The Shame of It.
- Thread starter joeaubie21
- Start date
Looks like WHCANole got the bat signal there was a Sandusky discussion.
That’s a ridiculous theory.
You don’t understand the notes and emails. They are the best evidence we have. Everything about them points to their thinking Jerry had boundary issues.
Snedden used same argument.
When he was investigating cold cases for NCIS, Special Agent John Snedden knew you always have to start from the beginning.
"Let's take a deep breath," he said. "And let's go back to square one, to the source of the original allegation, to determine whether it's credible."
On the Penn State campus in 2012, with national security at stake, that's just what Special Agent Snedden did on behalf of the U.S. government. And instead of finding a sex scandal or a cover-up in the cold case he was investigating in Happy Valley, Snedden said he discovered ample evidence of a "political hit job."
Back in 2012, Snedden was working as a special agent for the Federal Investigative Services. His assignment against the backdrop of the so-called Penn State sex abuse scandal was to determine whether former Penn State President Graham Spanier deserved to have his high-level national security clearance renewed.
The focus was on Spanier, but to do that investigation properly, Snedden, a PSU alum himself, had to unravel a big mess at his old alma mater. To figure out whether Spanier could be trusted with access to the most sensitive national secrets.
So Snedden began his job by starting at the beginning. By going back eleven years, to 2001, when Mike McQueary made his famous trip to the Penn State locker room. Where McQueary supposedly heard and saw a naked Jerry Sandusky cavorting in the showers with a young boy.
But there was a problem. In the beginning, Snedden said, McQueary "told people he doesn't know what he saw exactly." McQueary said he heard "rhythmic slapping sounds" in the shower, Snedden said.
"I've never had a rape case successfully prosecuted based only on sounds, and without credible victims and witnesses," Snedden said.
"I don't think you can say he's credible," Snedden said about McQueary. Why? Because he told "so many different stories," Snedden said. McQueary's stories about what he thought he saw or heard in the shower ranged from rough horseplay and/or wrestling all the way up to sex.
Which story, Snedden asked, do you want to believe?
"None of it makes any sense," Snedden said about McQueary's tale. "It's not a credible story."
Back in 2001, Snedden said, Mike McQueary was a 26-year-old, 6-foot-5, 240-pound former college quarterback used to running away from 350-pound defensive linemen.
If McQueary actually saw Jerry Sandusky raping a young boy in the shower, Snedden said, he probably would have done something to stop it.
"I think your moral compass would cause you to act and not just flee," Snedden said.
If McQueary really thought he was witnessing a sexual assault on a child, Snedden said, wouldn't he have gotten between the victim and a "wet, defenseless naked 57-year-old guy in the shower?"
Or, if McQueary decided he wasn't going to physically intervene, Snedden said, then why didn't he call the cops from the Lasch Building? The locker room where McQueary supposedly saw Sandusky with the boy in the showers.
When he was a baby NCIS agent, Snedden said, a veteran agent who was his mentor would always ask the same question.
"So John," the veteran agent would say, "Where is the crime?"
At Penn State, Snedden didn't find one.
Working on behalf of FIS, Snedden wrote a 110-page report, all in capital letters, where he catalogued the evidence that led him to conclude that McQueary wasn't a credible witness.
In his report, Snedden interviewed Thomas G. Poole, Penn State's vice president for administration. Poole told Snedden he was in Graham Spanier's office when news of the Penn State scandal broke, and Penn State's then-senior Vice President Gary Schultz came rushing in.
Schultz blurted out that "McQueary never told him this was sexual," Snedden wrote. Schultz was shocked by what McQueary told the grand jury, Snedden wrote.
"He [McQueary] told the grand jury that he reported to [Schultz] that this was sexual," Schultz told Poole and Spanier.
"While speaking, Schultz shook his head back and forth as in disbelief," Snedden wrote about Poole's observations. Poole "believes it appeared there was a lot of disbelief in the room regarding this information."
"I've never had a rape victim or a witness to a rape tell multiple stories about how it happened," Snedden said. "If it's real it's always been the same thing."
But that's not what happened with McQueary. And Snedden thinks he knows why.
"In my view, the evolution of what we saw as a result of Mike McQueary's interview with the AG's office" was the transformation of a story about rough horseplay into something sexual, Snedden said.
"I think it would be orchestrated by them," Snedden said about the AG's office, which has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
In Snedden's report, he interviewed Schuyler J. McLaughlin, Penn State's facility security officer at the university's applied research laboratory. McLaughlin, a former NCIS agent himself, as well as a lawyer, told Snedden that McQueary initially was confused by what he saw.
"What McQueary saw, apparenty it looked sexual to him and he may have been worried about what would happen to him," Snedden wrote. "Because McQueary wanted to keep his job" at Penn State.
[McLaughlin] "believes Curley and Schultz likely asked tough questions and those tough questions likely caused McQueary to question what he actually saw," Snedden wrote. McLaughlin "believes that after questioning, McQueary likely did not know what he actually saw," Snedden wrote. "And McQueary "probably realized he could not prove what he saw."
There was also confusion over the date of the alleged shower incident. At the grand jury, McQueary testified that it took place on March 1, 2002. But at the Sandusky trial, McQueary changed the date of the shower incident to Feb. 9, 2001.
There was also confusion over the identity of the boy in the showers. In 2011, the Pennsylvania State Police interviewed a man suspected of being "Victim No. 2." Allan Myers was then a 24-year-old married Marine who had been involved in Sandusky's Second Mile charity since he was a third-grader.
Myers, however, told the state police he "does not believe the allegations that have been raised" against Sandusky, and that another accuser was "only out to get some money." Myers said he used to work out with Sandusky since he was 12 or 13, and that "nothing inappropriate occurred while showering with Sandusky." Myers also told the police that Sandusky never did anything that "made him uncomfortable."
Myers even wrote a letter of support for Sandusky that was published in the Centre Daily Times, where he described Sandusky as his "best friend, tutor, workout mentor and more." Myers lived with Sandusky while he attended college. When Myers got married, he invited Jerry and Dottie Sandusky to the wedding.
Then, Myers got a lawyer and flipped, claiming that Sandusky assaulted him ten times. But at the Sandusky trial, the state attorney general's office deemed Myers an unreliable witness and did not call him to testify against Sandusky.
Instead, the prosecutor told the jury, the identity of Victim No. 2, the boy in the showers, "was known only to God."
Myers, however, eventually collected $3 million in what was supposed to be a confidential settlement with Penn State as Victim No. 2.
Mike McQueary may not have known for sure what he heard and saw in the shower. And the cops and the prosecutors may not know who Victim No. 2 really was. But John Snedden had it figured out pretty early what the source of the trouble was at Penn State.
Snedden recalled that four days into his 2012 investigation, he called his bosses to let them know that despite all the hoopla in the media, there was no sex scandal at Penn State.
"I just want to make sure you realize that this is a political hit job," Snedden recalled telling his bosses. "The whole thing is political."
Why did the Penn State situation get blown so far out of proportion?
"When I get a case, I independently investigate it," Snedden said. "It seems like that was not the case here. It wasn't an independent inquiry. It was an orchestrated effort to make the circumstances fit the alleged crime."
How did they get it so wrong at Penn State?
"To put it in a nutshell, I would say there was an exceptional rush to judgment to satisfy people," Snedden said. "So they wouldn't have to answer any more questions."
"It's a giant rush to judgement," Snedden said. "There was no debate."
"Ninety-nine percent of it is hysteria," Snedden said. Ninety-nine percent of what happened at Penn State boiled down to people running around yelling, "Oh my God, we've got to do something immediately," Snedden said.
It didn't matter that most of the people Snedden talked to at Penn State couldn't believe that Graham Spanier would have ever participated in a coverup, especially involving the abuse of a child.
Carolyn A. Dolbin, an administrative assistant to the PSU president, told Snedden that Spanier told her "that his father has physically abused him when [Spanier] was a child, and as a result [Spanier] had a broken nose and needed implants."
Spanier himself told Snedden, "He had been abused as a child and he would not stand for that," meaning a coverup, Snedden wrote.
Snedden couldn't believe the way the Penn State Board of Trustees acted the night they decided to fire both Spanier and Paterno.
There was no investigation, no determination of the facts. Instead, the officials running the show at Penn State wanted to move on as fast as possible from the scandal by sacrificing a few scapegoats.
At an executive session, the vice chairman of the PSU board, John Surma, the CEO of U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh, told his fellow PSU board members, "We need to get rid of Paterno and Spanier," Snedden said. And then Surma asked, "Does anybody disagree with that?"
"There wasn't even a vote," Snedden said. In Snedden's report, Dr. Rodney Erickson, the former PSU president, told Snedden that Spanier "is collateral damage in all of this."
Erickson didn't believe there was a coverup at Penn State, because of what Spanier had told him.
"I was told it was just horsing around in the shower," Spanier told Erickson, as recounted in Snedden's report. "How do you call the police on that?"
On the night the board of trustees fired Paterno, they kept calling Paterno's house, but there was no answer. Finally, the board sent a courier over to Paterno's house, and asked him to call Surma's cell phone.
When Paterno called, Surma was ready to tell the coach three things. But he only got to his first item.
"Surma was only able to tell Paterno that he was no longer football coach before Paterno hung up," Snedden wrote.
In Snedden's report, Spanier is quoted as telling Frances Anne Riley, a member of the board of trustees, "I was so naive."
"He means that politically," Snedden said about Spanier. "He was so naive to understand that a governor would go to that level to jam him. How a guy could be so vindictive," Snedden said, referring to the former governor, who could not be reached for comment.
When the Penn State scandal hit, "It was a convenient disaster," Snedden said. Because it gave the governor a chance "to fulfill vendettas."
The governor was angry at Spanier for vocally opposing Corbett's plan to cut Penn State's budget by 52 percent, Snedden wrote. In his report, Spanier, who was put under oath by Snedden and questioned for eight hours, stated that he had been the victim of "vindictiveness from the governor."
In Snedden's report, Spanier "explained that Gov. Corbett is an alumni of Lebanon Valley College [a private college], that Gov. Corbett is a strong supporter of the voucher system, wherein individuals can choose to utilize funding toward private eduction, as opposed to public education."
Corbett, Spanier told Snedden, "is not fond of Penn State, and is not fond of public higher education."
Spanier, Snedden wrote, "is now hearing that when the Penn State Board of Trustees was telling [Spanier] not to take action and that they [the Penn State Board of Trustees] were going to handle the situation, that the governor was actually exercising pressure on the [The Penn State Board of Trustees] to have [Spanier] leave."
The governor, Snedden said, "wants to be the most popular guy in Pennsylvania." But Spanier was fighting him politically, and Joe Paterno was a football legend.
Suddenly, the Penn State scandal came along, and Corbett could lobby the Penn State Board of Trustees to get rid of both Spanier and Paterno.
And suddenly Corbett starts showing up at Penn State Board of Trustees meetings, where the governor was a board member, but didn't usually bother to go. Only now Corbett "is the knight in shining armor," Snedden said. Because he's the guy cleaning up that horrible sex abuse scandal at Penn State.
"The wrong people are being looked at here," Snedden said about the scandal at Penn State. As far as Snedden was concerned, the board of trustees at Penn State had no reason to fire Spanier or Paterno.
""It's a political vendetta by somebody that has an epic degree of vindictiveness and will stop at nothing apparently," Snedden said about Corbett.
The whole thing is appalling," Snedden said. "It's absurd that somebody didn't professionally investigate this thing from the get-go."
As far as Snedden is concerned, the proof that the investigation was tampered with was shown in the flip-flop done by Cynthia Baldwin, Penn State's former counsel.
"You've got a clear indication that Cynthia Baldwin was doing whatever they wanted her to do," Snedden said about Baldwin's cooperation with the AG's office.
In her interview with Snedden, Baldwin called Spanier "a very smart man, a man of integrity." She told Snedden that she trusted Spanier, and trusted his judgment. This was true even during "the protected privileged period" from 2010 on, Baldwin told Snedden. While Baldwin was acting as Spanier's counsel, and, on the advice of her lawyer, wasn't supposed to discuss that so-called privileged period with Snedden.
Baldwn subsequently became a cooperating witness who testified against Spanier, Curley and Schultz.
Another aspect of the hysterical rush to judgment by Penn State: the university paid out $93 million to the alleged victims of Sandusky, without vetting anybody. None of the alleged victims were deposed by lawyers; none were examined by forensic psychiatrists.
Instead, Penn State just wrote the checks, no questions asked. The university's free-spending prompted a lawsuit from Penn State's insurance carrier, the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association Insurance Company.
So Snedden wrote a report that called for renewing Spanier's high-level security clearance. Because Snedden didn't find any evidence of a coverup at Penn State. Because there was nothing to cover up.
"The circumstances surrounding [Spanier's] departure from his position as PSU president do not cast doubt on [Spanier's] current reliability, trustworthiness or good judgment and do not cast doubt on his ability to properly safeguard national security information," Snedden wrote.
Meanwhile, the university paid $8.3 million for a report from former FBI Director Louie Freeh, who reached the opposite conclusion that Snedden did. Freeh found that there had been a top-down coverup of a sex crime at Penn State that was allegedly orchestrated by Spanier.
What does Snedden think of the Louie Freeh report?
"It's an embarrassment to law enforcement," Snedden said.
Louie Freeh, Snedden said, is a political appointee.
"Maybe he did an investigation at one point in his life, but not on this one," Snedden said about the report Freeh wrote on Penn State.
What about the role the media played in creating an atmosphere of hysteria?
"Sadly, I think they've demonstrated that investigative journalism is dead," Snedden said.
If Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile, Snedden said, how did he survive a month-long investigation back in 1998 by the Penn State police, the State College police, the Centre County District Attorney's office, and the state Department of Child/Public Welfare?
All of those agencies investigated Sandusky, after a mother complained about Jerry taking a shower with her 11-year-old son. Were all those agencies bamboozled? None of them could catch a pedophile in action?
Another problem for people who believe that Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile: When the cops came to Sandusky's house armed with search warrants, they didn't find any porn.
Have you ever heard of a pedophilia case where large caches of pornography weren't found, I asked Snedden.
"No," he said. "Having worked child sex abuse cases before, they [pedophiles] go from the porn to actually acting it out. It's a crescendo."
"I'm more inclined" to believe the results of the 1998 investigation, Snedden said. "Because they're not politically motivated."
Snedden said he's had "minimalistic contact" with Sandusky that basically involved watching him behave at a high school football game.
"I really do think he's a big kid," Snedden said of Sandusky.
Does he believe there's any credible evidence that Sandusky is a pedophile?
"Certainly none that's come to light that wasn't susceptible to manipulation," he said.
Does Sandusky deserve a new trial?
