After New Allegations, Urban Meyer Placed on Paid Leave

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He said his ESPN contract expires later this month, at which point he will join Stadium, a Chicago-based sports network. Later Wednesday, Stadium published an exclusive video interview with Courtney Smith.

“Shelley said she was going to have to tell Urban,” Smith said in the video. She also said that Shelley Meyer never confirmed to her that she had told her husband about the allegations. Meyer is a registered nurse employed by Ohio State’s College of Nursing, according to an Ohio State website.

The lawyers listed in a local court docket as having represented Zach Smith and Courtney Smith in the recent proceedings did not reply to requests for comment Wednesday. Last week, Zach Smith’s lawyer, Bradley Koffel, told The Columbus Dispatch that the recent trespassing charge stemmed from a misunderstanding related to where Smith was supposed to drop off their children as part of their custodial arrangement.

Smith has worked for Meyer since 2005, when he was a graduate assistant at Florida, and he played for Meyer before that, at Bowling Green. He is also a grandson of Earle Bruce, a former Ohio State coach whom Meyer has identified as a mentor.

The questions of who knew what, and when, about allegations of domestic abuse against an Ohio State athletics employee echo those raised in recent weeks about two other former university employees affiliated with athletics.

Last month, Ohio State announced that an independent investigation, which is still continuing, had uncovered more than 100 former students who said that Dr. Richard H. Strauss, a former university employee and team doctor, had sexually abused them. Three lawsuits have been filed by former athletes in several sports. They say that Strauss used his position as a university-designated medical professional to molest them and that several authority figures knew about it, including a former wrestling coach and a former athletic director. Both have denied that they knew about the Strauss abuse.

That scandal has ensnared Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the most powerful elected Republican politicians in the country, who was an assistant wrestling coach for several years while Strauss was the team doctor. Jordan has denied having had knowledge of the allegations, and he has argued that accusers have been put up to fabricating stories by an unspecified “deep state.”

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