JobsOhio, the state’s privatized economic development agency, is now saying that former Ohio State President Ted Carter facilitated a $60,000 grant to support a podcast by a woman with whom Carter had an inappropriate relationship.
The agency was created by the legislature and is funded by the state liquor franchise. Late on Wednesday, it announced that only then was it seeing if its contract allowed it to claw back money back for a job that went 75% undone.
But even as it boasts that it’s being transparent, JobsOhio initially didn’t disclose Carter’s role in awarding the grant. And it continues to be unresponsive to other important questions.
Concerns about payments to a person with ties to a powerful official come as Ohio State, JobsOhio and the government generally stand accused of running public institutions in the service of an elite, unaccountable few.
Surprise departure
Ohio State abruptly announced Carter’s resignation last Monday. It came after university trustees held a three-hour closed session the Saturday before.
Carter had been in an “inappropriate relationship with someone seeking public resources to support her personal business,” the university said.
That person turned out to be Krisanthe Vlachos, host of “The Callout” podcast. It was a veteran-focused program that had about a dozen episodes posted on YouTube.
By Wednesday, all had been removed.
Among them was one that aired on Jan. 7.
Featuring Vlachos, Carter, and JobsOhio’s top official, J.P. Nauseef, it was the only of the four installments funded by JobsOhio funded that actually got made.
The podcast was recorded in the studios of WOSU, which is also home to Ohio State’s public radio and TV stations.
Journalists there were blindsided shortly before 10 a.m. Monday when university administrators announced that Carter was no longer the institution’s president.
“For personal reasons, I have made the difficult decision to resign from my role as president of The Ohio State University,” Carter said in a written statement. “I disclosed to the board of trustees that I made a mistake in allowing inappropriate access to Ohio State leadership.”
So far, the university hasn’t said what the nature of the relationship between Carter and Valchos was. Nor has it explained what “public resources” Vlachos sought.
“In light of the ongoing investigation, it would be inappropriate to share details at this time,” University spokesman Ben Johnson said in an email.
Vlachos couldn’t be reached for comment.
Johnson was also asked if Ohio State officials had referred the matter to law enforcement. If the university wouldn’t answer that question, he was asked, could he explain to the public why it wouldn’t?
“No, not at this time,” Johnson said. “The investigation is ongoing.”
Inaccessible?
Carter is a 1981 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy.
Outside of the military, he had one job in academia prior to coming to Ohio State near the start of 2024. That was as president of the University of Nebraska from 2020 to 2023.
At Ohio State, Carter oversaw the closure of Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change. The closures came as the Trump administration waged a war on diversity programs.
In light of those efforts and a controversial state law aimed at curbing campus speech, Carter last summer banned chalking on campus.
In addition, under Carter’s watch, 41 people were arrested at various Ohio State protests over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza during the spring of 2024.
As those things happened, some observers said Carter held himself aloof from everyday campus life.
“He was an inaccessible person,” Student Association Chapter President Sabrina Estevez told the Capital Journal last week. “No one saw him at career fairs or popping into classrooms.”
After Carter’s sudden departure, members of the university community called on the board of trustees to consult with them before hiring a replacement.
Instead, the board hurriedly appointed Provost Ravi Bellamkonda, who immediately praised Carter’s performance and ducked questions about campus speech.
The American Association of University Professors said the broader community had been ignored — again.
“Ohio State’s system of shared governance — not to mention best practices in hiring university presidents — requires all of us having a say in the process. This hasty, undemocratic process starts this presidency on the wrong footing and sends the wrong message about our supposed shared values,” WOSU reported the group as saying in a written statement.
Money talks
As student and faculty speech were suppressed, Carter and the Ohio State trustees faced calls for accountability.
In 2021, a federal judge said the university “turned a blind eye” to decades of sexual abuse of hundreds of athletes and other students by a team doctor.
The victims have been seeking to extend the statute of limitations so many of them can sue. As they did, university administrators in 2022 quietly lobbied the legislature to keep the limitations where they were, an investigation by the student paper, The Lantern, showed.
More recently, those victims and many others have been demanding that the university remove the name of a person connected to an even bigger sexual abuse scandal. That name is on several of the university’s most important facilities.
Billionaire Les Wexner has been a generous contributor to Ohio State and he’s served as chairman of the board of trustees.
He now serves on the board of the massive university medical center, which bears his name. And the current chairman of the trustees is John Zeiger, Wexner’s long time personal attorney.
Wexner had a long, close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who operated a global sex-trafficking ring of which many victims were minors.
Wexner was Epstein’s primary client from 1991 to 2007, and Epstein had control of the retail billionaire’s assets.
Forbes reports that Epstein collected $200 million in fees from Wexner, apparently the sex trafficker’s largest single source of income.
Epstein had a house that was a stone’s throw from Wexner’s New Albany estate. One of his victims alleged she was abused at Epstein’s home in Ohio in 1996, and that Wexner’s security detail wouldn’t allow her to leave.
In 2019, a former guard told the Washington Post that Wexner’s team regularly provided security at Epstein’s residence.
When Wexner last month gave a deposition to Congress, he denied knowledge of Epstein’s predatory activities. He even denied that he and Epstein were friends.
State lawmakers, professional associations, and hundreds of students have called for Wexner’s name to be removed from the many Ohio State buildings it graces.
In a February radio appearance, Carter noted that Wexner hadn’t been arrested. Ohio state’s top administrator added that he believed the retail mogul when Wexner said he didn’t know what Epstein was up to.
“Let’s let the facts play out,” Carter said. “I should say right up front, how thankful and appreciative I am for Les and Abigail Wexner’s philanthropic efforts at Ohio State. Nobody has given more money to Ohio State than they as a family. … I’m appreciative of what they have done here at Ohio State.”