"Without a doubt," Snedden said. Because the first time around, when he was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in jail, Sandusky didn't have a real trial, Snedden said.
"To have a real trial, you should actually have real credible witnesses and credible victims," Snedden said. "And no leaks from the grand jury."
It also would have been a fair trial, Snedden said, if the people who Sandusky would have called as defense witnesses hadn't already been indicted by the state attorney general's office.
While he was investigating Spanier, Snedden said, he had his own dust-up with the state Attorney General's office. It came in the form of an unwanted phone call from Anthony Sassano, the lead investigator in the AG's office on the Sandusky case.
Sassano didn't go through the appropriate channels when he called, Snedden said. But Sassano demanded to see Snedden's report.
Snedden said he told Sassano, sorry, but that's the property of the federal government. Sassano, Snedden said, responded by "spewing obscenities."
"It was something to the effect of I will ****ing see your ass and your ****ing report at the grand jury," Snedden recalled Sassano telling him.
Sure enough, Snedden was served with a subpoena from the state AG's office on October 22, 2012. But the feds sent the subpoena back saying they didn't have to honor it.
"The doctrine of sovereign immunity precludes a state court from compelling a federal employee, pursuant to its subpoena and contempt powers, from offering testimony contrary to his agency's instructions," the feds wrote back to the state Attorney General's office.
So what would it take to straighten out the mess at Penn State?
"The degree of political involvement in this case is so high," Snedden said.
"You need to take an assistant U.S. Attorney from Arizona or somewhere who doesn't know anything about Penn State," Snedden said. Surround him with a competent staff of investigators, and turn them loose for 30 days.
It’s not a theory, it’s a plain reading of the emails, you know, like the jury read. I understand them perfectly. Everything points to a coverup that Joe was part of. That’s why Spanier was convicted.
Last edited:
It gets better.
Ten years after an illegal grand jury leak set off the media firestorm known as the Penn State sex abuse scandal, the evidence of official misconduct in this case is so pervasive and egregious that Jerry Sandusky deserves to walk out of prison today as a free man.
Since 2017, Big Trial has reviewed thousands of pages of court transcripts and legal proceedings in the case, along with hundreds of pages of confidential documents that are still under a judge's seal.
Taken together, those records tell a clear story -- the case against Sandusky is fatally flawed from top to bottom. A decade later, records show, the actions of many of the principal actors in this case, including prosecutors, judges, and FBI Director Louis Freeh, who led the civil investigation at Penn State, are irredeemably tainted by misconduct, incompetence, unethical behavior, conflict of interest, collusion and/or corruption.
In addition, psychologists in the case used scientifically discredited recovered memory therapy to elicit suspect testimony from many of the alleged victims, whose improbable and constantly evolving stories to this day have never been vetted by anyone. Finally, the defendants' own medical records cast doubt on whether Sandusky was physically capable of performing the acts he was accused of.
Based on the evidence that I will present here, there's no longer any reason for any sane person to believe in the findings of both the civil and the criminal investigations conducted at Penn State. A decade later, the prevailing story line in the Penn State sex scandal about the man who's supposed to be the most notorious pedophile in America amounts to an X-rated fractured fairy tale that, when viewed from multiple angles, makes no freaking sense.
There's a looming shadow that's cast over the entire Penn State scandal, and that's the egregious conduct of an overzealous prosecutor on a rampage, former Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina, who was the lead prosecutor at Penn State.
Amelia Kittredge, the counsel for the state Supreme Court's disciplinary board who ran the investigation that resulted in Fina losing his license to practice law, memorably described Fina to the state's highest court as "someone who cannot or will not separate right from wrong."
A decade later, Fina's fingerprints are all over this travesty of a case, particularly when it comes to illegal grand jury leaks. But when we're talking about bad actors in the Sandusky case, Fina's got plenty of company.
The tragedy of all this is if the state gets its wish, Sandusky, who at 77, still professes his innocence, may die in prison before the truth about the scandal behind the scandal at Penn State is finally known.
Much of the material published below will be familiar to Big Trial readers, as it has been presented piecemeal over the past five years in some 60 blog posts published on this website.
The stories were written by myself as well as author Mark Pendergrast, who excerpted on bigtrial.net several chapters from his 2017 book, The Most Hated Man In America; Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment.
It was ten years ago this month, on Nov. 4, 2011, that the premature leak of the pending grand jury indictment of Sandusky to reporter Sara Ganim set off the media firestorm that would railroad Sandusky into spending what amounts to a life sentence in jail.
Just five days after that leak, without doing any fact-finding, Penn State's panicked board of trustees hastily fired Joe Paterno, the winningest football coach in America, as well as longtime Penn State President Graham Spanier.
With the tenth anniversary of the Penn State case upon us, rather than examine its own malpractice and negligence, the news media has chosen to regurgitate a completely discredited story line that's built around a big lie.
To counter the prevailing narrative, I've decided to publish in one spot large chunks of the evidence that clearly shows Sandusky was railroaded.
As outlined below, the level of official misconduct in this case is so extreme that it rises to the level of egregious. That's the term the state Supreme Court used in 1992 when it freed former Lower Merion High School Principal Jay Smith from prison, where he had been on death row for six years, after his conviction for the murders of English teacher Susan Reinert and her two children, whose bodies were never discovered.
In the Jay Smith case, the state Supreme Court found that prosecutors in the state attorney general's office committed egregious misconduct when they hid exculpatory evidence that would have benefitted the defendant. The hidden evidence included two grains of sand found between the toes on Reinert's body that indicated she may have died at the Jersey Shore, as opposed to the the prosecution's theory of the case, which was that Smith had killed Reinert in his basement.
In freeing Smith, the state Supreme Court barred a retrial on the grounds that it would amount to unconstitutional double jeopardy.
In the Sandusky case, the state attorney general's office outdid its previous standards for corruption by knowingly writing a false and inflammatory grand jury presentment, deliberately leaking that false presentment to the media, and then basically manufacturing the trial testimony that was used to convict Sandusky. To finish the job, the judges in this case trampled on Sandusky's constitutional rights at every turn, while turning a blind eye to overwhelming evidence of official misconduct.
Stated simply, the Sandusky case is a cluster f--k from start to finish that can't be undone.
The Rape In The Showers
Let's start at the beginning, with the headline charge in the grand jury presentment that has permanently convicted Sandusky in the minds of an entire nation, as well as the jury pool in Centre County. The headline charge that was also responsible for the firing of Paterno and Spanier.
“Remember that little boy in the shower,” then-Gov. Tom Corbett told the university’s board of trustees on Nov. 9, 2011, just before they decided, in a mad rush to judgment, to fire Paterno and Spanier without even taking a formal vote.
According to that grand jury presentment, a decade earlier, at 9:30 p.m. on March 1, 2002, a then-28-year-old Penn State graduate assistant walked into the locker room at the Lasch Football Building on the University Park Campus.
[The prosecutors subsequently claimed they had gotten the date of the shower story wrong, and moved the date of that alleged incident back 13 months to Feb. 9, 2001.]
The graduate assistant, subsequently identified as assistant Penn State football coach Mike McQueary, heard "rhythmic slapping sounds" emanating from the showers, sounds that he "believed" to be evidence of "sexual activity."
According to the grand jury presentment, McQueary looked into the showers and saw "a naked boy, Victim 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky."
According to the grand jury presentment, the "distraught" graduate assistant called his father for advice, and then he left he Lasch Building and went straight home.
"The next morning," according to the grand jury presentment, McQueary "went to [Coach Joe] Paterno's home, where he reported what he had seen."
The rape in the showers, as well as the implication that McQueary promptly told Paterno about "what he had seen" -- as in that rape in the showers -- are both works of fiction written by overzealous prosecutors in the state attorney general's office.
How do we know this? From the words of the sole witness himself, in emails first disclosed by blogger Ray Blehar.
On Nov. 10, 2011, six days after the grand jury presentment was leaked, McQueary emailed deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach to tell her that the grand jury report the AG had just published was factually incorrect.
"I feel my words are slightly twisted and not totally portrayed correctly in the presentment," McQueary wrote. "I cannot say 1000 percent sure that it was sodomy. I did not see insertion. It was a sexual act and or way over the line in my opinion whatever it was."
In a second email that day to Eshbach, McQueary complained about "being misrepresented" in the media. To which Eshbach replied, "I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect and it is hard not to respond. But you can't."
During a defamation suit that McQueary subsequently filed against Penn State, Eshbach was sworn in as a witness and asked to explain what she meant by telling McQueary not to talk.
"My advice to Mr. McQueary not to make a statement was based on the strengthening of my -- and saving of my case," Eshbach testified. "I did not want him [McQueary] making statements to the press at that time that could at some time be used against him in cross-examination. He [McQueary] was perfectly free to make a statement, but I asked him not to."
Less than a month after the grand jury presentment, Paterno issued a statement disclosing that when he went before the grand jury, he testified, "It was obvious that the witness [McQueary] was distraught over what he saw, but he at no time related to me the very specific actions contained in the Grand Jury report."
To further confirm this, on Dec. 16, 2011, McQueary testified under cross-examination that "I have never used the word anal or rape in this -- since day one."
Besides Paterno, McQueary told his story about "whatever it was" that he had allegedly witnessed within hours of the alleged incident in the Penn State showers to his father, John McQueary, and his father's friend, Dr. Jonathan Dranov, who, as a doctor, was a mandated reporter when it comes to allegations of sex abuse.
Approximately 10 days later, McQueary told Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and senior Vice President for finance and business Gary Schultz about what he had allegedly seen in the showers.
All five men -- Paterno, McQueary's father, Dr. Dranov, Curley and Schutz -- have testified under oath that Mike McQueary never told them that he witnessed anything sexual going on in the showers. Instead, Paterno, Curley and Schultz characterized what McQueary told them about as "horseplay."
On Nov. 23, 2010, recounting what was then a nearly decade-old incident in the showers, McQueary wrote out a statement to police that said whatever he witnessed took place during a brief time period that lasted between 30 and 45 seconds.
During that time, McQueary wrote to the cops, he glanced into a mirror once, which gave him a reflected view of the showers, and then he glanced directly into the showers.
McQueary told a grand jury in 2010 that the two “glances” he took each lasted “maybe one or two seconds.”
But the story McQueary told kept changing.
On Nov. 8, 2011, after the grand jury presentment became public, McQueary emailed a friend and claimed that instead of leaving the locker room and doing nothing to stop an alleged rape of a child in progress, "I did stop it, not physically, but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room."
In that email that was subsequently published in Thee Morning Call of Allentown, PA, on Nov. 15, 2011, McQueary also claimed that he told the police about the rape in the showers. But the next day, representatives from both the Penn State campus police and the State College police publicly stated that they had no record of McQueary ever reporting any sex crime to them.
In subsequent retellings of the shower story, McQueary claimed that when he left the locker room, he slammed his locker door, which he said, made Sandusky look up and stop the abuse. McQueary also claimed that as he was leaving the shower room, he took another glance in the showers a second time, to make sure that Sandusky and the boy remained apart.
At the Sandusky trial in 2012, McQueary testified that when he first glanced in the showers eleven years earlier, this time he said that glance lasted between one and five seconds, and that he saw Sandusky standing behind a boy whose hands were against the shower wall.
On the witness stand, McQueary claimed that he now recalled a "very slow, slow, subtle movement" of Sandusky's crotch against the boy's buttocks.
The identity of the victim, the boy in the showers, Deputy Attorney General Joe McGettigan told the jury at the Sandusky trial, was "known only to God." But jurors didn't buy that story, and despite convicting Sandusky on 45 other counts, they acquitted Sandusky on the charge of abusing the unknown boy in the showers.
[According to author Mark Pendergrast, McGettigan was lying when he said they didn't know the identity of the boy in the showers. He's a former Marine named Allan Myers, who was 14, and not 10 at the time of the alleged shower incident. Myers initially told the state police and a private investigator that Sandusky was a father figure and mentor who had never abused him, and that they were horsing around that day in the shower, snapping some towels, when McQueary walked in.
That was before Myers decided to drastically change his story and cash in, to the tune of a $6.9 million civil settlement. During Sandusky's bid for a new trial, Myers was sworn in as a witness in 2016 and asked which story he told was the truth. He responded by saying he couldn't remember 34 times.]
The Previously Undisclosed Federal Investigation At Penn State
The Penn State sex scandal was the subject of a criminal investigation by the state attorney general's office, and a supposedly independent civil investigation conducted at the cost of $8 million by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
The investigation conducted by the state attorney general's office resulted in the indictment of Sandusky for the alleged rape of the boy in the showers, as well as for allegedly abusing seven other minors.
On June 22, 2012, a Centre County jury found Sandusky guilty of 45 out of 48 counts of sex abuse, and sentenced him to 30 to 60 years in jail.
The state attorney general's office also initially charged Spanier, Curley and Schultz with failing to report allegations of child abuse to authorities, along with allegedly committing perjury during grand jury testimony.
The Freeh Report concluded that there was an official cover up of Sandusky's sex crimes at Penn State. And that during that cover up, the Freeh Report claimed, Spanier, Curley and Schultz had displayed a "total and consistent disregard" for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's alleged victims, as well as a "striking lack of empathy."
In publishing their 267-page report, the authors of the Freeh Report claimed they operated "with total independence," and that "no party interfered with, or attempted to influence the findings in this report."
The media has dutifully reported on the two investigations done by the state attorney general's office, and former FBI Director Freeh, as well as their findings about a rape in the showers, followed by an official cover-up on the part of Penn State's top officials.
But there has been a total news blackout in the mainstream media on the third investigation done at Penn State. It was done by the federal government in 2012, which resulted in a 110-page report that initially was stamped confidential, but was finally declassified in 2017.
The federal investigation was conducted by former NCIS Special Agent and veteran cold case investigator John Snedden, then on assignment for the U.S. Federal Investigative Services.
Against the backdrop of the Penn State sex abuse scandal, Snedden's job was to determine whether former Penn State President Spanier deserved to have a high-level national security clearance renewed amid allegations that he had orchestrated an official cover-up of Jerry Sandusky's sex crimes.
With national security at stake, Snedden conducted a five-month investigation on the Penn State campus in 2012. And what did he find?
That the rape in the showers story told by McQueary made no sense, and that McQueary, who told so many different versions of that story -- according to author Mark Pendergrast, a total of five different accounts -- wasn't a credible witness.
Snedden also concluded that there was no cover up at Penn State, because there was no sex crime in the showers to cover up. It was the exact opposite of the conclusions reached by the state attorney general's office, and the Freeh Report.
As a result, the feds cleared Spanier, and renewed his high level security clearance.
Why didn't Snedden buy the rape in the showers story?
