The more I think about it, there is no defensible reason for Jim Jordan not to have known about allegations that his wrestlers at Ohio State were being molested by the longtime team doctor while he was an assistant there. As I note on my Medium blog, Jordan was the top assistant on the wrestling team—which means that he almost certainly should have known about the debauchery taking place there.
To this Carolina fan, this would roughly be like Bill Guthridge being in the dark about something like this while Dean Smith knew about it. Frankly, that isn’t believable. Neither is Jordan’s account. And it became even less believable when Politico revealed that during Jordan’s tenure as an assistant, the wrestlers’ training facility was a house of horrors.
A half-dozen ex-wrestlers told POLITICO they were regularly harassed in their training facility by sexually aggressive men who attended the university or worked there. The voyeurs would masturbate while watching the wrestlers shower or sit in the sauna, or engage in sexual acts in the areas where the athletes trained, the former wrestlers said.
(snip)
The situation was so egregious that former wrestling head coach Russ Hellickson would at times have to physically drag the gawkers out of the building, several sources familiar with his actions at the time said. Hellickson also pleaded with the university multiple times to move their athletes to a private facility, the sources said. Jordan served as Hellickson’s No. 2, and the coach has been described as Jordan’s mentor.
There is no way in the world that Jordan wasn’t aware of this. Indeed, another assistant who worked in Columbus at the time claimed that Larkins Hall, Ohio State’s main athletic training facility, was “a cesspool of deviancy.” Indeed, even those wrestlers who defended Jordan said there was no way he couldn’t have known about that atmosphere.
When the best-case scenario is that Jordan didn’t make it his business to know, there’s really no defensible reason for him to stay in Congress.