The Ohio State University and its Title IX office, including their newest branding into the Office of Institutional Equity (“OIE”), have a longstanding reputation for negligence and/or sweeping misconduct under the rug. They are fresh on the heels of several public scandals, including:

1. Failure to investigate or remedy sexual misconduct within the marching band.
   In 2014, an investigation was launched into Johnathan Waters, the Director of OSU’s marching band, which found that he had knowledge of a hostile environment created by the sexually charged culture of the marching band for years and failed to address it. Waters either willfully ignored or actively participated in many of the marching band’s overtly sexual antics, such as “ramp night” in which students got undressed and walked into the football stadium, the practice of giving sexually explicit nicknames to rookies, and the band zine “Trip Tic” which at times contained sensitive material about band members.
   This scandal revealed a number of dysfunctions within the university’s Title IX investigation procedures, resulting in the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issuing a finding of noncompliance to Title IX later that year.
   Instead of taking full responsibility, OSU took steps to mitigate the spread of the story, hiding the investigative report from search engines until the middle of 2022.
2. Failure to investigate or remedy domestic violence by football coach Zach Smith in 2015 until the news broke in 2018.
   As allegations of intimidation, assault, and stalking came to public attention, Zach Smith was fired. Head Coach Urban Meyer at first denied knowledge of the 2015 allegations but admitted to knowing about an incident in 2009 in which Smith was arrested for beating his then-pregnant wife. Both Meyer and other OSU admins had clear and provable knowledge of all the allegations as well as other vices of Smith’s - following a particularly expensive strip club visit of his, OSU added a morality clause to their coaching contract. Meyer had long been in personal contact with Zach’s battered and terrified ex-wife but still chose to lie to the public and keep Zach employed. When this came to light, OSU gave him a slap on the wrist with a 3 month suspension.
3. Failure to investigate or remedy at least 57 felonies, resulting in four employees fired and the collapse of the Office of Sexual Civility and Empowerment in 2018.
   The Title IX office’s dysfunction became so outrageous, with employees struggling for power and ignoring the needs of victims, that OSU kept it under internal investigation for two years. Natalie Spiert, the assistant director, was said to have bullied her coworkers, discouraged inter-office collaboration (including with the Title IX Coordinator and SARNCO!), commented to a group of coaches that they would all go home and beat their wives, compared sexual assault survivors to drug addicts, and told some that they were “not ready to heal.”
   Students, SARNCO advocates, and a SCE whistleblower reported that various staff had told survivors that they were lying, “delusional,” that the assault was their fault, or that they would have to embellish their story to be taken seriously. And on top of that, some survivors were pressured to participate in medical research and to have their mouths swabbed during advocacy meetings. So I can’t say I’m surprised that OSU decided to scrap the office and start over instead of trying to reform it.
4. Failure to investigate or remedy when Richard Strauss sexually abused literally hundreds of students across thousands of reported incidents.
   Richard Strauss was hired as an Assistant Physician at OSU’s College of Medicine in 1979. During his 18-year tenure there (and also in the following 2 years at his private practice), Strauss was found by an investigative report in May of 2019 to have sexually abused as many as 177 students, 153 of which were student-athletes. Since then, as many as 521 students have come forward. Strauss was known for inappropriately fondling the young men he treated and often demanding to be shown their genitals even when treating entirely unrelated illnesses/injuries (e.g., in one case, a bloody nose). OSU is known to have began receiving complaints about his conduct as early as 1979, but didn’t launch an investigation into his conduct until 1996 when they terminated him. Even still, he continued to hold a tenured position in the College of Public Health and left with emeritus status in 1998 when he retired.
   When, in 2018, survivors began making records requests of his investigation, OSU repeatedly denied, delayed, and manipulated records to deny any knowledge of the sexual abuse he committed all while lobbying the courts to overturn the growing number of lawsuits. In 2021, they succeeded in getting a federal judge to rule that none of the lawsuits could move forward due to the statute of limitations, but this was reversed late last year. Since then, OSU has requested the Supreme Court to reconsider that decision and rule against the lawsuits moving forwards - a request which has received support from over 80 universities.
   OSU has announced that it has fully cooperated with bringing Strauss’s abuses to light, having gone as far as to create a “sexual abuse taskforce” to examine its policies, but their previous actions in trying to bury the story and current actions in resisting compensation for Strauss’s victims speak louder than words.
   https://survivorsofosu.com/ is an excellent website for learning more.