Back in 2001, Snedden told Big Trial, Mike McQueary was a 26-year-old, 6-foot-5, 240-pound former college quarterback used to running away from 350-pound defensive linemen. If McQueary actually saw Jerry Sandusky raping a young boy in the shower, Snedden said, he probably would have done something about it.
"I think your moral compass would cause you to act and not just flee," Snedden said.
If McQueary really thought he was witnessing a sexual assault on a child, Snedden said, wouldn't he have gotten between the victim and a "wet, defenseless naked 57-year-old guy in the shower?"
Or, if McQueary decided he wasn't going to physically intervene, Snedden said, instead of going home and doing nothing about a child rape in progress, why didn't he call the cops from the Lasch Building?
As Snedden says, the story makes no sense. It was also egregious prosecutorial misconduct for the state attorney general's office to fictionalize and sensationalize such a flimsy, decade-old story, and then hang an entire grand jury presentment on it.
Evidence of Corruption, Collusion & Illegal Grand Jury Leaks
While the Freeh Group investigation claimed to operate with "total independence," there's a confidential record that meticulously documents ample evidence of routine collusion between the criminal investigation of Penn State conducted by the state attorney general's office, and the supposedly independent investigation conducted by the Freeh Group.
And that evidence comes from a seemingly unimpeachable source, former FBI Special Agent Kathleen McChesney, who was credited with starting the investigation that led to the capture of serial killer Ted Bundy.
In "Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes," McChesney revealed on camera how the federal investigation of the serial killer got started. A woman called and said, "I'm concerned about my boyfriend -- his name is Ted Bundy."
The girlfriend proceeded to detail Bundy's suspicious behavior that included following women around at night, hiding a knife in his car and keeping a bag of women's underwear in his apartment.
McChesney, who was on the task force that ultimately arrested Bundy, rose to become the only female FBI agent appointed to be the bureau's executive assistant director. Her credibility was such that in 2002, in the wake of the widespread sex abuse scandal involving the Catholic clergy, the U.S. Conference of Bishops hired McChesney to establish and lead its Office of Child and Youth Protection.
McChesney is also the author of a 2011 book, "Pick Up Your Own Brass: Leadership the FBI Way."
But in the Sandusky case, the decorated former FBI special agent is now known for another book she wrote -- an unpublished, confidential 79-page diary written in 2011 and 2012, back when McChesney was a private investigator working for her old boss, former FBI Director Freeh, while investigating Penn State.
In her diary, McChesney records multiple contemporaneous instances of then Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina, the lead prosecutor in the Penn State case, leaking grand jury secrets to the Freeh Group.
It's clear from the McChesney diary that multiple grand jury documents were also regularly leaked to the Freeh Group, as was a 1998 police report on an earlier alleged shower incident that was investigated and found to be unfounded, resulting in a report that was supposed to have been expunged in 1999.
While the Freeh Group claimed in their report that they operated with "total independence" and "no party interfered with, or attempted to influence the findings in this report," the McChesney diary tells a different story.
Namely, that in conducting their supposedly independent investigation, the Freeh Group was regularly colluding with and working seemingly under the direction of the state attorney general's office, and particularly under the direction of deputy Attorney General Frank Fina.
According to McChesney, members of the Freeh Group "don't want to interfere with their investigations," and that she and her colleagues were being "extremely cautious & running certain interviews by them."
McChesney wrote that the Freeh Group even "asked Fina to authorize some interviews." And that the A.G.'s office "asked us to stay away from some people, ex janitors, but can interview" people from the Second Mile, Sandusky's charity for disadvantaged youths.
According to McChesney, Fina was actively involved in directing the Freeh Group's investigation, to the point of saying if and when they could interview certain witnesses.
For example, McChesney recorded that the Freeh Group was going to notify Fina that they wanted to interview Ronald Schreffler, an investigator for Penn State Police who probed the earlier 1998 shower incident involving Sandusky and another boy that turned out to be unfounded; he also wrote the police report that was supposed to be expunged.
After he was notified, McChesney wrote, "Fina approved interview with Schreffler."
According to the McChesney diary, Fina also routinely kept the Freeh Group up to date on what was going on with the grand jury investigation, telling Freeh's investigators secrets that the defendants and their lawyers weren't privy to.
For example, the night before former Penn State President Spanier, Curley and Schultz were going to be arrested, Gregory Paw, another Freeh investigator, sent an email to his colleagues at the Freeh Group, advising them of the imminent arrest.
The subject of Paw's email: "CLOSE HOLD -- Important."
"PLEASE HOLD VERY CLOSE," Paw wrote his colleagues at the Freeh Group. "[Deputy Attorney General Frank] Fina called tonight to tell me that Spanier is to be arrested tomorrow, and Curley and Schultz re-arrested, on charges of obstruction of justice and related charges . . . Spanier does not know this information yet, and his lawyers will be advised about an hour before the charges are announced tomorrow."
When I asked Freeh, through a spokesperson, whether he as a private citizen during the Penn State investigation, was authorized to have access to grand jury secrets, Freeh declined comment.
Other emails contained in documents under seal show that while investigating Penn State, Freeh may have had a conflict of interest. According to the emails, Freeh, whose investigators had telephone conferences with every Friday with NCAA officials, saw the Penn State investigation as a way to land the NCAA as a permanent client.
On July 7, 2012, a week before the release of the Freeh Report on Penn State, Omar McNeill, a senior investigator for Freeh, wrote to Freeh. "This has opened up an opportunity to have the dialogue with [NCAA President Mark] Emmert about possibly being the go to internal investigator for the NCAA. It appears we have Emmert's attention now."
In response, Freeh wrote back, "Let's try to meet with him and make a deal -- a very good cost contract to be the NCAA's 'go to investigators' -- we can even craft a big discounted rate given the unique importance of such a client. Most likely he will agree to a meeting -- if he does not ask for one first."
It took seven years but Freeh's efforts finally paid off. In August, 2019, the NCAA hired five employees of the Freeh Group to staff its new Complex Case Unit.
The McChesney diary was the basis for a motion for a new trial filed with the state Superior Court in 2020 by Sandusky's appeal lawyers. In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers requested an evidentiary hearing where McChesney would have been summoned to testify under subpoena and asked to authenticate the diary.
But a year later, on May 13, 2021, the state Superior Court denied that motion, ruling that Sandusky's lawyers did not file their appeal in a timely fashion.
Instead, the state Superior Court blasted Sandusky's appeal lawyers, saying that they "dithered for one-half a year" before bringing the newly discovered evidence to the court's attention.
Evidence of Jury Tampering
The Freeh Group's investigation at Penn State involved interviewing hundreds of people, including a Penn State faculty member before she was chosen as a juror in the Sandusky case.
And when it came time for defense lawyers to question the juror, she misrepresented what she had told the Freeh Group.
The juror was identified by Freeh's investigators as Laura Pauley, a professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State, who did not respond to a request for comment. During jury selection on June 6, 2012, Pauley was asked by Joseph Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, what she told Freeh's investigators.
"It was focused more on how the board of trustees interacts with the president," Pauley told Amendola, as well as "how faculty are interacting with the president and the board of trustees . . ."
But an April 19, 2011 confidential summary of that interview shows that the juror had already made up her mind about the guilt of Sandusky, by reading her local newspaper. According to the report of the interview, Pauley had also already decided that Penn State's top administrators were guilty of a cover up.
In her interview with Freeh's investigators, Pauley stated that she was "an avid reader of the Centre Daily Times" and that she believed that the leadership at Penn State just "kicks the issue down the road."
"The PSU culture can best be described as people who do not want to resolve issues and want to avoid confrontation," she told Freeh's investigators.
Pauley, a tenured professor who served on the Faculty Advisory Committee for three years, told Freeh's investigators that Penn State President Graham Spanier was "very controlling," and that "she feels that [former Penn State Athletic Director Tim] Curley and [former Penn State vice president Gary] Schultz are responsible for the scandal."
"She stated that she senses Curley and Schultz treated it [the scandal] the 'Penn State' way and were just moving on and hoping it would fade away."
While Pauley was being questioned by Amendola, Sandusky's appeal lawyers wrote, "at no time during this colloquy, or any other time, did the prosecution disclose that it was working in collaboration with the Freeh Group which interviewed the witness."
Had Amendola known what Pauley told Freeh's investigators, he would have sought to have her stricken from the jury. He would have also asked the judge to find out whether any other jurors had met with Freeh's investigators.
At Sandusky's trial, while Amendola was questioning Pauley about what she told Freeh's investigators, Deputy Attorney Frank Fina sat silently at the prosecution table and said nothing.
Since the McChesney's diary documents how the Freeh Group routinely kept the attorney general's office abreast of the Freeh investigation, it's possible that Fina knew all about the Freeh Group's interview with Pauley.
It's also possible that Fina may have even been given his own copy of that interview with the juror.
The Corruption Of Frank Fina
On Feb. 19, 2020, the state Supreme Court of Pennsylvania voted to suspend for a year and a day the law license of former deputy attorney general Frank Fina, the lead prosecutor in the Penn State case, for his "reprehensible" and "inexcusable" misconduct during the grand jury investigation of three Penn State officials that he accused of orchestrating a cover up.
Fina, the disciplinary board found, was guilty of purposely "misleading" a grand jury judge into thinking that Fina wasn't going to press Cynthia Baldwin, Penn State's former counsel, into breaking the attorney-client privilege behind closed doors and betraying three top Penn State officials who were her former clients -- Spanier, Curley and Schultz.
Fina got Baldwin to cooperate by threatening her with an indictment for obstruction of justice. So Baldwin went into the grand jury and testified against her clients, without even notifying them of her betrayal.
After deliberately misleading the judge back in October 2012, Fina then "proceeded to question [Baldwin] extensively about the very subjects he represented to Judge [Barry] Feudale he would avoid," the disciplinary board concluded.
"These actions are reprehensible" and "inexcusable," the disciplinary board wrote.
Even worse, the disciplinary board found that Fina's alleged defense of his behavior before the board was "without substance." What Fina did, the disciplinary board said, was to tear down all the safeguards built into the criminal justice system by turning defense attorney Baldwin "into a witness for the prosecution against her clients."
"Unlike other lawyers, the prosecutor is more than a zealous advocate for a client," the state Supreme Court wrote. "The prosecutor bears as well the high and non-delegable duty of ensuring a fair process for the defendant and of comporting himself or herself always in a manner consistent with a position of public trust."
"To state it plain, instead of Baldwin serving as a shield for her former clients, her testimony was elicited and used by Fina as a sword against them, to devastating effect," the court wrote. In addition, when he was brought up on charges of misconduct, the disciplinary board concluded, Fina "failed to acknowledge he had a special responsibility to ensure justice and utterly failed to acknowledge the ramifications of his conduct."
The board found that "deflecting responsibility and displaying a lack of sincere remorse constitute aggravating factors."
Clearly, Fina was a man who would stop at nothing to accomplish his goals. Even if it meant breaking the law.
There was more fall-out from Fina's actions.
In 2013, then state Attorney General Katharine Kane ousted Judge Feudale from his duties as supervising grand jury judge in Harrisburg, citing his close relationship with Fina and lack of objectivity.
On Feb. 21, 2020, the state Supreme Court publicly censured Baldwin, a former state Supreme Court justice herself, for her "unfathomable" and "incompetent" actions in betraying her own clients.
In censuring Baldwin, the court noted her "lack of remorse for her actions," saying she "cast blame for her problems on everyone involved," but never herself.
The Corruption Of the Trial Judge In The Sandusky Case
The trial of Sandusky was presided over by the Honorable John Cleland, who oversaw a rush to judgment that resulted in Sandusky going from indictment to conviction at trial in just seven months.
How did the judge pull that off? By trampling on Sandusky's constitutional rights.
Before the trial started, Sandusky's defense lawyers tried to get the trial postponed so they could wade through 12,000 pages of grand jury transcripts he had just received only 10 days before the start of trial.
Amendola, Sanduksy's trial lawyer, begged for a continuance, telling the judge that he needed time to read the files and find out what Sandusky's accusers were saying about him; he also needed time to subpoena witnesses.
"We can't prepare . . . I felt like Custer at Little Bighorn for God's sake," Amendola testified during an appeals hearing. But Judge Cleland turned him down.
[Besides being unprepared, Joe Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, was painfully inept, as detailed on this blog by author Mark Pendergrast.]
Jerry Sandusky had a constitutional right to a fair trial. But in order to save Penn State football, which was being threatened with the death penalty by the NCAA, Sandusky had to be convicted and sitting in jail before the start of the 2012 college football season to wrap up the Penn State scandal in a nice, neat bow.
Putting Sandusky in jail for life fit right into the deal that PSU had struck with the NCAA, which was to voluntarily admit guilt and take their lumps, which included a $60 million fine. But the payoff for Penn State was that the Nittany Lions would escape the death penalty that the NCAA had threatened to impose on the football program in Happy Valley.
Jerry Sandusky also had a constitutional right to confront his accusers, but Judge Cleland took care of that as well.
The night before the preliminary hearing in the case, the only pretrial opportunity where Sandusky's lawyers would have had the right to confront his accusers -- the eight young men who claimed that Sandusky had abused them -- Judge Cleland convened an unusual off-the-record meeting of prosecutors, a magistrate, and defense lawyers at the Hilton Garden Inn at State College.
At the meeting, with prosecutors nodding in agreement, the judge talked Amendola into waiving the preliminary hearing so that Sandusky could remain out on bail for his trial. On their end of the deal, the state attorney general's office, which had previously requested bail of $1 million for Sandusky, agreed to lower that amount to $250,000.
The A.G. had also had threatened to file more charges against Sandusky, but according to the deal worked out by the judge during the off-the-record session at the Hilton Garden Inn, no more charges would be forthcoming.
So Amendola caved and took the deal. The grand result of Sandusky's lawyers waiving the preliminary hearing was that the Pennsylvania railroad that Sandusky was riding on would stay on schedule.
During the appeal process, after Judge Cleland's actions were disclosed regarding the Hilton Garden Inn conference, the judge had to turn over notes that he had taken during the off-the-record session. Cleland then voluntarily recused himself from continuing to preside over the appeals in the Sandusky case.
While the Sandusky case was headed to trial at breakneck speed, some people in the know were aware that the Honorable Judge Cleland wasn't going to budge on the scheduled trial date.
In the McChesney diary, on May 10, 2012, the former FBI agent noted in a conference call with Gregory Paw and Omar McNeil, two of Freeh's investigators, that Paw is going to talk to Fina, and that the "judge [is] holding firm on date of trial."
In an affidavit, Amendola, Sandusky's trial lawyer, stated that McChesney didn't get that information from him.
"An obvious question arises as to whether or not the trial judge was communicating with a member of the Freeh Group, attorneys for the attorney general's office, or anyone else concerning the trial date," Sandusky's appeal lawyers wrote.
