Ohio’s flagship public university is making news again for scandals old and new.
Last week, Ohio State University assistant professor Luke Perez was videotaped knocking a filmmaker and his equipment to the ground outside a classroom where former university president Gordon Gee was speaking.
OSU alumnus Mike Newman was waiting to ask Gee a question on camera in the hallway when Perez lunged at him. The incident, caught on tape and posted by political blogger D.J. Byrnes, “The Rooster,” was viewed more than 10 million times on social media.
The video, wrote Byrnes, belied what he said was an initial attempt by Perez and others to recast the attack as self-defense against disorderly criminal trespassers.
Ultimately, the recorded evidence of Perez pouncing on Newman forced OSU to place the professor, ironically hired in January by the university to advance free speech and civil discourse, on administrative leave.
A guarded OSU President Ted Carter said he was disturbed by the viral video and stressed “that’s not representative of who we are as faculty or staff or even senior administrators.” Perez was issued a summons to appear in court for assault.
Ohio State’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors considered it telling that a recent recruit to the campus’s Chase Center — one of the “intellectual diversity” centers ordered by right-wing Ohio Senate legislation in 2023 to fix perceived liberal indoctrination at state public universities with mandated conservative indoctrination — resorted to physical confrontation to shut someone up.
“Unfortunately, this assault — and the embarrassing actions around it — make it clear these centers aren’t really about encouraging civil discourse and intellectual diversity,” the group said in a statement. “AAUP-OSU is in favor of free speech for everyone on campus, not just for the ideas that politicians want to promote.”
In a bizarre bookend to the latest OSU convulsion over a faculty member gone wild, the Republican mouthpiece for the Ohio Senate GOP rode to the rescue of the accused professor with anger-management issues.
In an op/ed seesawing incoherently between hostility and disdain, John Fortney argued that Perez was right to rage against “clowns” with recording devices who had no business being in a public building. At a taxpayer-funded public institution. Seeking public accountability from public employees.
“The left wants to politicize and smear the mission of Ohio State’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society over an incident that can clearly be called self-defense,” Fortney declared noting the cameraman (tackled by Perez) appeared to be holding “a DSLR camera with a microphone that could be used as a weapon.”
Fortney referred to the hoodie-wearing Newman as “Mr. Hoodie” throughout his blame-the-victim broadside, suggested his own background in self-defense made him an expert in reading body language, and boasted that instead of helping Newman to his feet “some of the guys I trained with would’ve made sure Mr. Hoodie didn’t get up.”
This is the communications director for Ohio Senate Republicans?
Byrnes surmised that Fortney, apparently no fan of The Rooster newsletter, “saw a clip of Lucas Perez assaulting a man backing away from him, with cameras in both hands, and instantly fantasized about doing the violence himself.”
As to Fortney’s swipes about the blogger and unaffiliated cameraman being where they don’t belong, Brynes said he was informed by Ohio State police two days after the altercation in the Smith Laboratory building that he and Newman “were well within our rights to stand in the hallways of a public university during business hours. They admitted that our original trespassing notice…had been issued in error.”
University spokesman Ben Johnson confirmed that neither Byrnes nor Newman was under investigation and that Perez was notified he must appear in court to face an assault charge.
Bad as the “very concerning” alleged assault against a Columbus filmmaker by an OSU professor was, it pales in comparison to the yet unresolved scandal tormenting former OSU student-athletes sexually abused by campus team doctor Richard Strauss.
The abuse was allegedly an open secret that was swept under the rug by OSU leaders for decades.
Last week a judge finally ordered Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner, identified as an alleged co-conspirator of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in files released by the U.S. Department of Justice, to testify in a lawsuit brought by a group of Strauss survivors.
Today, Wednesday, Wexner is being deposed by members of U.S. Congress in their probe of Epstein.
Wexner, a member of the OSU board of trustees during the Strauss era, and his wife are OSU’s biggest donors.
“Wonderful philanthropists,” gushed Carter after Wexner was mentioned more than 1,000 times in the Epstein files. “The co-conspirator word is alleged co-conspirator. We have to remember that. He’s never been indicted. He hasn’t been arrested. So we take all of this very seriously.”
Carter’s self-described “wingman” Gordon Gee, who presided over eight years of Strauss’ tenure and allowed him to retire with emeritus status, also went to bat for Wexner.
He called the billionaire a victim of ‘cancel culture’ when efforts to remove Wexner’s name from university buildings intensified as word of his long relationship with Epstein, the most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker in modern history, provoked outrage.
Ohio’s flagship public university thrives on power, privilege, and institutional wealth, not reparations for alleged wrongs.
Scandals that scar students for life or go viral with an assault on free speech are organizational risks best neutralized with poor-recollections, rationalizations, feigned concern, and denied culpability. Unless videotaped.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.