1. Student survivors at OSU have continued to speak out about their experiences with OIE, and Lantern reporters Sarah Szilagy & Maeve Walsh published a high-quality, four-part exposé in the fall of 2020.
   Many of the survivors that participated in their interviews described experiences that mirrored mine, and all of them reported lack of responsiveness from OIE as their cases were dragged out far beyond the 60-day guideline. “Emails and questions to investigators went unanswered for weeks or even months. When investigators did respond, they reused the same phrases: ‘Thank you for your patience’ and ‘There are no updates at this time,’ among others.”
   Kat Kinnen’s story in particular was uncanny– after reporting her rapist to the Title IX office, he filed a report back against her in retaliation. And despite the obvious flimsiness of his story, OIE decided to treat it with equal credibility and open formal charges against her. He claimed that he couldn’t remember anything, and therefore must have been too drunk to consent, and therefore she actually attacked him. “I had to pause and be like, ‘I really might get expelled because I was assaulted by a drunk guy,’” Kinnen said.
   And as I saw in both the Summary of Evidence compiled by Allan Williams and the Investigation Packet compiled by Courtney Johnson in their respective investigations, the interview notes/summaries generated by Kinnen’s investigator (Ronnie Boyer) were sloppy and riddled with obvious errors.
   [Molly Peirano, you’ll recall, was the Title IX Coordinator that kept claiming that strict policies must be followed and that her hands were tied for my case, which was allegedly why OIE was pursuing a formal investigation without either party’s consent and why we couldn’t pursue an informal resolution without accepting responsibility.
   But according to her statements for this story and the testimony of some of these survivors, there’s quite a bit of flexibility on both counts. Peirano was quoted saying clearly, “Informal resolution has always been at the discretion of the university.” And Kinnen described reaching an informal resolution in her mutual-allegation case, where charges were dropped against both parties without anyone accepting fault. So to be clear, OSU always had the option to admit their mistake after seeing the evidence and to drop the charges against me.]
2. OSU is currently subject to numerous lawsuits under Title IX, Title VII, and similar civil rights statutes, as it has been every single year, and these can be found in a quick google search.
3. As of writing in April 2023, OSU is under eleven separate investigations for Title IX violation allegations found credible and significant by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, including my own.

Leaders of OSU’s Title IX office have a tendency to abandon ship due to systemic issues, and rapid turnover and understaffing create administrative chaos that slows down the office even further.

1. Andrea Goldblum’s critiques were scathing when she resigned as Title IX Coordinator after 15 months in 2014, alleging that other OSU administrators did not take the duty to investigate and remedy sexual misconduct seriously and that the University didn’t even provide her department with a room to interview rape victims privately.
2. Kelly Brennan took over as Title IX Coordinator, and after a scandal-ridden tenure from June 2014 through July 2020, OSU struggled to fill the position. So they used a PhD student in their orbit, Molly Peirano, to serve as the Interim coordinator for over a year afterward (June 2020 through July 2021). By nature of the magnitude of academic commitments, there is no PhD student capable of concurrently fulfilling all of the Title IX coordinator responsibilities set forth by the Department of Education. And as mentioned in the “legal claims” section, a PhD student studying for their candidacy exam, balancing yet another job, and suffering from a concussion is even less capable of fulfilling these duties. But after a year, they finally replaced her with Melissa Mayhan.
   
   So That's Why My Emails Weren't Answered
3. After Natalie Spiert was fired in the wake of the Sexual Civility and Empowerment unit’s closing, Katherine Lasher took over as the Associate Vice President of the new Title IX office (OIE). She lasted 14 months, resigning suddenly just a few days after the student investigation was initiated against me in October 2020. High-level resignations are normally planned months in advance for universities to have time to form search committees, but clearly some drama caused her to bail before that. The role was then vacant for over a month before Keesha Mitchell was hired.