In their motion for a new trial, Sandusky's lawyers sought to question Judge Cleland at an evidentiary hearing "to determine whether, and to what extent, collusion between the office of the attorney general, the Freeh investigation and the NCAA had an impact on the trial."
But the court denied that appeal.
Gullible Judges Deny A New Trial For Sandusky
During the appeals of Sandusky's conviction, his lawyers accused deputy attorney generals Fina and Eshbach of breaking state law by repeatedly leaking grand jury secrets.
But on Oct. 18, 2017, Jefferson County Presiding Judge John Henry Foradora issued a 59-page opinion where he cleared Fina and Eshbach of leaking, while denying Sandusky a new trial sought under the Post Conviction Relief Act.
In his opinion, Judge Foradora concluded that Fina and Eshbach weren't the leakers who were feeding reporter Sara Ganim intel about the impending grand jury presentment.
Why? Because Fina said so.
The judge bought Fina's alibi that he and Eshbach had supposedly set an "internal trap" to find the real leakers. But apparently the two prosecutors were about as successful as O.J. Simpson was in his hunt for the real killers.
Fina had asked his old buddy, Judge Barry Feudale, the supervising judge of the grand jury, to investigate the leak, Judge Foradora wrote. So, Judge Foradora decided, after hearing testimony from Fina, that it couldn't be Fina or Eshbach who were doing the leaking at the A.G.'s office.
At the PCRA hearing, "the testimony, then did not support the idea that the prosecution leaked grand jury information for any reason, let alone for the purpose of generating more victims," the judge wrote.
"If anything it supports the opposite conclusion, because while someone might be skeptical about the validity of Eshbach and Fina's internal 'trap'" to catch the real leakers, the judge wrote. "It is a fact of human nature that one engaged in or aware of misconduct he does not wish to have exposed does not ask an outside source to investigate it."
Unless the judge in question is an old pal. As in wink, wink.
One of the allegations of a leak raised by Sandusky's lawyers involved an incident related by the prosecution's official whistle blower in the Sandusky case, Mike McQueary.
At the 2017 trial of former PSU President Graham Spanier, McQueary was asked by a prosecutor how he found out that Sandusky was going to be arrested.
During the bye week of the 2011 Penn State football season, McQueary said, "I was on my way to Boston for recruiting and I was going from the F terminal over to the B terminals over in Philadelphia Airport."
That's when "the AGs called," McQueary said, referring specifically to Eshbach. According to McQueary, Eshbach told him "We're going to arrest folks and we are going to leak it out."
But rather than believe McQueary, Judge Foradora decided to trust Fina and Eshbach.
In denying Sandusky a new trial, Judge Foradora foolishly staked his entire 59-page opinion on the credibility and integrity of Frank Fina, which is now in tatters.
On Feb. 5, 2019, the state Superior Court, in a 70-page written by another gullible judge, the Honorable Judge Carolyn Nichols compounded this lunacy by denying Sandusky's appeal of Judge Foradora's opinion not to grant a new trial.
Once again, Judge Nichols and another court bought Fina and Eschbach's explanation that they had set an "internal trap" to find the real leakers, and didn't do any leaking themselves.
Recovered Memory Therapy
According to Mark Pendergrast, therapists in the Sandusky case used scientifically-discredited recovered memory therapy on six of Sandusky's eight accusers at trial, and on several other alleged victims who wound up getting civil settlements.
Pendergrast focused on the work of therapist Mike Gillum, who for three years, in weekly and sometimes daily skull sessions, basically brainwashed Aaron Fisher, Victim No. 1, into recalling memories of abuse, after he had originally denied he had been abused.
In a book Gillum co-wrote with Fisher, Silent No More, the therapist, who was convinced from the get-go that Sandusky was a serial abuser, stated that he sought to “peel back the layers of the onion” of Fisher's brain to recover memories of abuse that Gillum already knew were there.
During these weekly and sometimes daily sessions, Fisher didn't have to say anything. According to Silent No More, Gillum would guess what happened and Fisher only had to nod his head or say Yes.
“I was very blunt with him when I asked questions but gave him the ability to answer with a yes or a no, that relieved him of a lot of burden,” Gillum wrote. In the same book, Aaron Fisher recalled: “Mike just kept saying that Jerry was the exact profile of a predator. When it finally sank in, I felt angry.”
The grand result of Gillum's work --- Fisher cashed in for $7.5 million.
Another alleged victim who initially denied he had been abused, Dustin Struble, Victim No. 7, dramatically changed his story after he also underwent recovered memory therapy.
Like many of the other alleged victims in this case, Struble's story kept evolving. Struble told the grand jury that Sandusky had never touched his privates or touched him in the shower, which Struble said he and Sandusky shared with other coaches and players.
But at Sandusky's trial, Struble changed his story to say that Sandusky put his hands down the boy's pants when they were riding in Sandusky's car. And this time when he told the story about showering with Sandusky, Struble claimed that Sandusky was alone with him in the shower. And that Sandusky grabbed the boy and pushed his own naked front against the boy's backside, then he touched the boy's nipples and blew on his stomach.
When asked why his account had changed, Struble testified, "That doorway that I had closed has since been reopening more. More things have been coming back and things have changed since that grand jury testimony. Through counseling and different things, I can remember a lot more detail that I had pushed aside than I did at that point."
Struble's new story won him a civil settlement of $3,250,000.
A prominent critic of recovered memory therapy is Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, one of the world’s foremost experts on the malleability of human memory. Loftus, who testified at a hearing on behalf of Sandusky’s unsuccessful bid for a new trial, has given lectures on how memory works to the Secret Service and FBI; she also has a contract to work for the CIA
On May 11, 2017, testifying by phone, Loftus told Judge Foradora, “There is no credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression."
Nor is there any credible support, she added, for the idea that “you need psychotherapy to dig it out, and you can reliably recover these memories . . . in order to heal yourself.”
In many jurisdictions, Loftus told the judge, cases involving repressed memories have been thrown out of court.
Human memory “doesn’t work like a recording device” that can simply be played back at a later date, Loftus told the judge. Memories evolve over time and can be distorted or contaminated with suggestive and leading questioning. Her experiments have also shown that people can be talked into believing things that aren’t true.
“You can plant entirely false memories in the minds of people for events that never happened,” she explained to the judge. And once those false memories are planted, she said, people will relate those memories as if they were true, “complete with high levels of detail and emotion.”
But at the Sandusky trial, repressed memories were consistently presented as fact. Prosecutor Joseph McGettigan told the jury before calling his witnesses that he would have to “press these young men for the details of their victimization,” because “they don’t want to remember.” That’s why the investigation was slow,” McGettigan told the jury, because “the doors of people’s minds” were closed.
After a jury found Sandusky guilty, then Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly held a press conference outside the courthouse where she said of the alleged victims, “It was incredibly difficult for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”
During the appeal hearing over Sandusky's conviction, memory expert Loftus told Judge Foradora, “It seems pretty evident that there were drastic changes in the testimony of some of the [Sandusky] accusers.”
One reason for those changes, she testified, was the “highly suggestive” way police and psychotherapists interviewed them.
But rather than listen to Loftus, and the science, Judge Foradora chose to believe the recovered memories of the victims, which was the basis for the state attorney general's X-rated fractured fairy tale.
Victims' Stories Totally Unvetted
At Penn State, the university paid out $118 million to 36 alleged victims without investigating anything.
The average cost of the settlements was $3.3 million, more than double the average settlements paid out by the Catholic Church in abuse cases in Los Angeles and San Diego.
In 2013, the extravagant payouts prompted the university’s insurance carrier, the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association Insurance Company [PMA], to sue Penn State and the various “John Doe” claimants. The lawsuit ended three years later in a confidential settlement that lawyers in the case told Big Trial they were prohibited from discussing.
One of those lawyers is Eric Anderson of Pittsburgh, an expert witness who testified on behalf of the insurance carrier.
“It appears as though Penn State made little effort, if any, to verify the credibility of the claims of the individuals,” Anderson wrote on October 5, 2015. In his report, Anderson decried “the absence of documentation” in the claims, saying in many cases there was “no signed affidavit, statement or other means of personal verification of the information which I reviewed."
“I do not know why so many of the cases were settled for such high sums of money,” Anderson wrote.
In paying out the $118 million, the university did not undertake any of the usual methods to vet the stories of the accusers, such as having them questioned by private investigators, deposed by lawyers, personally examined by forensic psychiatrists, or subjected to polygraph tests.
Instead, the university just wrote checks.
How The Alleged Victims Were Recruited
On May 1, 2009, deputy state attorney general Eshbach wrote a formal request to initiate a grand jury probe of Sandusky. Nineteen months later, the state attorney general's investigation of Sandusky the alleged serial pedophile, had produced only one alleged victim, the brainwashed Aaron Fisher.
To make matters worse, the first grand jury that heard Fisher testify didn't believe him, so they issued no indictment.
But in November 2010, the A.G. got a tip about the shower incident that Mike McQueary had supposedly witnessed a decade earlier, a breakthrough that suddenly energized the Sandusky investigation.
On March 10, 2011, the state attorney general convened a second grand jury. They were aided by reporter Sara Ganim, who on March 31, 2011, wrote the first story about the secret grand jury probe of Sandusky that revealed for the first time the allegation that Sandusky was a serial sexual abuser of children.
The Ganim story basically functioned as a want add for the A.G.'s office to recruit more sex abuse victims.
The state police and the attorney general's office promptly created a seven-member joint task force and sent them out knocking on the doors of hundreds of young men who were alums of Sandusky’s Second Mile charity for disadvantaged youths, hunting for alleged victims.
But the joint task force didn't have much success.
As one frustrated investigator emailed on June 3, 2011, as recounted by author Mark Pendergrast in his book, “We have recently been interviewing kids who don’t believe the allegations as published and believe Sandusky is a great role model for them and others to emulate.”
On Jan. 4, 2012, Anthony Sassano, a narcotics agent from the state attorney general's office who led the Sandusky investigation, testified that the special task force interviewed 250 men who were former members of the Second Mile charity, but found only one man who claimed to be a victim of abuse.
Ask yourself a simple question. If Jerry Sandusky was allegedly the most notorious pedophile in America who's been on rampage in a small town of 42,000 for nearly four decades, why does the state have to create a special joint task force to go out knocking on doors, and hunting down victims?
Shouldn't they be lined up around the block?
But then the grand jury presentment hit the media. On Nov. 10, 2011, Business Insider ran a story predicting that Penn State wound wind up paying Sandusky's accusers a total of $100 million.
Suddenly, every plaintiff’s lawyer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had been alerted about a possible jackpot at Penn State. All they had to do to hit the lottery was to round up some guys who were willing to claim they were abused.
In seeking a lottery payoff, these alleged victims wouldn't even have to give up their real names. The media, for sure, could be counted on to keep their identities secret. While they were vilifying and destroying Jerry Sandusky's name and reputation every day.
After Sandusky was convicted, the floodgates opened, and 41 men filed civil claims for damages. Thirty-six of them would eventually get paid.
And it didn't require any heavy lifting.
Penn State had hired Kenneth Feinberg, dubbed “The Master of Disaster,” to oversee the settlement process with victims. Feinberg specialized in a global approach to settlements, rather than duke it out in court with one individual claim after another.
At Penn State, Feinberg prepared a form for alleged victims that merely required their lawyers to make their allegations, as part of what was billed as a “claims resolution process."
The claims as submitted in more than 120 pages of confidential records that the press or public has never seen, are entirely devoid of evidence.
None of the initial claims were authenticated by signed affidavits, there were no reports of forensic evidence or witness testimony, or corroboration of any kind. Except when a few of the victims who were pals got each other to vouch for their stories.
The stories of the alleged victims, which were often improbable, and featured constantly changing details, remain completely unvetted to this day.
Jack Rossiter, a former FBI agent of 30 years, investigated more than 150 cases of alleged sex abuse as a private detective employed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia between 2003 and 2007.
As far as the Penn State case was concerned, Rossiter told Big Trial he was surprised to hear that apparently not one of the 36 alleged victims ever told anyone about the attacks when they allegedly occurred -- a period that spanned nearly four decades.
Got that? Over four decades, in at least 500 alleged sex crimes involving 36 innocent victims, there was not one contemporaneous report of abuse.
If a pedophile was running loose for that long in small town, Rossiter said, "You would think someone would pick it up. Either at school or the parents or a close friend."
On top of that, in a scandal involving national publicity, like the Sandusky case, Rossiter said, if you were a gate keeper at Penn State, you'd have to be on guard against criminals and drug addicts coming forward to seek a pay day.
"With national headlines and all these people lining up, you'd have to be more skeptical" of the claims," Rossiter said.
But Penn State never even ran background checks to see if any of the alleged victims had criminal records. When Big Trial checked, we found that 12 of the 36 alleged victims who got paid did indeed have criminal records, including arrests for tampering with and fabricating physical evidence, identity theft, criminal conspiracy, theft, receiving stolen property, theft by deception, robbery and terroristic threats.
The way the system is supposed to work, somebody at Penn State should have investigated the stories told by the alleged victims.
"That's what you do, you investigate," Rossiter emphasized. "The key is to find corroboration for the victim's story, to see if their stories hold up."
But Penn State didn't do any of that. Instead, they just wrote checks.
Why? Because the trustees had already decided that they would pay any price to save their beloved Nittany Lions.
As for Jerry Sandusky, and his constitutional rights, nobody gave a damn.
The Defendant's Medical Records
In their civil claims of abuse, the 36 alleged victims portray Sandusky as a sexually insatiable predator with the virility of a male porn star in his 20s. According to the claims, Sandusky was constantly on the prowl for forced sex with boys, and never had any problems achieving an erection.
Sandusky’s medical records, however, from 2006 to 2008, depict a man in his 60s suffering from all kinds of ailments and conditions, including atrophied testicles and chronic prostatitis.
A doctor who reviewed Sandusky’s medical records, but asked to remain anonymous, told Big Trial in an email, “This guy couldn’t get an erection no matter how he tried. Even Cialis/Viagra would probably not work.”
The doctor added that because the medical issue was never raised at trial, Sandusky should have sued his lawyers for malpractice.
Doctors described Sandusky as having an “androgen deficient state,” meaning he had levels of male sex hormones so low it was unhealthy. Sandusky’s medical records state that he was undergoing “testosterone replacement therapy for significant low levels of both free and total testosterone.”
Sandusky's medical records reveal that he was being treated with antibiotics for chronic prostatitis, an inflammation of the prostate commonly caused by bacterial infection that results in frequent and painful urination. Prostatitis can also cause sexual problems such as low libido, erectile dysfunction, and painful ejaculations.
Sandusky’s chronic prostatitis began in 2005 and continued through 2008, his medical records state. Doctors described Sandusky as being “light-headed” and suffering “dizziness” from using Flomax, which he began taking in 2006, because he was having trouble urinating.
