Spencer: New Yorker article sheds light on pedophiles
By GIL SPENCER,
POSTED: 09/20/12, 12:01 AM EDT | UPDATED: ON 09/20/2012
Meet Donald Silva: doctor, good friend, charmer and child molester. As a case study in the ability of pedophiles to fool people, his story is a chilling one.
After graduating from med school, Silva met a family with a 9-year-old boy named Eric to whom he was attracted. He took time to get to know the boy's parents. He ingratiated himself and wooed them as much as he wooed their son.
Despite warning signs, mostly noticed by Eric's mother, the parents allowed Eric to sleep at Silva's residence. After all, Silva had a fiancé and Eric's parents didn't know that Silva had already molested Eric on a ski trip the two of them took together earlier.
In a short 22-page autobiography, Silva wrote:
"I had recently broken up with Cathy (his girlfriend) when Evelyn, my future wife, arrived for a visit. In that month, Evelyn met Eric's family, and she and his mother became good friends. Evelyn stayed with me at my parents' house, and we enjoyed an active sex life. Eric slept over one night, and the three of us shared a bed for a while. He was going to pretend to be asleep while Evelyn and I made love, but Evelyn declined with him there and went to sleep elsewhere."
This snippet is from Malcolm Gladwell's discerning piece in the latest New Yorker magazine about how Jerry Sandusky managed to fool so many people at Penn State despite warning signs that, in retrospect, look so obvious.
According to Gladwell, Sandusky "built a sophisticated grooming operation, outsourcing to child-care professionals the task of locating vulnerable children -- all the while playing the role of lovable goofball."
As for Silva's story, Gladwell writes, "To recap: A man uses his new girlfriend to befriend the family of the 10-year-old boy he is molesting. He orchestrates a threesome in a bed in his parents' house. He asks the girl to have sex with him with the 10-year-old lying beside them. She says no. She leaves him alone with his victim -- and then he persuades her to marry him."
Which is to say, that the gullible naiveté of some people knows no bounds.
But even relatively smart, reasonable people are willing to give some suspected child molesters the benefit of the doubt. I arrogantly include myself in that group.
In the past, in this job, I have gone to bat for people accused of molesting children who were later acquitted of the charges against them. "Acquitted," not "proven innocent." And after reading Gladwell's piece, I have greater doubts about the absolute innocence of at least one of them.
That said, there are more than enough well-documented stories about truly innocent people being convicted of sexually assaulting children and having their lives tragically ruined in the process.
Jerry Sandusky is not such a victim. But that brings us to the people Gladwell and the rest of the world are more interested in -- the people who knew Sandusky, saw him with children, saw him playing and touching and even showering with them, and never suspected he was what he was.
Even psychologists trained in identifying the tell-tale signs of pedophilia disagreed about Sandusky during the 1998 probe into a mother's concern over a showering incident. No charges were brought in that case because there was no evidence that any crime had actually been committed.
Three years later, when Mike McQueary told Joe Paterno that he saw Sandusky in a shower touching a young boy, Paterno dutifully passed the matter up to the chain of command. Just what McQueary told Paterno, and later AD Tim Curley and VP Gary Schultz, remains in dispute.
After Sandusky's arrest last year, Paterno was asked if he considered calling the cops after hearing McQueary's story.
"To be honest with you, I didn't," Paterno told author Joe Posnanski. "This isn't my field. I didn't know what to do. I had not seen anything. Jerry didn't work for me anymore. I didn't have anything to do with him. I tried to look at Penn State guidelines to see what I was supposed to do. It said I was supposed to call Tim (Curley). So I called him."
All that, sounds strangely reasonable, does it not?
It was Curley and Schultz, who after talking to McQueary, talked to Sandusky. No one, as Gladwell makes clear, is better at feigning hurt innocence than a self-deluding pedophile.
Despite, McQueary's story, whatever it was, it was decided that Curley would notify Jack Raykovitz, head of the Second Mile, the charity for children Sandusky founded, that they had a problem with Sandusky's behavior.
Not reported by Gladwell, but told to me by a person close to the case, Raykovitz, a trained psychologist himself, raised and dismissed the concern that Sandusky might be a child molester.
"Are you trying to tell me that you think Jerry Sandusky is a pedophile?" Raykovitz asked Curley. Because, if that's what he was trying to tell him, Raykovitz suggested, Tim Curley had lost his mind.
In his grand jury testimony, Curley indicated that he believed Sandusky's problem was boundary issues that could be misconstrued into something else -- not that he had a full-blown child predator on his hands. As it turned out, Curley -- and the rest of PSU's official leadership -- was wrong about that. But then so were many, many others.
It remains the deeply held belief of a lot people now that Paterno, Curley, Schultz and PSU President Graham Spanier understood what Sandusky was and covered it up to protect the university and its football program from "bad publicity."
The more likely reality is that Jerry Sandusky simply fooled them all.
Gladwell's excellent piece deserves reading, especially by people who early on joined the lynch mob of conspiracy theorists who concluded that Paterno and company "had to know" and they all conspired to protect Sandusky instead at the expense of his victims.
Readers might learn that when it comes to pedophiles, people don't have to know anything. And thanks to the pedophile's talents for deception, people frequently don't.
Gil Spencer's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Check out his spencerblog every day a
delcotimes.com.