1. The Ohio State University’s conduct fits within a larger culture of negligence and coverups among American universities. Because no matter what values a university professes to have on its website, it is a profit-driven institution, and any corporation’s priority is its bottom line. Liberals and conservatives love to argue about the level of due process that should be afforded accused college students, and ascribe personal ideology (like feminism vs sexism) to the colleges that overreach or underreach.
   But the heart of the problem is that none of these schools actually care about ideology or justice– their grievance procedures and staffing decisions are designed to balance the highest returns on optics (i.e. the appearance of compliance with Title IX, a conviction ratio that satisfies the local population and current trends) with the lowest necessary cost and effort.
   So to a Title IX staffer, whether or not Student A actually assaulted Student B is secondary to whether the policy and internal evidence guidelines were consistently followed while investigating the case, because the University can claim a job well done either way.
   This was seen when I asked OSU’s Title IX leadership if they thought it would be fair/rational to simultaneously uphold a guilty employment case verdict and an innocent student case verdict, based on the same events and evidence. Because most of us would agree that a person can’t be guilty and innocent at the same time. But they were genuinely confused at the question– of course a person can be guilty and innocent at the same time, as long as the policies were followed correctly.
   
   
   Meeting with Title IX Leadership Meeting Transcript
   When some of the Title IX office’s predecessors were put on the stand for a lawsuit in 2018, a U.S. district judge tore into them as well as to the question of whether truth matters:
   

   With a settlement in the long-running due process lawsuit against @OhioState, a para. from the book. At the prelim. injunction hearing, multiple OSU officials testified they *didn't know* whether they had an obligation for a fair process, or to correct untruthful testimony. pic.twitter.com/XrzllrvC6D

   — KC Johnson (@kcjohnson9) September 20, 2018

2. Other universities have similarly overreached and misinterpreted Title IX’s “equality” language to mean that offenders and victims must be given the same punishment, instead of just the same opportunity to be heard. So when a student at The University of Mary Washington reported being assaulted by her then-partner, her victimhood was similarly invalidated by the Title IX office for having used self-defense:
   “When reviewing the evidence and hearing from mutual friends of the two, the Office of Title IX determined that because the complainant had scratched her attacker in self defense, regardless of the physical damage she had received during both altercations, both individuals were equally in the wrong and Title IX decided that the complainant did not have a case against her attacker.”
   And in her case as well, the university had advertised self-defense courses for women before surprising their victim with an internal No Self-Defense policy that contradicted this!

I probably don’t need to recite the stats about sexual and gender-based violence, especially on college campuses– you already know that it’s way too high. But it may not be obvious just how many victims, predominantly women, are put in my exact situation for reporting their assault:

An estimated 10% of student survivors who report to their school have a retaliatory complaint filed against them by their assailant, and half of these victims hit by DARVO are ultimately forced to take a leave of absence or transfer schools. 15% of survivors surveyed reported that their schools levied or threatened punishment in connection with coming forward, and between 21% and 60% of survivors of intimate partner violence lose their jobs due to fallout from the abuse. 23% of student survivors of gender-based violence are even threatened with defamation suits by their assailant.

Ultimately, what I mean to impress upon you is that if you report experiencing sexual misconduct to the Office of Institutional Equity (or to parallel Title IX offices at other schools, or to any school or workplace for that matter), you may not get the outcome you want. And heck, we haven’t even had time to cover all the risks of reporting to local law enforcement. In all of these settings, you may be met with retaliation, but even more likely is having to deal with basic negligence: a sham investigation where the perpetrator is let off, or retraumatizing microaggressions when discussing your story.

However, I am not saying that you should never make official reports. Just before you do, seek out confidential survivor advocates that can support you emotionally and/or logistically in making the decision about whether to report to your institution and if so, what rights you should be aware of and what information you should prepare in advance.

1. The Sexual Assault Response Network of Central Ohio (SARNCO) serves the larger Central Ohio area, and has two advocacy coordinators stationed on OSU campus for easy access. They offer a 24-hr Sexual Assault Helpline, 24-hr emergency room advocacy, educational materials to aid in recovery, and connections to other local resources as needed, so check their website directly for up-to-date resources and phone numbers.
2. There is also the option of speaking to an attorney, and this is especially recommended if you used self-defense or suspect that the perpetrator who you’d be reporting may try to DARVO and counter-accuse you out of spite. Many attorneys offer free one-hour consultations with no commitments afterward, and are very familiar with the cracks in the system– you just have to do a little research to find lawyers whose expertise (higher education, criminal defense, etc) best match the field you’d be reporting in.
3. And whether you’re throwing away the creepy note your coworker left, or filing a police report over the phone, or walking into a meeting that your boss suddenly scheduled at 5pm on a Friday, listen to me:
   Record. Everything.