In addition to his urological problems, Sandusky’s medical records list many ailments that raise the question of whether Sandusky was healthy and energetic enough to be out having rampant, promiscuous sex with all those boys.
Sandusky’s ailments include cysts on one of his kidneys, a small aneurysm in his brain, a 2006 hernia operation, bleeding hemorrhoids, chest pains, headaches, drowsiness, elevated blood pressure, and sleep apnea.
He was on thyroid medication when he went to the doctors and told them he began “falling apart” in 2005. By 2008, his doctors wrote, Sandusky reported he was falling asleep at the wheel and gotten involved in two car accidents.
The medical records also describe a distinctive feature of Sandusky’s anatomy that none of his accusers have ever mentioned.
On February 2, 2006, Dr. Frank B. Mahon at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, who was treating the 62-year-old Sandusky for chronic prostatitis, wrote that Sandusky had “small” testicles of “perhaps 2 cm” or centimeters each, which equals .787 of an inch. The average size of adult testicles are between two and three inches.
On December 18, 2008, another doctor at the Hershey Medical Center wrote that the 6-foot-1 210-pound former coach, nearly 65, had “marked testicular atrophy with very little palpable testicular tissue.”
In stark contrast to the way he is portrayed in the claims against him, a couple of law enforcement types who have observed Sandusky in close quarters describe him as an anomaly in the hyper-macho world of football coaches, saying he comes across as asexual.
There may be genetic reasons for that. Sandusky’s medical records state that as a boy, he had “delayed development of secondary sexual characteristics” that required shots, but they don’t say what kind of shots. Sandusky told his doctors he was “unable to have children” because his “sperm counts were low.”
Sandusky's medical records state that he suffered from hypothyroidism, [underactive thyroid] as well as hypogonadism, meaning his body didn’t produce enough testosterone to maintain good health.
The medical records, which date from 2006 to 2008, cover the same time period during which a couple of key trial accusers, Aaron Fisher and Sabastian Paden, claimed they were being raped hundreds of times by Sandusky.
Fisher settled his civil case against Penn State for $7.5 million. Paden, whose lawyers won in court access to all the confidential records in the Penn State case that are still under a judge's seal, got the biggest pay out of all the alleged victims, $20 million.
Totaling up the allegations made in 36 civil claims that were paid, the alleged victims stated that they had been raped or sexually abused by Sandusky at a minimum of least 520 to 620 times.
At his trial, Sandusky’s lawyers never used his medical records in his defense, probably because they didn’t have time to even read boxes of grand jury testimony, or serve subpoenas on witnesses.
In prison, Sandusky’s appeals lawyer said, he remains on a half-dozen medications, including continuing testosterone replacement therapy, and Terazosin for continuing prostate infections.
There’s another angle to the story of Sandusky’s medical records -- there are 36 alleged victims who got paid after claiming they were raped and abused hundreds of times by Sandusky, including nine alleged victims who claim that Sandusky had engaged with them in high-risk and apparently unprotected anal sex.
Yet not one of these alleged victim has ever asked to see Sandusky’s medical records, to find out whether he had HIV or any venereal disease. Nor has any victim ever sought to have Sandusky tested for any diseases.
That's the kind of evidence that would aid a criminal case. In a civil case, if Sandusky was found to have infected his victims with disease, it would have raised the damages.
But in the Penn State case, none of the alleged victims ever pursued the disclosure of any of Sandusky’s medical records.
You have to ask why.
And whether the answer is because it never really happened.
The Last Word
Jerry Sandusky is a relic from another time. He's an only child who was the son of Polish immigrants. His father, Art Sandusky, a trolley conductor, was the coach of a local baseball team who ran a recreation center that took in troubled kids and hired disabled people as employees.
At the recreation center, the motto hung on the wall by Sandusky's father said, "Don't give up on a bad boy, because he might turn out to be a great young man." Jerry Sandusky, a devout Methodist who grew up in that rec center, adopted his father's mission, and was out to save the world one troubled kid at a time.
At the rec center, it was a common practice for men and boys to shower together. When Sandusky first got in trouble in 1998, for taking a shower with 11 year-old Zachary Konstas, after a complaint from the boy's mother, the incident wound up being investigated by authorities that included an official from the Centre County Children and Youth Services, a detective from the Penn State police, an investigator from the state Department of Public Welfare, the boy's therapist, as well as a psychologist hired by the county.
The authorities concluded that there was no evidence of abuse or of any sexual conduct whatsoever, so the mother's alleged claim was officially deemed unfounded. As recounted in The Most Hated Man In America; Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, by author Mark Pendergrast, the psychiatrist who questioned young Zach Konstas for an hour concluded:
"The behavior exhibited by Mr. Sandusky is directly consistent with what can be seen as an expected daily routine of being a football coach. This evaluator spoke to various coaches from high school and college football teams and asked about their locker room behavior. Through verbal reports from these coaches it is not unusual for them to shower with players. This appears to be a widespread, acceptable situation and it appears that Mr. Sandusky followed through with patterning that he has probably done without thought for many years."
The problem in the Sandusky case is that the customs of an earlier time, as in a communal shower for men and boys, are being viewed through a modern lens.
Since he couldn't have kids of his own, Jerry and his wife Dottie adopted six children, five girls and a boy. Only one of those adopted kids, Matt Sandusky, who took his adoptive dad's name, would ultimately claim to be abused.
According to author Mark Pendergrast, after Matt sat next to his adoptive mother on the first day of the Sandusky trial and heard the alleged victim spout accusations of abuse that were the result of recovered memory therapy, Matt came home and told one of his siblings, "This is ridiculous. Anyone can make accusations without evidence, and get paid. I could, you could, anyone could . . . but I actually have morals."
Three days later, Matt famously flipped. After first telling authorities he hadn't been abused, Matt gave a statement to the police that said that after he went to a psychiatrist, he had recalled memories of past abuse. His flip earned him an appearance on Oprah, and a civil settlement of $325,000.
The other five of Sandusky's adopted kids, however, told Pendergrast that they'd never been abused, and that they didn't believe that Matt had ever been abused either.
I'll leave the last words to the man who's been in prison for the past ten years as a result of egregious official misconduct and a decade of media malpractice.
"I am an innocent person, wrongly convicted by sinister ways of deception, dishonesty and disregard," Sandusky wrote from prison.
"I did not commit the heinous crimes I was accused of doing. Oral and anal sex never entered my mind, nor did I ever engage in them with anybody. This includes my wife, who has been my only sexual partner and loyally stands with me today."
This thread is supposed to be about the shame of the BoT and Penn State administration.
Not JJ and his BS.
Not JJ and his BS.
This is how Jockstrap gets his jollies
6 months later? Or was it 18 months later? When this now 13/14 year old didn’t know what an erection was because he was only 10. When he was molested the first time he ever worked out with Sandusky, 2-3 years after his picture appeared in “Touched”!
This guy also completely contradicted his trial testimony when he sued PSU for money.
It was also clear he changed the year of his abuse from 1998 to years later because his attorney told him there was more $$$ in saying it happened after McQueary. However, he got confused and couldn’t decided whether it was 2001 or 2002 based on the OAG getting the year of the McQueary incident wrong!
You are an absolute moron if you believe him.
The Paterno’s believe the victims and have said so publicly. They renounce Ziegler too. Are they “morons”? Oh yeah, the jury believed them and sent CSS to jail.
Scott Paterno is a moron.
John Ziegler played a recording of Scott cussing him out on the phone after he interviewed Sandusky. Scott is not to be taken seriously.
John Ziegler is Alex Jones part deux. You are an absolute moron to believe anything he says.
The rest of the Paterno family agrees with Scott.
Are they morons? Are they to be taken seriously?
Scott cussing on the phone to Ziegler? Really? Ziegler sounds like a lunatic with his ranting and raving about BS. Seriously man.🙄
Last edited:
Ziegler/Ganim connection should be worth a study.
Wow.
Long ago, on Saturday, when the Nittany Lions were defeating the Pittsburgh Panthers 33-14 to go 2-0 on a promising young football season, Sara Ganim of CNN posted a blast from Penn State's nightmarish past -- a big scoop that supposedly further tarred and feathered the ghost of the late Joe Paterno.
What startling new evidence did Ganim have to attack what was left of Paterno's credibility? A one-page police report about a 16-year-old incident from a tainted source in an investigation marred by blatant police and prosecutorial misconduct. And what did Ganim and CNN do with that police report? She claimed it "bolsters evidence" that Paterno "knew years before Jerry Sandusky's arrest that his longtime assistant might be abusing children."
You had to dig deep into Ganim's intellectually dishonest story to discover what her main new allegation was -- that Paterno supposedly knew about a 1998 incident where Sandusky was accused of hugging a naked 10-year-old boy in the shower. An incident investigated by the Centre County District Attorney's Office at the time and determined to be unfounded.
An incident that happened three years before the infamous 2001 Mike McQueary shower incident, where McQueary, according to the state attorney general's indictment, supposedly saw Sandusky anally raping another 10-year-old boy in the showers. Even though McQueary later admitted what the attorney general wrote wasn't true. And the alleged victim of the most infamous act of child abuse in the history of America never came forward to testify. Despite tons of publicity and a potential multimillion dollar payout.
With the so-called Penn State sex abuse scandal, it's getting harder and harder to separate reality from myth. All Ganim has done with her latest effort is to throw a fresh coat of mud on the situation and emphasize the need for independent scrutiny of the tainted investigation of Sandusky, as well as Ganim's central role in it.
The problems with Ganim
Problem No. 1 with Ganim's new story is that the scoop the reporter was peddling directly contradicted one of her previous scoops. Where she claimed that Paterno, who's no longer around to defend himself, knew about a previous allegation of sex abuse regarding Sandusky dating back to 1971.
She also writes in her latest story about the 1998 shower incident as though it's some kind of mystery, even though Ganim, who did not respond to a request for comment, was intimately familiar with all the details.
So when did Joe know that Jerry might be a pedophile, Sara? Was it in 1998? Or was it way back in 1971? Or was it in 1976, with another alleged incident involving a "John Doe 150" that Ganim covered in her Saturday story.
Problem No. 2 with Ganim's latest scoop -- the reporter has an ethical conflict that is undisputed.
At Sandusky's trial, the prosecutors from the state attorney general's office admitted in a legal stipulation that Ganim, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on Sandusky while working for The Patriot News of Harrisburg, had meddled in a supposedly secret grand jury investigation. An investigation that was in danger of expiring if the prosecutors didn't find more alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky.
So how did Ganim meddle? By acting as an agent for the state attorney general's office when she contacted the mother of the naked 10-year old who was allegedly hugged in the shower back in 1998.
Ganim's ethical conflict was laid out in a legal brief filed by Sandusky's lawyers in their arguments for a new trial. In the brief, Sandusky's lawyers wrote that Ganim "approached the mother of accuser 6," Deb McCord, according to the testimony of State Police Corporal Joseph Leiter, and gave the mother the name and phone number for an investigator assigned to the attorney general's office.
Ganim, according to the brief, left this message for McCord:
"Debra, it's Sara from the Patriot. I just want to pass along this agent's name and number. The Attorney General has expressed interest in helping you."
So when Sara Ganim writes another story about Joe Paterno and the Penn State sex scandal, it's not exactly like Bob Woodward opining about Richard Nixon and Watergate. But that didn't prevent Ganim from making a splash with her bogus scoop in gullible mainstream media outlets, such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, by generating a fresh round of headlines asking What did Joe Know and When Did He Know It?
Let's get to Ganim's new evidence and lay out why the source of it is tainted, as well as the product of an investigation marked by blatant police and prosecutorial misconduct.
The one page Pennsylvania state police report from 2011, supposedly obtained from a source, Ganim wrote, is "described here for the first time." The report "lays out an account from whistleblower Mike McQueary," who was telling Paterno about the infamous shower incident from 2001 starring a naked Jerry Sandusky and a 10-year-old boy.
"Paterno allegedly told McQueary in 2001 that the claim against Sandusky 'was the second complaint of this nature he had received," according to the police report, which was written after Sandusky's arrest 10 years later," Ganim wrote.
"Paterno, upon hearing the news, sat back in his chair with a dejected look on his face," the report states, adding that McQueary "said Paterno's eyes appeared to well up with tears."
Nice dramatic touches for a police report. Next, Ganim writes:
"Then he [Paterno] made the comment to McQueary this was the second complaint of this nature he had received about Sandusky," the report states, citing McQueary's recollection."
The police report also noted, Ganim wrote, that Paterno allegedly told McQueary that Dottie Sandusky, Jerry's wife, had told Sue Paterno, Joe's wife, that "Jerry doesn't like girls."
A tainted witness
Let's start with McQueary, who, according to Ganim, is now writing a book about his exploits as the alleged Penn State whistleblower.
As former NCIS Special Agent John Snedden has said, McQueary is not a credible witness. As a special agent for the Federal Investigative Service, Snedden investigated former Penn State President Graham Spanier in 2012, to determine whether his top secret security clearance should be renewed by the federal government. Snedden wrote a recently declassified 110-page report that concluded there was no sex crime at Penn State and no coverup.
Snedden didn't believe McQueary was credible because he told five different versions of what he saw and heard in the Penn State showers, featuring slapping sounds and fleeting glimpses of naked people in the shower. The day he witnessed the shower event, McQueary was repeatedly questioned by his father, a doctor, and a friend of his father's, another doctor, about what happened. McQueary could not definitely say whether he had witnessed a sexual attack or horseplay. And that's why neither of the two doctors, both mandated reporters, ever told the police.
McQueary was also questioned by two Penn State administrators, who came to the same conclusion as the two doctors, that McQueary wasn't sure what he saw or heard in the showers. So they didn't report it to the police either.
"I've never had a rape victim or a witness to a rape tell multiple stories about how it happened," Snedden said in a previous interview with Big Trial, to describe why McQueary wasn't a credible witness. "If it's real it's always been the same thing," Snedden said.
"In my view, the evolution of what we saw as a result of Mike McQueary's interview with the AG's office" was the transformation of a story about rough horseplay into something sexual, Snedden said.
"I think it would be orchestrated by them," Snedden said about the AG's office, which has never responded to multiple requests for comment.
A tainted investigation and grand jury report
That didn't stop the attorney general's office from running with their exaggerated version of McQueary's story.
The 2011 grand jury report was built around a lie. It claimed that McQueary witnessed a 10-yar-old boy in the showers being subjected to “anal intercourse” by a “naked Jerry Sandusky.” McQueary supposedly told Joe Paterno about it, and two other university officials, but Penn State covered it up, the grand jury report says.
