Ex-Ohio State players plan to join

sexual abuse lawsuit against school

Thirty former Ohio State football players, including some former NFL players, have agreed to join a federal lawsuit against the university over the sexual abuse of student athletes decades ago by a team doctor, a lawyer in the case said Thursday.

The lawyer, Rocky Ratliff, said in an interview that the men came forward some eight years after the first lawsuit was filed because they needed to overcome the shame of revealing that they’d been sexually abused by another man and the fear of taking on the university publicly.

They are “tearful and living with it,” Ratliff said. “But as this case progresses on, they see how Ohio State’s treating athletes from the university and I think they want people to know it’s OK, even if it is male to male (sexual abuse), to come forward.”

Ex-deputy found guilty of reckless

homicide in shooting of black in Ohio

COLUMBUS — A former sheriff’s deputy was found guilty of reckless homicide at trial Thursday for shooting a black man who was bringing sandwiches to his grandmother’s house.

The killing of Casey Goodson Jr. by Jason Meade in December 2020 had provoked outrage in Ohio.

Trial jurors said they couldn’t agree on the more serious charge of murder, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial on that count.

Meade, who is white, said his shooting of Goodson — five times in the back and once in the side — was justified because he saw the 23-year-old holding a gun and turning toward him in the doorway of the house in Columbus. But no one else testified they saw Goodson holding the gun he was licensed to carry, and no cameras recorded the shooting.

Former cellmate produces alleged

suicide note from Jeffrey Epstein

NEW YORK — A note Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate claimed he found after the millionaire sex offender’s first suspected jail suicide attempt was made public Wednesday, years after being sealed and locked in a courthouse vault as part of an unrelated legal dispute.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains, New York, ordered the release of the note after The New York Times asked him last week to unseal it and other documents in a case involving the former cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione. Federal prosecutors did not oppose the request.

Few people had known about the note until Tartaglione, a former police officer serving a life sentence for killing four people, mentioned it last year on writer Jessica Reed Kraus’ podcast.

Tartaglione claimed he discovered the note in a book after Epstein was found on the floor of their cell at a Manhattan federal jail on July 23, 2019, with a strip of bedsheet around the financier’s neck. That was about three weeks before Epstein was found dead in his cell in what authorities concluded was a suicide.

“They investigated me for month — found nothing!!!” said the short note, which is hard to decipher in some places. “It is a treat to be able to choose” the “time to say goodbye,” the note continues. “Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!”

Tennessee enacts new US House map carving up black Memphis district

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Amid raucous protests Thursday, Republicans in Tennessee enacted a new U.S. House map that carves up a majority-Black district in Memphis, reshaping it to the GOP’s advantage as part of President Donald Trump’s strategy to hold on to a slim majority in the November midterm elections.

The final Senate vote unfolded as demonstrators chanted loudly in the galleries and hallways. Democratic state Sen. Charlane Oliver stood on her desk in the Senate chamber, holding a banner denouncing the redistricting as a “Jim Crow” effort, then clapping and dancing. Other Democratic senators linked arms in the front of the chamber. Republican leadership quickly adjourned the special session, sending the new map on to Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who promptly signed it into law.

Protesters in the galleries also had disrupted the Republican-led House as it voted for the new map — yelling, chanting and blowing air horns. In the hallways, other shouting protesters were held back by Tennessee state troopers.

The Associated Press