Court Grants Plaintiffs Access to Witness Interviews Referenced in Perkins Coie Report on OSU Strauss Abuse Investigation
Public Justice Media Contact:
Nicole Funaro nfunaro@publicjustice.net 203-435-1722
Court Grants Plaintiffs Access to Witness Interviews Referenced in Perkins Coie Report on OSU Strauss Abuse Investigation
Washington, D.C. , May 9, 2024 – Yesterday, the federal court for the Southern District of Ohio granted plaintiffs’ request that Perkins Coie – the investigators who produced a report detailing decades of known abuse by former doctor for The Ohio State University Richard Strauss — must share its memos from interviews with non-survivor witnesses produced as part of its investigation. The documents associated with the Perkins Coie report must be produced within 30 days, favoring the plaintiffs in the ongoing Snyder-Hill v. The Ohio State University case.
The Perkins Coie report was originally produced in May 2019 and detailed Strauss’s continuous abuse and OSU’s failure to act. The report showed that despite repeated, serious complaints of sexual abuse against Strauss by students since 1979, “no meaningful action was taken by the University to investigate the concerns until January 1996.” Even then, high-level university officials kept Strauss as a tenured faculty member until 1998, gave him an emeritus appointment in 1998, failed to inform students that he was a sexual predator, and allowed Strauss to run ads in the university newspaper about his off-campus private men’s clinic for OSU students and others.
The order by the court to have non-survivor documents released will now give plaintiffs in the ongoing case a greater understanding of who Perkins Coie interviewed in their investigation and additional context of staff and university leadership’s accounts of what OSU failed to do in response to the evidence that Strauss was abusing students.
“Despite the fact that OSU has publicly touted their dedication to transparency as this case moves through the courts, both OSU and Perkins Coie vigorously fought to suppress this information. Today, we are grateful to the court for holding them to account and ordering that Perkins Coie release these documents,” stated the legal team for Snyder-Hill v. The Ohio State University. “We look forward to a greater understanding of the Perkins Coie investigation and the additional context these documents will provide in describing the breadth and depth of OSU’s knowledge of Strauss’s abuse and its failure to take action to stop it.”