But McQueary himself was shocked when he read the grand jury report. He emailed the prosecutors, saying they had “twisted” his words. ”I cannot say 1,000 percent sure that it was sodomy,” McQueary wrote. “I did not see insertion.”
The investigation conducted by the state police in the Sandusky case also included stone-cold proof of police misconduct on tape. On April 21, 2011, the state police made the mistake of leaving a tape recorder on, and the machine caught the police deliberately lying to one alleged victim to get him to tell the story they wanted him to tell.
State Troopers Joseph Leiter and Scott Rossman were interviewing alleged victim Brett Houtz at the police barracks, with Houtz’s attorney Benjamin Andreozzi present. While Houtz took a cigarette break the two troopers continued talking with Houtz’s lawyer. They assumed the tape-recorder was turned off but it wasn't.
In their conversation captured for eternity, the troopers talked about how it took them months to get details of sex attacks out of Aaron Fisher, Victim No. 1 in the Penn State case, and how they’re sure that Houtz was a rape victim too. The troopers then discussed how to get more details of sex abuse out of Houtz.
Attorney Andreozzi had a helpful suggestion: “Can we at some point say to him, ‘Listen, we have interviewed other kids and other kids have told us that there was intercourse and that they have admitted this, you know. Is there anything else you want to tell us.’ ”
“Yep, we do that with all the other kids,” Trooper Leiter said. Sure enough, when Houtz returned, Trooper Leiter told him, “I just want to let you know you are not the first victim we have spoken to.”
The trooper told Houtz about nine adults that they had already talked to and said, “It is amazing. If this was a book, you would have been repeating word for word pretty much what a lot of people have already told us.”
The troopers, however, had only interviewed three alleged victims at that point, and only one – Aaron Fisher – had alleged prolonged abuse. But Houtz didn't know that.
“I don’t want you to feel ashamed because you are a victim in this whole thing,” Trooper Leiter told Houtz. “He [Sandusky] took advantage of you . . . [but] We need you to tell us as graphically as you can what took place as we get through this procedure. I just want you to understand that you are not alone in this. By no means are you alone in this.”
That's what you call coaching a witness, to manufacture testimony.
Reaction to Ganim's latest story
The condemnation of Ganim's most recent story came from many quarters.
"Well CNN published a lie from Sara Ganim," tweeted Scott Paterno, a lawyer who defended his father during the Sandusky scandal. "Sue [Paterno] never said that Dottie [Sandusky] told her anything and this was categorically denied before publication."
"To be clear Sara Ganim and @CNN is using triple hearsay to get clicks and it's false. And enough is enough."
"To my knowledge we were not contacted by Sara Ganim for a response," Dottie Sandusky wrote. "If we had been, I would have told her that this is old news which actually exonerates both Joe and Jerry. The incident in question is the 1998 episode which, according to [Former Penn State Athletic Director] Tim Curley's testimony, Joe knew was fully investigated by the D.A. and determined to be unfounded. I never said that Jerry doesn't like girls and the factual record, including at trial, makes that extremely obvious to anyone not invested in this entire fairy tale."
"On the brighter side, I'm glad to see that Sara and the rest of the news media has seemingly dropped the absurd notion that Joe Paterno was told in the 1970s about abuse that never happened by accusers who made up stories for Penn State money," Dottie Sandusky wrote.
Former Special Agent Snedden called Ganim's scoop "revisionist history."
"The whole thing is absurd," Snedden said about the supposedly new police report from 2011. "It was written ten years after the fact," Snedden said about the 2001 shower incident supposedly witnessed by McQueary, and described to the state police in 2011.
"Police reports are supposed to be contemporaneous," Snedden said. About the 2011 police report concerning the 2001 shower incident, Snedden asked, "How is that contemporaneous?"
The CNN story, Snedden said, is the product of either "trying to either cover your ass or bolster your position. It appears to me that she [Ganim] doesn't even go through the motions of asking if it's accurate."
John Ziegler, a reporter who has covered the Penn State story for years, was even harsher in his assessment of Ganim's work.
"This one [Ganim's new story] is the biggest piece of crap yet," Ziegler said. "Ganim is pretending that we don't know" about the 1998 shower incident, Ziegler said. "If she was at the [Sandusky] trial she would know that what she's reporting is ancient news. It's got cobwebs on it."
Ziegler went at Ganim's work from another angle -- logic.
"This is actually exculpatory," Ziegler said about Ganim's latest scoop.
When McQueary is telling Joe about the 1998 shower incident, which is almost identical to the 2001 shower incident, Ziegler said, "Joe is immediately flashing back to 1998."
"That tells us that McQueary never said anything [to Paterno] about a sexual assault because Joe already knows that 1998 [the first alleged shower incident] is a nothing burger," Ziegler said. "Had McQueary actually said something about a sexual assault Joe would have never connected it to 1998, because the [Centre County] D.A. had already cleared Sandusky."
Ziegler said he has come to the conclusion that Ganim "was a very ambitious and also very naive or stupid person who got used" by the prosecutors in the Sandusky case to basically "put out a Craig's list ad" for more victims of sexual abuse.
Ziegler said that Ganim's story goes beyond any claims of the prosecutors. Former Chief Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina, the lead prosecutor in the Sandusky case, went on 60 Minutes Sports in 2013 and declared that there was no evidence that Joe Paterno had ever participated in a cover up.
"I did not find that evidence," Fina said on 60 Minutes Sports.
"It does reek of deception," Ziegler said about Ganim's latest effort to prop up the official Penn State story line. "They have to be worried about something," Ziegler said, who devoted a podcast to it. "This story makes me think that even she doubts it."
Mark Pendergrast, an author who has written a book about Jerry Sandusky, The Most Hated Man In America; Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, said that McQueary "revised his memory a decade after the Feb. 2001 shower incident, in which he heard slapping sounds but did not see Sandusky and a boy in the shower -- he only fleetingly saw a boy, in the mirror."
McQueary's "memory of his meeting with Paterno in 2001was also subject to revisions and this appears to be more evidence of that," Pendergrast wrote in an email. "In other words, this is Sara Ganim once more raising a non-issue based on Mike McQueary's revised memory, and referring as well to highly questionable anonymous allegations dating back to the 1970s."
The 1970s alleged victims
In May 2016, Ganim reported on CNN that a man who claimed to have been sexually abused by Sandusky at a rest stop after he was picked up as a hitchhiker. The alleged victim also claimed that he was personally ordered by Joe Paterno to keep quiet about the abuse.
"Stop it right now" or "we'll call the authorities," the alleged victim claimed that Paterno had told him on the phone.
The alleged victim told Ganim that he had no doubt it was Paterno on the other end of the line ordering him to keep quiet.
"There was no question in my mind who Joe was," the alleged victim told Ganim. "I've heard that voice a million times. It was Joe Paterno."
Sure it was. Penn State's gullible trustees decided, OK, we'll just take your word for it. So the alleged victim got paid $200,000.
Now we come to the most ridiculous part of our story, namely the man referred to in Ganim's most recent opus as "John Doe 150," an alleged sex abuse victim of Jerry Sandusky's dating back to June 1976.
Another ancient claim of abuse that Joe allegedly knew about.
John Doe 150 was represented in his civil claim by Slade McLaughlin and Paul Lauricella, two Philadelphia lawyers who represented Danny Gallagher AKA "Billy Doe" in his bogus claim against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where Gallagher collected $5 million.
Gallagher is the lying, scheming altar boy who claimed he was the victim of three separate rapes by a couple of priests and a Catholic school teacher. But then the lead investigator in the case, retired detective Joe Walsh, came forward to say that he caught Gallagher telling one lie after another, and that Gallagher even admitted he "made up stuff." Which led the detective to conclude that all of Gallagher's allegations were false.
In the John Doe 150 case, the alleged victim, who is 56 years old, claimed that back in 1976, when he was 15, he attended a Penn State football summer camp for a week. According to alleged victim, he was taking a shower when 10 other kids when Jerry Sandusky, who had just introduced himself, stopped by. And then, after the other boys left the shower, Sandusky "came up to me and began soaping my back and shoulders."
And then "he stuck his finger in my ass," the alleged victim claimed. Sandusky allegedly apologized, saying he didn't realize he was getting that close.
What allegedly happened next is even more unbelievable.
John Doe 150 claims, at 15 years old, that he had the guts to talk about the incident to an anonymous Penn State football player, who told him that Sandusky "does this with all of his, I guess, boys."
According to John Doe 150, at 15, he then had the moxie to hunt down Joe Paterno at his Penn State office, and corner him in the hallway. John Doe 150 supposedly told Paterno what just happened with Sandusky. And Paterno supposedly replied, "I don't want to hear about any of that stuff, I have a football season to worry about."
Have you ever heard a more absurd story? A 15-year-old kid molested on the first day he ever met Jerry Sandusky? No grooming? No box of candy or six-pack first?
A 15-year-old kid who has just been victimized who has the nerve to track down and confront a legendary football coach?
Who would believe this crap? Oh that's right, the same lawyers who bought Billy Doe's lies and made $5 million off of it.
Before he collected his $300,000 settlement, John Doe 150 was never questioned by any lawyers or any psychiatrists representing Penn State. The Penn State Board of Trustees just paid John Doe 150 as one of 32 such claimants who collected a total of $93 million.
What an irresponsible expenditure of money. Even the lawyers who were ripping off Penn State had to know it was bogus. Actually, one of them did, and said so.
In a 2016 interview, Paul Boni, one of John Doe 150's lawyers, said that he knew of no "direct irrefutable evidence" that Paterno knew about any prior abuse by Sandusky dating back to the 1970s.
"I think you need more than anecdotal evidence or speculative evidence" to attack Paterno, Boni said.
So Sara Ganim keeps serving up more fairy tales and asking us to believe them. Only the stories just keep getting crazier.
No it wasn't.
Curley to Spanier, CC to Schultz:
I had scheduled a meeting with you this afternoon about the subject we discussed on Sunday. After giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe yesterday – I am uncomfortable with what we agreed were the next steps. I am having trouble with going to everyone, but the person involved. I think I would be more comfortable meeting with the person and tell him about the information we received. I would plan to tell him we are aware of the first situation. I would indicate that we feel there is a problem and we want to assist the individual to get professional help. Also, we feel a responsibility at some point soon to inform his organization and maybe the other one about the situation. If he is cooperative, we would work with him to handle informing the organization. If not, we do not have a choice and will inform the two groups. Additionally, I will let him know that his guests are not permitted to use our facilities. I need some help on this one. What do you think about this approach?
There’s so much here!
- I don’t think anyone has ever mentioned this. Curley had a meeting scheduled with Spanier. Rather than propose a change to the agreed upon plan in person, he put it in an email using a university owned account. This is not the act of men attempting to conceal a crime.
- As has been pointed out, Tim said that he gave the meeting on Sunday more thought. He then spoke with Joe. He didn’t say he first spoke with Joe and then gave it more thought.
- Tim said he was uncomfortable. He did not say “we are uncomfortable”, or “Joe is uncomfortable.” Joe was not the tail wagging the dog here.
- Tim said he would feel more comfortable confronting Sandusky with the information they received and that they were aware of the first situation. This suggests that what they were told happened was along the same lines of what took place in 1998, which was not determined to have been sexual or criminal, though inarguably inappropriate and unacceptable in the facilities.
- He said he would tell Jerry that they feel there is a problem and they want to assist him in getting professional help. You don’t do that if a child has been sexually abused. That would be closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out. This is far more consistent with an incident involving appropriate boundaries than any kind of sexual abuse. Helping Jerry is a recurring theme in these emails.
- Tim said he would tell Jerry that they would have to inform TSM soon. If there was any intent to conceal a sex crime, this would simply not be part of the plan.
- By saying “maybe” with respect to informing the other organization, he is bringing back the optional component. In the context written, it suggests a concern for Jerry, not some attempt to keep a crime from the authorities.
- Depending on Jerry’s cooperation, Tim said they would work with him with respect to informing the organization. Again, helping Jerry.
- If Jerry is not cooperative, they would have no choice but to inform both TSM and DPW. Thus, informing DPW has not been removed from the table. This is of critical importance!
- What does Tim mean by “cooperative”? In the context of Schultz’s notes where he says “confesses”, it suggests that Jerry had to admit to having a problem and to go along with what they are proposing. Otherwise, PSU would have to cover its butt. Again, helping Jerry, but only if Jerry was willing to help himself.
- Tim would still inform Jerry that he could no longer bring TSM to the facilities. This was for both Jerry’s and PSU’s future protection.
- Finally, Tim is asking for help. He’s not making this call on his own. He is seeking approval from his boss and from the university president, not from the football coach. Imagine that!
Anyone notice a lack of McQueary ink?
On Friday, Nov 11, 2011, Sara Ganim, who had publicly identified Mike McQueary as the “graduate assistant” in the grand jury presentment who had supposedly witnessed Sandusky sodomizing a boy in the shower, wrote that McQueary was “getting blasted by the public for doing too little.”
He had received several death threats. The same day, newly appointed Penn State President Rodney Erickson announced that McQueary was being placed on administrative leave “after it became clear he could not continue coaching.” Erickson pointedly continued: "Never again should anyone at Penn State feel scared to do the right thing.”
McQueary was hard to miss around town. He stood six feet five inches, topped by short bristles of bright orange-red hair, which gave him the nickname Big Red. Now people were asking one another, “Why didn’t Big Red stop it?”
On Tuesday, McQueary had called an emotional meeting with his Penn State players. He looked pale and his hands were shaking.
“I’m not sure what is going to happen to me,” he said. He cried as he talked about the Sandusky shower incident. According to one of the players, “He said he had some regret that he didn’t stop it.”
Then McQueary revealed that he himself had been molested as a child. Perhaps because he had been sexually abused, McQueary was particularly alert to possible abuse, and so he leaped to the conclusion that the slapping sounds he heard in the Lasch Building locker room were sexual.
It is clear from the testimony of Dr. Dranov and others, however, that McQueary did not witness sodomy that night in February 2001. He thought something sexual was happening, but as he emphasized later, the entire episode lasted 30 to 45 seconds, he heard the sounds for only a few seconds, and his glance in the mirror was even quicker.
Ten years after the event, his memory had shifted and amplified, after the police told him that they had other Sandusky victims. Under that influence, his memory made the episode much more sexually graphic.
As I have written previously, all memory is reconstructive and is subject to distortion. That is particularly true when many years have intervened, and when current attitudes influence recall of those distant events. It is worthwhile quoting here from psychologist Daniel Reisberg’s 2014 book, The Science of Perception and Memory: A Pragmatic Guide for the Justice System.
“Connections between a specific memory and other, more generic knowledge can allow the other knowledge to intrude into our recollection,” Reiserberg notes. “Thus, a witness might remember the robber threatening violence merely because threats are part of the witness’s cognitive ‘schema’ for how robberies typically unfold.”
