Extremist Republican Rep. Jim Jordan didn’t just lie about knowing that a team doctor was sexually abusing student-athletes during his time as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University. He also got the team’s former head coach to pressure the victims to lie for him:
“I’m sorry you got caught up in the media train,” [former head coach Russ] Hellickson wrote in a July 4 text to Dunyasha Yetts that the former wrestler shared with NBC News. “If you think the story got told wrong about Jim, you could probably write a statement for release that tells your story and corrects what you feel bad about. I can put you in contact with someone who would release it.”
Yetts, for context, complained to Hellickson and Jordan after he went to team doctor Richard Strauss for a thumb injury and Strauss pulled his pants down. Yetts says that in a phone call, also on July 4:
“[Hellickson] said, 'I will defend Jimmy until I have to put my hand on a Bible and be asked to tell the truth, then Jimmy will be on his own,'” Yetts said in an interview this week, recalling his conversation with Hellickson. “I told him, 'I’m going to contradict you, coach, because I’m telling the truth.'”
Another former wrestler has supported Yetts by specifically saying he was there when Yetts complained to Hellickson and Jordan, while numerous others have come forward about Strauss’s abusive behavior, and Hellickson has even said in a past interview that he confronted Strauss at the time. But now that Jordan’s political future could be on the line—if Republicans cared about people who turned a blind eye to abuse—Hellickson is trying to cover for him.