Meyer’s deleted texts raise legal questions
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Any attempt by Ohio State coach Urban Meyer to eliminate work-related text messages on his university-issued phone to hide information would be illegal, open records experts said following a two-week investigation into his handling of domestic violence allegations against an assistant coach.
Ohio State suspended Meyer for three games after investigators concluded he mishandled Zach Smith’s repeated professional and behavioral problems and instead protected his protégé for years through domestic violence allegations, a drug problem and poor job performance. Among the many questions raised by the investigation into the highly successful coach of the fifthranked Buckeyes was how he responded when the story broke.
On Aug. 1, investigators say, Meyer and the team’s director of operations discussed ways to change the settings on his phone to eliminate messages older than a year. The discussion came the same day a story said Smith’s then-wife had shared allegations of domestic violence with Meyer’s wife, Shelley Meyer, via texts.
“A bad article,” Brian Voltolini, director of football operations, told Meyer on the practice field, according to investigators.
Courtney Smith alleged her husband attacked her in 2015. Zach Smith has never been criminally charged with domestic violence. The university put Meyer on paid leave and began investigating after Courtney Smith spoke out publicly, sharing text messages and photos she traded in 2015 with Shelley Meyer, who is a registered nurse and instructor at Ohio State. Zach Smith was fired last month after his ex-wife asked a judge for a protective order.
When the university obtained Meyer’s phone on Aug. 2, it was set to only retain texts within a year. Investigators said they couldn’t determine if that setting was made in response to the breaking news story.
“It is nonetheless concerning that his first reaction to a negative media piece exposing his knowledge of the 2015-2016 law enforcement investigation was to worry about the media getting access to information and discussing how to delete messages older than a year,” the report said, referring to Meyer.
The latest university records retention policy doesn’t single out text messages. A category covering “transient” records includes telephone messages, some emails, drafts and other documents that “serve to convey information of a temporary value, have a very short lived administrative, legal and/or fiscal value.”
Those should be disposed of once their “administrative, legal or fiscal use has expired,” but no fixed time is allotted. It could be “as short as a few hours and could be as long as several days or weeks,” the 2016 policy says.
As murky as the policy seems, Fred Gittes, a veteran open records lawyer in Columbus, said any elimination of texts on Meyer’s university-issued phone related to his coaching responsibility would break Ohio’s open records law. He also noted that a lack of older text messages would make it difficult to determine whether NCAA recruiting rules were violated.
Open records advocate Dennis Hetzel questioned why investigators didn’t do more to track down any older messages.
“What happened to these text messages seems like a pretty big thing to ignore or not pay a lot of attention to,” said Hetzel, executive director of the Ohio News Media Association. —