That appears to be what happened to McQueary, who had a “schema” of what child sexual abuse in a shower would look like. He had thought at the time that some kind of sexual activity must have occurred in the shower. The police were telling him that they had other witnesses claiming that Sandusky had molested them. Thinking back to that long-ago night, McQueary now visualized a scene that never occurred, but the more he rehearsed it in his memory, the more real it became to him.
“As your memory for an episode becomes more and more interwoven with other thoughts you’ve had about that episode, it can become difficult to keep track of which elements are linked to the episode because they were, in truth, part of the episode itself and which are linked merely because they are associated with the episode in your thoughts,” Reisberg writes. That process “can produce intrusion errors – so that elements that were part of your thinking get misremembered as being actually part of the original experience.”
In conclusion, Reisberg writes, “It is remarkably easy to alter someone’s memory, with the result that the past as the person remembers it differs from the past as it really was.”
On Nov. 23, 2010, McQueary wrote out a statement for the police in which he said he had glanced in a mirror at a 45 degree angle over his right shoulder and saw the reflection of a boy facing a wall with Sandusky standing directly behind him.
“I am certain that sexual acts/the young boy being sodomized was occuring [sic],” McQueary wrote. “I looked away. In a hurried/hastened state, I finished at my locker. I proceeded out of the locker room. While walking I looked directly into the shower and both the boy and Jerry Sandusky looked directly in my direction.”
But it is extremely unlikely that this ten-year-later account is accurate. Dranov was adamant that McQueary did not say that he saw anything sexual. When former Penn State football player Gary Gray went to see Joe Paterno in December 2011, the month before he died, Gray told Paterno that he still had a hard time believing that Sandusky had molested those children. “You and me both,” Paterno said.
In a letter to the Penn State Board of Trustees after the trial, Gray recalled their conversation about McQueary’s telling Paterno about the shower incident. “Joe said that McQueary had told him that he had seen Jerry engaged in horseplay or horsing around with a young boy. McQueary wasn’t sure what was happening, but he said that it made him feel uncomfortable. In recounting McQueary’s conversation to me, Coach Paterno did not use any terms with sexual overtones.”
Similarly, in November 2011, when biographer Joe Posnanski asked Paterno about what McQueary told him back in 2001, Paterno told him, “I think he said he didn’t really see anything. He said he might have seen something in a mirror. But he told me he wasn’t sure he saw anything. He just said the whole thing made him uncomfortable.”
If McQueary had told Paterno, Curley or other administrators that he had seen Sandusky in such a sexual position with the boy, it is inconceivable that they would not have turned the matter over to the police.
This was not a “cover-up.” Sandusky didn’t even work for Penn State by the time of the incident, so what was there to cover up? Paterno and Sandusky had never really liked one another, and Paterno was famed for his integrity and honesty. If he thought Sandusky was molesting a child in the shower, he would undoubtedly have called the police.
It is clear that Paterno, Curley, Schultz, and Spanier took the incident for what it apparently was – McQueary hearing slapping sounds that he misinterpreted as being sexual.
McQueary gave five different versions of what he heard and saw, but all were reconstructed memories over a decade after the fact. They changed a bit over time, but none of them are reliable.
McQueary had painted himself into a difficult corner. If he had really seen something so horrendous, why hadn’t he rushed into the shower to stop it? Why hadn’t he gone to the police? Why hadn’t he followed up with Paterno or other Penn State administrators to make sure something was being done? Why had he continued to act friendly towards Sandusky, even taking part in golfing events with him?
When angry people began to ask these questions, that first week in November 2011, McQueary emailed a friend. "I did stop it not physically but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room,” he wrote. He now said that he had in essence contacted the police about the incident by alerting Joe Paterno, which led to Gary Schultz talking to him about it, and Schultz was the administrator the campus police reported to.
“No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30-45 seconds," McQueary said. "Trust me…. I am getting hammered for handling this the right way ... or what I thought at the time was right … I had to make tough, impacting quick decisions.”
Subsequently, McQueary changed his story somewhat. He now recalled that he had loudly slammed his locker door, which made Sandusky stop the abuse, and that he had taken yet a third look in the shower to make sure they had remained apart.
At the trial, he said that he had “glanced” in the mirror for “one or two seconds,” then lengthened his estimate to “three or four seconds, five seconds maybe.” During that brief glance, he now said that he had time to see Sandusky standing behind a boy whose hands were against the shower wall, and that he saw “very slow, slow, subtle movement” of his midsection.
But neither the newly created sodomy scene nor the slammed locker would save McQueary’s
By the time of the trial, eight accusers had been “developed,” as Assistant Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach put it. But Allan Myers, the boy in the shower in the McQueary incident, had been so public and vehement in his previous defense of Sandusky that the prosecution did not dare call him to testify.
When police inspector Joseph Leiter first interviewed him on September 20, 2011, Myers had emphatically denied that Sandusky had abused him or made him uncomfortable in any way.
After the Grand Jury Presentment was published on November 5, 2011, with its allegations that Mike McQueary had witnessed sodomy in a locker room shower, Myers realized that he was “Victim 2,” the boy in the shower that night, but that the sounds McQueary heard were just snapping towels or slap boxing. Myers then gave a detailed statement to Joseph Amendola’s investigator, Curtis Everhart, denying that Sandusky had ever abused him.
But within two weeks, Myers had become a client of Andrew Shubin. For months, Shubin refused to let the police interview Myers without Shubin being present, and he apparently hid Myers in a remote Pennsylvania hunting cabin to keep them from finding him.
After a February 10, 2012, hearing, Shubin verbally assaulted Anthony Sassano, an agent for the attorney general's office, outside the courthouse, cursing him roundly. “He was very vulgar, critical of me,” Sassano recalled. “Let’s call it unprofessional [language], for an attorney.”
Shubin was angry because the Attorney General’s Office wouldn’t interview Myers, who, he claimed, had stayed at Sandusky’s house “over 100 times” where he had been subjected to “both oral and anal sex.” But the police still refused to allow Shubin to be present during any interview.
Soon afterwards, Shubin relented, allowing a postal inspector named Michael Corricelli to talk to Allan Myers alone on February 28, 2012. But during the three-hour interview, Myers never said Sandusky had abused him. On March 8, Corricelli tried again, but Myers again failed to provide any stories of molestation. On March 16, Corricelli brought Myers to the police barracks for a third interview in which Anthony Sassano took part. Asked about three out-of-state trips, Myers denied any sexual contact and said that Sandusky had only tucked him into bed.
“He did not recall the first time he was abused by Sandusky,” Sassano wrote in his notes, nor did Myers recall how many times he was abused. “He indicated it is hard to talk about the Sandusky sexual abuse because Sandusky was like a father to him.” Finally, Myers said that on a trip to Erie, Pennsylvania, Sandusky put his hand inside his pants and touched his penis. Sassano tried valiantly to get more out of him, asking whether Sandusky had tried to put Myers’ hand on his own penis or whether that had been oral sex. No.
Still, Myers now estimated that there had been ten sexual abuse events and that the last one was in the shower incident that McQeary overheard. “I attempted to have Myers elaborate on the sexual contact he had with Sandusky, but he refused by saying he wasn’t ready to talk about the specifics,” Sassano wrote. Myers said that he had not given anyone, including his attorneys, such details. “This is in contrast to what Shubin told me,” Sassano noted.
On April 3, 2012, Corricelli and Sassano were schedule to meet yet again with the reluctant Allan Myers, but he didn’t show up, saying that he was “too upset” by a friend’s death.
“Corricelli indicated that Attorney Shubin advised him that Myers had related to him incidents of oral, anal, and digital penetration by Sandusky,” Sassano wrote in his report. “Shubin showed Corricelli a three page document purported to be Myers’ recollection of his sexual contact with Sandusky. Corricelli examined the document and indicated to me that he suspected the document was written by Attorney Shubin. I advised that I did not want a copy of a document that was suspected to be written by Attorney Shubin.” Sassano concluded: “At this time, I don’t anticipate further investigation concerning Allan Myers.”
That is how things stood as the Sandusky trial was about to begin. Karl Rominger wanted to call Myers to testify as a defense witness, but Amendola refused. “I was told that there was a détente and an understanding that both sides would simply not identify Victim Number 2,” Rominger later recalled. The prosecution didn’t want such a weak witness who had given a strong exculpatory statement to Curtis Everhart. Amendola didn’t want a defense witness who was now claiming to be an abuse victim. “So they decided to punt, to use an analogy,” Rominger concluded.
Mike McQueary Takes The Stand [From Chapter 15]
Mike McQueary then took the stand to tell his latest version of the shower incident with “Victim 2” (i.e., the unnamed Allan Myers), where he heard “showers running and smacking sounds, very much skin-on-skin smacking sounds.” (Later in his testimony, he said he heard only two or three slapping sounds that lasted two or three seconds.) He had re-framed and re-examined his memory of the event “many, many, many times,” he said, and he was now certain that he had looked into the shower three separate times, for one or two secondseach, and that he saw “Coach Sandusky standing behind a boy who is propped up against the shower. The showers are running and, and he is right up against his back with his front. The boy’s hands are up on the wall.” He saw “very slow, slow, subtle movement.” After he slammed his locker, McQueary said, they separated and faced him. Surprisingly, he said that Sandusky did not have an erection. When Amendola failed to object, Judge Cleland inserted himself, obviously fearful of future appeal or post-conviction relief issues. “Wait, wait, wait, just a second,” he warned McGettigan. “I think you have to be very careful for you not to lead this witness.”A few minutes later, the judge asked both lawyers to approach the bench. “I don’t know why you’re not getting objections to this grossly leading [questioning],” he told McGettigan, who said, “I’m just trying to get through it fast.”McQueary recounted how he had met with Joe Paterno.“I made sure he knew it was sexual and that it was wrong, [but] I did not go into gross detail.” Later, he said, he met with Tim Curley, the Penn State athletic director, and Gary Schultz, a university vice president. In an email quoted during his testimony, McQueary had written, “I had discussions with the police and with the official at the university in charge of the police.” He now explained that by this he meant just one person, since Schultz oversaw the university police department. With only an hour’s warning, Joe Amendola asked Karl Rominger to conduct the cross-examination of McQueary and handed him the file. Rominger did the best he could, asking McQueary why in 2010 he had told the police that he’d looked into the showers twice but had now added a third viewing, and he questioned him about his misremembering that the shower incident occurred in 2002 rather than 2001. Rominger also noted that McQueary had told the grand jury, “I was nervous and flustered, so I just didn’t do anything to stop it.” Now he was saying that he slammed the locker, which allegedly ended the incident. Without meaning to, McQueary indirectly helped Sandusky’s case by explaining the demanding work schedule of a Penn State football coach, typically reporting to work Sunday through Tuesday at 7 a.m. and working until 10 p.m. or later. Then, Wednesday through Friday, it was 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. If Sandusky kept the same hours, it was difficult to see when he would have managed to molest all those boys, at least during preseason training and football season.
Finally, McQueary revealed that he had filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Penn State for having removed him from his football coaching job in the midst of the Sandusky scandal. “I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong to lose that job," he said.
What Mike McQueary Told Dr. Dranov [From Chapter 16]
In his brief appearance for the defense, physician Jonathan Dranov recalled the February night in 2001 that his friend and employee, John McQueary, had called to ask him around 9 p.m. to come over, because his son Mike was upset by something that had happened in a Penn State locker room.
When he came in, Mike was sitting on the couch, “visibly shaken and upset.” The younger McQueary said he had gone to the locker room to put away some new sneakers and “he heard what he described as sexual sounds.”
Dranov asked him what he meant. “Well, sexual sounds, you know what they are,” McQueary said. “No, Mike, you know, what do you mean?” But he didn’t explain. “He just seemed to get a little bit more upset. So I kind of left that.”
McQueary told him that he looked toward the shower “and a young boy looked around. He made eye contact with the boy.” Dranov asked him if the boy seemed upset or frightened, and McQueary said he did not. Then, as Dranov recalled, McQueary said that “an arm reached out and pulled the boy back.”
Was that all he saw? No, McQueary said “something about going back to his locker, and then he turned around and faced the shower room and a man came out, and it was Jerry Sandusky.” Dranov asked McQueary three times if he had actually witnessed a sexual act. “I kept saying, ‘What did you see?’ and each time he [Mike] would come back to the sounds. I kept saying, ‘But what did you see?’ “And it just seemed to make him more upset, so I back off that.”
Karl Rominger asked Dranov, “You’re a mandatory reporter?” Yes, he was, meaning that he was legally bound to report criminal sexual activity to the police. He did not do that, since he obviously didn’t conclude that it was warranted. He only told Mike McQueary to report the incident to his immediate supervisor, Joe Paterno.
As a follow-up witness, a Second Mile administrator named Henry Lesch explained that he had been in charge of the annual golf tournament, in which Mike McQueary had played in June 2001 and 2003. The implication was that this seemed strange behavior, supporting an activity in which Jerry Sandusky was a leading sponsor and participant, if McQueary had witnessed sodomy in the shower in February 2001.
Allan Myers Takes The Stand [From Chapter 20]
One last hearing took place three months later, on November 4, 2016, when Allan Myers finally took the stand. He had evaded all subpoena attempts for the August hearings. Jerry Sandusky could hardly
recognize the overweight, bearded, sullen 29-year-old, who clearly didn’t want to be there.
He wouldn’t use Sandusky’s name, referring to him as “your client” in response to Al Lindsay’s questions. Yes, he had gone to the Second Mile camps for a couple of years “until your client hand-picked me,” he said. He admitted, however, that he had regarded Sandusky as a father figure and that he had lived with the Sandusky’s the summer of 2005, before he attended Penn State. “I left because he was controlling,” Myers said.
Lindsay had him read the notes of his September 2011 police interview, in which he said that Sandusky never made him uncomfortable and had not abused him, and that he didn’t believe any of the allegations.
“That would reflect what I said then,” Myers said, “not what I would say now.” That would become his refrain during his testimony, which appeared to be well-rehearsed, along with “I don’t recall.”
Yes, he had told Curtis Everhart that “Jerry never violated me while I was at his home or anywhere else….I felt very safe and at ease at his home, whether alone with Jerry or with others present.” Yes, he had denied any anal or oral intercourse or any abuse at all. “That’s what I said then," he said.
Yes, Shubin was Myers’ lawyer for his DUI charge, and then he represented him as a claimed Sandusky victim, and yes, he had received a settlement from Penn State. And yes, he said, he was Victim 2.
During her cross-examination, Jennifer Peterson asked Myers, “And you told him [Anthony Sassano] that you were sexually abused by Mr. Sandusky, right?” Surprisingly, he didn’t agree. “I don’t remember exactly what I said in the meetings. I know then I was more forthcoming, but not all the way coming, because still processing everything and dealing with it.” It sounded as if he might have been in repressed memory therapy.
