The Ohio State University has denied a petition to remove the name of Les Wexner—the billionaire fashion magnate, longtime OSU donor and business associate of Jeffrey Epstein—from the football practice facility at the school’s Woody Hayes Athletic Center.
The formal request was submitted Dec. 18 by Stephen Snyder-Hill, the lead plaintiff in the latest wave of lawsuits against Ohio State brought by scores of former athletes and other students who allege they were sexually abused by former OSU sports medicine physician Richard Strauss.
Snyder-Hill was among the first individuals to raise concerns about Strauss’ behavior, alerting university officials in the mid-1990s about abuse he says he suffered during a medical appointment. OSU did not publicly acknowledge Strauss’ serial sexual abuse until decades later, after former OSU wrestler Michael DiSabato raised allegations to the school.
Wexner, now 88, served the first of two stints on the OSU board of regents from 1988 to 1997, a period that overlapped with the university’s internal handling of the first complaints raised by Snyder-Hill and others against Strauss. The disgraced physician was terminated from his roles with OSU’s athletic department and student health center in 1996 but continued to serve as emeritus faculty until his death by suicide in 2005.
Late last week, Kevin Leonardi, OSU’s association vice president for operations, wrote to Snyder-Hill informing him that the school’s naming review committee had denied the request “due to [Snyder-Hill] not providing sufficient information … to conduct a review.”
Leonardi cited the school’s name-removal policy, which he said limits the committee’s initial review to only materials and evidence provided by the requestor.
“You seek the removal of Mr. Wexner’s name from a university space,” Leonardi said, “but most of your request focuses on allegations concerning other individuals, and none of the documents that you provided refer to Mr. Wexner whatsoever; rather, they all relate to actions taken by Dr. Richard Strauss.”
In a phone interview with Sportico, Snyder-Hill said OSU’s response was emblematic of what he described as years of institutional blame-shifting and evasiveness.
“One of the things we have become pros at is understanding how OSU can gaslight people,” Snyder-Hill said. He pointed to the schools’ resistance to release internal documents, in response to public records requests and subpoenas that, he believes, more than demonstrate the disrepute he thinks Wexner has brought upon the school.
A school spokesperson confirmed the university’s response but did not provide further comment.
Leonardi’s response notably did not defend Wexner, other than to suggest he was owed due process. Wexner and his charitable entities have given more than $200 million to Ohio State, his alma mater, which has, in turn, honored him through the naming of its football facility, medical center and the Wexner Center for Arts.
The Les Wexner Football Complex was named in 2007 following a $2.5 million donation from Wexner. That contribution was part of the same gift agreement as a separate, $2.5 million that was donated to the school by Epstein’s COUQ Foundation, though OSU has insisted that the latter had no bearing on the naming of the football facility.
The clash over Wexner’s naming rights has emerged as a proxy PR war running parallel to the ongoing legal fight over Ohio State’s culpability for Strauss’ abuse—with the first of those cases scheduled to go to trial this fall.
As part of the litigation, Snyder-Hill and his co-plaintiffs have sought to depose Wexner and recently won court approval to subpoena him through alternative means after his attorney refused to accept service and other efforts proved futile. In granting that request, the court rejected a motion filed by Ohio State, which contended that the plaintiffs were only trying to draw Wexner into their case based on unrelated controversies.
Wexner has recently been subjected to national scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, which has spurred a separate congressional subpoena effort.
The Ohio State plaintiffs counter that that Wexner’s position of authority at the school would reasonably have given him valuable insights into how OSU initially responded to allegations against Strauss. In email correspondence included in the court record, Wexner’s attorneys demanded that plaintiffs’ counsel first provide compelling evidence of his connections to Strauss before they would agree to accept service of a subpoena. The controversy has since widened to conflict-of-interest concerns over Wexner’s legal counsel.
Wexner has thus far been represented by the Columbus-based law firm run by John Zeiger, the current chair of the Ohio State board of trustees. In light of that, Snyder-Hill, DiSabato and other Strauss survivors have called for Zeiger’s removal from the OSU board, along with vice chair Elizabeth Kessler, the daughter of a former Wexner business partner.
Snyder-Hill and dozens of other plaintiffs first sued OSU in July 2018, after the school retained the law firm Perkins Coie to conduct an independent investigation of Strauss. Its report, released in May 2019, concluded that over a two-decade span Strauss had sexually abused at least 177 male students under the guise of medical treatment.
In May 2020, OSU reached a $40.9 million settlement with 162 of Strauss’ survivors, then paid out an additional $16.9 million to settle claims with 70 other survivors by September 2021.
Snyder-Hill says he declined to settle because of the proposed terms that would have inhibited his ability to speak out about Ohio State’s role in the abuse. A former U.S. Army soldier, Snyder-Hill had previously been an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights well before the Strauss scandal became public, and was a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging federal laws that barred same-sex marriage and denied equal protections to same-sex couples in the military.
A federal court dismissed Snyder-Hill’s initial lawsuit against OSU in July 2021 on statute-of-limitations grounds. However, a year later, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Strauss-related Title IX claims could proceed, finding that plaintiffs could not reasonably have known of the university’s potential liability until 2018.
In 2023, Snyder-Hill spearheaded a new civil rights action, joined by 106 other named and unnamed plaintiffs. Their suit accuses the university of enabling what it calls “the greatest sex abuse scandal in American history.”
The Snyder-Hill suit is currently moving forward alongside four companion cases–Knight v. Ohio State, Doe 162 v. Ohio State, Gonzalez v. Ohio State and Gresock v. Ohio State–under a bellwether framework. Under this system, a select group of representatives’ claims will be tried first to assess evidence and legal issues common to the broader group of claims. The initial bellwether trial is set for October.
Last week, the plaintiffs filed a motion seeking to compel production of an unredacted Ohio State Medical Board file concerning its investigation into Strauss that resulted in the suspension of his clinical privileges. The plaintiffs say that the redacted copy they have so far been able to obtain obscures the names of potentially key witnesses that the medical board had interviewed about Strauss.
On Sunday, Snyder-Hill sent an email response to Leonardi insisting that he would not let the naming-rights matter go and that he planned to resubmit his petition.
“The optic(s) of this situation is that you would rather keep this guy’s names on your buildings even as you go into your 8+ years of fighting sexual assault survivors you have already admitted you harmed, and covered up by enabling the abuse and concealing it,” Snyder-Hill wrote. “So please spell out to me exactly what connections you need me to make with Wexner short of a written confession from himself.”
(This story has been updated in the third and 18th paragraphs to correct and clarify the timeline and the impetus of the Perkins Coie investigation and OSU’s public response to Strauss.)
