it can be hard to keep up with it all or properly process some of it. Still, Jim Jordan is allowed to appear in public and speak in an official manner of political leadership these days seemingly without having his choice to put the people he coached in harm’s way being paperclipped to him incessantly. 

As former Buckeye wrestler Adam DiSabato says in the doc, “Jim Jordan is a coward. He’s not a leader. He’s a coward.”