After his appointment as Ohio State’s new president last week, Bellamkonda also praised Wexner and his wife as “great supporters” of the university.
As Carter was paying his compliments to Ohio’s richest man, he was also carrying on an inappropriate relationship with a woman whom he helped get at least $60,000.
Those funds used to be public money. Many argue they still are.
After initially dodging a question about whether Carter helped Vlachos get money from JobsOhio, the agency took to X late on Wednesday and said he did.
“How were we introduced to Ms. Vlachos: we are continuously introduced by partners to explore opportunities for business and talent attraction,” a part of the thread said.
“Ohio State is a trusted partner and Admiral Carter, sharing our passion for military and veterans, recommended The Callout Podcast as an opportunity to build and engage a military and veteran audience in Ohio and connect them to the massive job opportunities coming to Ohio’s super sectors like advanced aerospace/defense and energy.”
Created by the legislature in 2011 under former Gov. John Kasich, JobsOhio was given the sole opportunity to lease the state liquor franchise for far less than it was worth.
Last year, Gov. Mike DeWine allowed the state controlling board to extend JobsOhio’s ability to take the money to 2053 — without making JobsOhio pay any more for the priviledge.
Despite the fact that it was created by the government and funded by what at least used to be public money, JobsOhio claims it’s a private corporation and thus exempt from such inconveniences as open-records and open-meetings laws.
Many critics don’t buy it.
“That’s just ridiculous,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of the watchdog group Common Cause Ohio. “It’s just theater so that it’s not clear to the public that it’s our money.”
Over the course of its history, JobsOhio has spent well over $1 billion in what at least used to be public money, giving massive grants and other “incentives” to private businesses.
It’s claimed that it’s created and retained thousands of jobs. But the agency has struggled to prove that it’s actually created any beyond its own well-paid staff.
Since its creation, Ohio has lagged other states in terms of economic development. It consistently had higher-than-average rates of unemployment, it has the 16th-highest poverty rate and it has the 28th-highest per-capita economic output.
As might be expected from a body that holds itself above open-government laws, JobsOhio has been accused of self-dealing.
Last year, Youngstown’s WFMJ reported that JobsOhio granted more than $2 million to a company run by a man who headed up a regional entity created by JobsOhio.
And in 2014, the Ohio Ethics Commission notified two Marathon Petroleum Corp. executives who sat on the JobsOhio board that they had potential conflicts because Marathon was receiving benefits from JobsOhio.
There were other apparent conflicts as board members decided who would get what incentives. Corporations enjoying JobsOhio largesse who have had employees on the board include Sherwin-Williams, Bob Evans, Procter & Gamble and Manta Media.
A podcast to develop the economy?
It was against this backdrop that JobsOhio decided to give $60,000 to a friend of the president of Ohio’s flagship university.
JobsOhio said the podcast would serve its economic development mission by building an audience of veterans and connecting it to “the massive job opportunities coming to Ohio’s super sectors… ”
The one episode that JobsOhio funded and actually got made received fewer than 4,000 views on YouTube. Most of those appeared to have taken place after news of Carter’s departure broke on Monday. None of the others had more than 200.
In terms of Carter’s annual pay, $1.4 million, or Nauseef’s, $709,000, or Wexner’s estimated wealth, $10.5 billion, $60,000 might not sound like much.
But in a state where median income for an entire household is just $71,000, it might seem like good money for four podcasts.
Are there other podcasts?
JobsOhio didn’t respond directly when asked whether it conducted a talent search or competitive process before it decided to give Vlachos $60,000 of what used to be the public’s dollars.
Turcer of Common Cause said it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Carter’s influence was the reason Vlachos got the money.
“We don’t know whether a cozy relationship with people in power led to this contract,” she said. “But it’s so odd and lopsided, it’s hard to imagine there’s any other reason.”
In its thread on X, JobsOhio cited “scheduling difficulties” as the reason why three additional podcasts it paid for were never made.
“We fulfilled our contract in calendar year 2025 for $60,000,” it said. “To date, 1 episode has been produced, and we have had scheduling difficulties recording the other 3. As all 4 episodes were not completed, and the first was removed, we are reviewing clawback options in our contract.”
Asked whether JobsOhio is paying anyone else to make a podcast, JobsOhio wouldn’t say.
“We don’t typically share our marketing playbook because it is competitive in nature — other states try to replicate what we do,” Ryan Squire, JobsOhio’s vice president for marketing and communications, said in an email Thursday.
Failing the public
For Turcer, this latest scandal involving Ohio’s powerful again shows that institutions are serving the elite few and not the public at large. There have been many antecedents.
For example, on Wednesday U.S. Sen. Jon Husted was forced to testify about his knowledge as lieutenant governor of the biggest bribery scandal in Ohio history.
In that case, Akron-based FirstEnergy paid $61 million in bribes to get a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout that was passed by the gerrymandered legislature and signed by DeWine.
After the latest scandal broke, Turcer called on Ohio State to be actually transparent about Carter’s departure instead of simply claiming it is.
“It is incredibly irritating that a university that is an economic engine and that so many of us are so proud of spends time and energy hiding their problems,” she said.
“It’s time for them to fess up, make things as open as possible. Buckeyes deserve to feel pride in the university and feel good about the taxpayer money that is spent to support students in Ohio.”
Regarding JobsOhio, she said the agency hasn’t lived up to the promises Kasich made when it was created.
“Back when former Gov. Kasich talked about the importance of JobsOhio, he talked about ‘the speed of business’ — that economic development that was housed in government was slowing everything down,” she said.
“But I think what’s very clear is that JobsOhio has not helped everyday folks see a benefit. It appears to be some kind of country club.”
Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.