‘It’s Called…Reporting’
Rep. Jim Jordan is seeing his career go down the drain after calling up to nine former wrestlers liars. And now he’s fighting back – but doing a very poor job of it.
The former wrestlers insist Jordan, when he was an assistant coach for the Ohio State wrestling team, knew they had been sexually molested by the team doctor.
At least seven of the former wrestlers say they were personally sexually molested and abused. Two others say it was common knowledge and there is no way Jordan didn’t know. The most recent of them to step forward says Jordan knew because he personally told him.
“I remember coming up and saying, ‘Strauss held my balls longer than normal.’ He just snickered,” the ninth former wrestler told CNN.
How bad was it?
“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,” Politico reports, echoing other similar reporting. “It was a cesspool of deviancy,” one former wrestling coach who worked with Jordan said.
“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,” Politico notes.
Defending having not taken any action to stop the attacks or the culture of deviancy, Rep. Jordan insists he did not know, although acknowledges there was locker room talk.
But now Jordan is taking a page out of Trump’s book – possibly not a wise move given the President’s history of bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Jordan, a Republican from Ohio who seems to have been counting on replacing Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House next year, has decided his denials are not working (they’re not), so he’s attacking the messenger: the media.
Only, this time, the media is finally fighting back.
Many, many reporters are outright mocking Jordan, for, as one news producer put it, “the process of news reporting.”
Here’s a sample:
Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall, who has a solid track record of accurately looking ahead, offers this insight: