Ohio State University’s recent $100 million settlement agreement with sex-abuse victims of former sports medicine doctor Richard Strauss may require the school to pay millions of dollars more to parties covered by a settlement OSU reached with a prior class of Strauss survivors in 2020.
A special master will now have to determine how to divide the latest nine-figure settlement among 279 plaintiffs, which would amount to an average of approximately $358,000 per claimant.
That adds up to a substantially higher figure than the roughly $61 million Ohio State paid out to 317 earlier plaintiffs between March 2020 and February 2026.
Under the master services agreement governing a 2020 settlement with 152 claimants, a copy of which was seen by Sportico, Ohio State agreed that any future settlement would not exceed the earlier class’s average recovery of $252,551 per claimant.
If, in an “unforeseen event,” the university settled the remaining Strauss-related litigation as part of a global settlement for more than that amount off a per-claimant basis, it agreed to engage a mediator to determine the additional amount owed to the earlier settlement class to preserve its most-favored-nation status.
The remedy clause does not explicitly provide for an inflation adjustment, although Ohio State could conceivably argue for one in mediation. The $252,551 average recovery in March 2020 would be worth approximately $323,000 today, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation data.
It is unclear how many claimants would qualify for an adjustment, as the specific amounts paid to each have not been publicly disclosed.
An Ohio State spokesperson declined to comment, citing the confidentially requirements of an ongoing mediation process.
Following a vote of approval by its board of trustees, Ohio State in June finalized a settlement with the second wave of plaintiffs who had sued the school for the alleged abuses of Strauss, after six months of mediation and an ongoing public-pressure campaign.
A number of Strauss’ accusers are former Ohio State athletes he treated as part of his role in OSU’s athletic department, where he worked from 1978 to 1996. Following the allegations of his sexual misconduct, first reportedly internally in 1979, Strauss died by suicide in 2005. Thirteen years later, after receiving a complaint, Ohio State commissioned an investigation by the law firm Perkins Coie, which eventually determined that Strauss had abused at least 177 male students while in his capacity as either a team doctor or physician within the school’s student health center.
This past May, several former Ohio State football players—including stars Ray Ellis, Al Washington and Keith Ferguson—publicly alleged for the first time that they had also been abused by Strauss and planned to join the class of plaintiffs.
Had OSU not struck a settlement, the first bellwether trial in the litigation was scheduled to begin Monday.
The university still has yet to issue a determination on hundreds of requests to remove the name of billionaire donor and former board president Les Wexner from campus facilities, including the university’s football practice center. Wexner, whose longtime association with Jeffrey Epstein has drawn public scrutiny, served as an Ohio State trustee during a period of time when Strauss was under internal investigation by the school. Early this year, the federal court presiding over the Strauss-related lawsuits ordered Wexner to appear for a deposition after the plaintiffs accused him of attempting to evade service. In August, Ohio State announced Wexner would step down as chairman of the board of its medical center, which bears his name, though he would continue in a non-voting role as chair emeritus.
Stephen Snyder-Hill, one of the lead plaintiffs in the class action against OSU, had originally submitted a formal request to the university to strip Wexner’s name from the football complex in December. The university denied that request, stating it Snyder-Hill did not provide “sufficient information … to conduct a review.”
Snyder-Hill followed up with a second request in late January, specifically targeting the Les Wexner Football Complex, which remains unresolved more than eight months later.
(This has been corrected in the 10th paragraph to reflect the proper spelling of the law firm Perkins Coie, and that the firm’s investigation commenced after Ohio State received a complaint.)