Peterson asked again, “Were you sexually abused?” This time he answered, “Yes,” although he didn’t actually say that it was Sandusky who had abused him. And there the matter was left.
* * *
Meanwhile, several Sandusky-related legal decisions came down, all of them relying on the truth of the abuse narrative.
Three weeks before Cleland’s recusal, Mike McQueary won his whistleblower lawsuit against Penn State, with the jury awarding the former Penn State coach $7.3 million.
At the end of November 2016, Judge Thomas Gavin ruled that that amount wasn’t enough, so he added another $5 million. In doing so, he cited prosecutor Jonelle Eshbach’s testimony during the trial that McQueary had been a terrific grand jury witness: “He was rock solid in his testimony as to what he had seen,” Eshbach said. “He was very articulate. His memory was excellent.”
Eshbach, the author of the notorious Grand Jury Presentment, was correct that McQueary had been articulate, but his “rock solid” testimony had morphed from what he told his father and Jonathon Dranov in February 2001 – that he heard sounds but witnessed no sexual abuse – to his grand jury testimony ten years later.
And he kept modifying his story and memory after that. Nonetheless, the judge ruled that McQueary had suffered “humiliation” when Graham Spanier publicly supported Curley and Schultz, which by implication impugned the assistant coach. Gavin later added another $1.7 million to pay for McQueary’s lawyers’ fees.
The Fallout [From Chapter 23]
Former federal investigator John Snedden, who interviewed many players in the Penn State drama soon after the trial, concluded that there was no cover-up because there was nothing to cover up. Mike McQueary had only heard slapping sounds in the shower. If McQueary really thought he was witnessing a sexual assault on a child, Snedden said, wouldn't he have intervened to stop a "wet, defenseless naked 57-year-old guy in the shower?"
Snedden’s boss told him, as a rookie agent, that the first question to ask in an investigation is, “Where is the crime?” In this case, there didn’t appear to be one. "I've never had a rape case successfully prosecuted based only on sounds, and without credible victims and witnesses.”
* * *
In 2016, psychologist Julia Shaw published The Memory Illusion, a summary of her own and others’ work. “[My colleagues and] I have convinced people they have committed crimes that never occurred, suffered from a physical injury they never had, or were attacked by a dog when no such attack ever took place,” she wrote.
The Memory Hackers (2016), a Nova public television program, featured one of Shaw’s subjects recalling an illusory crime in three sessions. In that study, over 70 percent of her subjects developed false memories.
“What could have been turns into what would have been turns into what was,” the experimental psychologist explained. Her conclusion? “Any event, no matter how important, emotional or traumatic it may seem, can be…misremembered, or even be entirely fictitious…. All of us can come to confidently and vividly remember entire events that never actually took place.”
Experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett made similar observations in his classic 1932 text, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Our memories, he noted, “live with our interests and with them they change.” We tend to incorporate details of what really happened, along with other inserted elements, perhaps from a movie we saw or a book we read, or a story someone else told us. This kind of “source amnesia” is amazingly common. In fact, many of us are sure something happened to us, when it was our sibling who actually experienced it.
That is how Mike McQueary’s memory of the infamous 2001 shower changed. The night of the shower, he said he had heard slapping sounds but had not seen anything incriminating. Ten years later, his retrospective bias led him to have questionable memories of seeing Sandusky moving his hips behind a boy in the shower. With rehearsal, his new memories were solidified, and he became quite confident in them. That phenomenon, called “the illusion of confidence” by The Invisible Gorilla authors, is not unusual, either.
There may have been other factors influencing McQueary's recollections of that infamous shower incident.
When he was first contacted by police, Mike McQueary, at that time a married man, apparently sent a “sexting” photo of his own penis to a female Penn State student in April 2010. He may have thought that was why the police wanted to talk to him, and why he didn’t want to meet with them in his home.
ESPN journalist Don Van Natta, Jr, initially intended to include this information in a feature article about McQueary, but it was cut from the published piece.
In 2017 McQueary, now divorced, texted another photo of his erect penis to a woman. Investigator John Ziegler obtained the text messages and photo and published them at framingpaterno.com.
Yes it was.
Richard Nixon recorded his crimes on a government owned recording system. Criminals often do stupid things for they think they won't be caught. Lots of folks are caught with emails and texts. Like the Hollywood boobs who bribed universities to take their kids. Texts and emails abounded.
But he mentions Joe and even Ziegler (can't believe I'm mentioning him) says that Curley was using Joe's name to get Spanier and Schultz's support for his plan not to report and that if Joe had not agreed with him he would not have mentioned it.
By current NCAA guidelines that JoeBots claim Joe followed this was a violation by involving Joe again in the decision process within which he should not have been involved after he reported to CSS.
Because Tim had ultimate responsibility.....on paper. Joe had greater influence and so that is why Tim dropped his name. It worked too.
Tim was also loyal to criminality to PSU and Joe since he owed his entire professional life to them and why at trial he took the bullet for Joe.
Had he sullied Joe's name in any way, he would have lost all his supporters in JoeBot nation who would have accused him of disloyalty. Just like Omerta in the Mafia, you get caught, you STFU and take your medicine. This is what too powerful institutions breed and why we must suspect and watch them always.
But the proper people to confront Sandusky were CYS and the Police as NCAA guidelines state. Should never have been any internal investigation which was also a violation or the rules.
Not charged does not mean nothing happened. A licensed Psychologist, with a PhD, who knew the victim gave a report in writing to the PSU police that stated Jerry was a likely pedophile. Having that report in the hands of the school shows the stupidity of allowing Sandusky back on the campus at all.
CSS were aware that if Sandusky was found to be a pedophile in 2001 and the media found out about 1998. All of them, Joe and CSS would have been canned right then after the public outcry.
Which there is no record that they did get him any "help" or that he received any professional treatment. They did nothing.
Yes they cared more for Jerry than the child and their actions reflect that. What many JoeBots forget is that Jerry was a beloved figure in SC and a member of the PSU football "family" so the admins were more concerned about him than the child even after the 1998 incident and then the repeat in 2001 should have showed them that he was not listening. What they are talking about is more consistent with them covering their asses since they knew about 1998 and did nothing about it.
No, Tim was trying to get a twofer here (he tried this later with his plea bargain and got burned). Tim goes to to Raykovitz and tells him nothing actionable. So, Tim can later say "well, I told somebody" knowing that it would end right there.
Yes, we've established that the group (Joe included) cared more about Sandusky than the child and didn't want to expose him to the authorities. This is consistent with large powerful organizations protecting and covering up important leaders crimes. The Roman Catholic church and Boy Scouts come to mind.
And not the child
Rationalization. They DID take DPW off the table by not reporting to them, cooperation or not. Wasn't their call to offer Jerry "help" rather than reporting him to police and consistent with coverup.
Which of course as a pedophile he would agree with initially as he certainly didn't want to be reported to the police.
But again, this theater, was criminally wrong. Joe knew (because MM told him) that the shower incident was sexually inappropriate so either he held that back from CSS or he told them and they came up with this coverup.
Schultz admitted to the GJ that Tim told him it was sexual. Child + Adult + ANYTHING SEXUAL= Call the cops, do not pass Go do not collect $200. We all know that and they did too even then.
So Jerry said fine, I'll go along with your plan, did nothing, but kept abusing kids and CSS and Joe forgot about it. Coverup.
Curley admitted he knew then that was unenforceable and as we know now, Jerry disregarded that prohibition and abused another boy in the PSU showers 6 months later.
Why didn't Tim (if he was serious) alert the athletic staff to watch for Sandusky and report if he brought kids into the facilities in the future? We both know why.
He uses Joe's name to get Spanier and Schultz to go along with he and Joe's plan.
It would make no sense for him to even mention Joe if Tim had not talked it over with him and Joe agreed with the idea not to report Sandusky.
This is consistent with the fact that, although Joe didn't like Sandusky personally, he was still part of the PSU football "family" and Joe was loyal (in this case to an immoral point) to his "family".
Classic institutional coverup. And off to jail they went.
You presume Joe, Tim and Gary were told of a crime. Nothing in their written communication from the incident suggests that.
Had they been dealing with an abused child, he would have been the topic of their discussions. They never mention him. In fact, Spanier said “The only downside for us is if our message is not heard and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported this. “. IOW, a subsequent incident would have to occur for them to be vulnerable. That means nothing that occurred that night left them “vulnerable”.
The bottom line is that none of the PSU people thought Jerry had abused that boy. The evidence bears that out as do their actions.
They did the right thing then and would have done the right thing had CSA occurred.
Somebody crafted a narrative that included making PSU the bad guys. That narrative is false. Why else would there be people like you who exist solely for its perpetuation?
Kinda like following Curley, Fina, Baldwin.
Lawrence J. Fox, a longtime Philadelphia lawyer who's a visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School, is an expert on teaching legal ethics and professional responsibility.
And Fox has harsh words for the conduct of former Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina, the lead prosecutor in the Jerry Sandusky case, as well as for Cynthia Baldwin, the former Penn State counsel who represented three top Penn State officials before the grand jury investigating Sandusky. That was before Baldwin flipped, at the behest of Fina, to become a prosecution witness, and testify against her former clients, an act of betrayal that horrified Fox.
"When lawyers feign representation, but in fact abandon their clients, and worse yet, become instrumentalities of the state, aiding the prosecution of their clients, the entire system of justice is systematically destroyed," Fox wrote in a 2013 filing recently unsealed in Dauphin County Common Pleas Court.
Tomorrow at 10 a.m. in Philadelphia, Fox will testify as an expert witness on behalf of the state Supreme Court's Disciplinary Board, to make the case that former prosecutor Fina is guilty of professional misconduct. But for those who can't wait for the hearing, Fox's scathing opinions of the alleged legal sins of Fina and Baldwin are laid out in the recently unsealed filing that has been completely ignored by reporters from the mainstream media; the same reporters who sought to have these documents unsealed. So it goes in the Penn State case, where media malpractice has been the norm.
"It is the Commonwealth whose lawyers were fully aware of the conflicts under which Ms. Baldwin was laboring at the time of the grand jury proceeding," Fox wrote, clearly referring to Fina, who questioned Baldwin in the grand jury after she flipped.
Fina was aware that Baldwin had a conflict of interest, Fox wrote, namely her decision to betray her former clients. Yet, Fina and his fellow prosecutors "stood silent," Fox wrote, and "took full advantage of the conflicts" to gather information to make a conspiracy and obstruction of justice case against those clients. But as part of his mission to seek the scalps of the three Penn State administrators, Fina had to mislead the grand jury judge, Fox wrote.
The prosecutors "never informed the court of the nature and extent of the conflicts" of interest posed by Baldwin's dual role in the case, Fox wrote. So that the court could fulfill its duty of assuring that the "rights of Messrs. [former Penn State vice president Gary] Schultz and [former Penn State athletic director Tim] Curley to effective representation were not systematically violated in the extreme."
In the unsealed filing, Fox ripped the Commonwealth's defense of Fina's actions.
"The Commonwealth actually asserts that because Messrs. Schultz and Curley were aware that Ms. Baldwin was general counsel for Penn State, they should have understood that they were merely second-class clients, and, as a result, are entitled to no attorney-client privilege whatsoever," Fox wrote.
But the Rules of Professional Conduct do not mention "a watered-down second-class version of clienthood," Fox wrote; the rules of Professional Conduct only define "one form of clienthood" that's subject to the attorney-client privilege.
Before she flipped, Fox wrote, Baldwin announced to "Schultz and Curley, the court, the grand jury, as well as the Commonwealth's lawyers" that she represented Schultz and Curley. But as their lawyer, Fox wrote, Baldwin was "required, in fact, to represent both of them to the full extent required by her fiduciary duties . . . the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct, the Pennsylvania statutory provisions covering the right to counsel before a grand jury" as well as the U.S. Constitution.
But in reality, Fox wrote, while Baldwin was representing her clients, "her fingers were crossed behind her back, and she never fully intended to fulfill that obligation, let alone warn them they would not receive the benefit of attorney-client privilege because of their second-class status."
"The law governing the attorney-client privilege in a joint representation is clear," Fox wrote. "There can be no waiver of the privilege unless each client has given his or her informed consent . . . to waive the privilege."
But the record of the case "demonstrates that there never was so much as a telephone call" to let Schultz and Curley know that the Commonwealth was seeking a waiver of the attorney-client privilege, and that Baldwin was planning to testify against her clients, Fox wrote.
By not telling her former clients she was about to stab them in the back, Fox wrote, Baldwin "turns the law of privilege literally upside-down, rendering it a false protection and leaving the clients helpless before the power of the Commonwealth."
That certainly was OK with Frank Fina. As for Baldwin, Fox wrote, her "sins here are both manifold and manifest. Turning against one's client is the greatest betrayal a lawyer can commit."
"But that is what Ms. Baldwin did here, stripping the clients of any opportunity to object to her misdeeds," Fox wrote. "Either she was subpoenaed to the grand jury or she voluntarily agreed to appear. Either way, she ran right through the red light by, in fact, testifying before the grand jury without notice to her former clients."
"No lawyer is permitted to disclose confidential information without the informed consent of the client," Fox wrote. "As a result of Ms. Baldwin's misconduct, Messrs. Schultz and Curley went six months without being aware of Ms. Baldwin's betrayal, and only learned of her shocking abandonment of her former clients when the new indictment was issued. Ms. Baldwin's conduct in this regard cries out for relief."
Fox labeled Baldwin's conduct as a "blatant betrayal . . . unprecedented in the annals of lawyer representation of clients."
And according to the disciplinary board's petition against Fina, it was Fina who set up that blatant betrayal by hoodwinking Judge Barry Feudale, then presiding over the grand jury investigating Sandusky.
On Oct. 22, 2012, Fina and Baldwin appeared before the judge in a conference to discuss Schultz and Curley's claim of attorney-client privilege in light of Baldwin's imminent appearance before the grand jury where the Commonwealth planned to have Baldwin testify against her former clients.
The petition notes that lawyers for Schultz, Curley, as well as former Penn State President Graham Spanier, who was also formerly represented by Baldwin, were not invited to the conference. At the conference, the petition says, Fina told the judge regarding the attorney-client privilege that he intended to "put those matters on hold" until the judge made a decision regarding the privilege, and "we can address that later on."
Penn State's counsel then argued that the judge should make a ruling on the attorney-client privilege first, before Baldwin testified. But Fina told the judge, "We need not address the privilege issue," because "we are not going to ask questions about" the grand jury testimony of Schultz and Curley, "and any preparation for, or follow-up they had" with Baldwin, Fox wrote.
Fina asked the judge to keep Baldwin's testimony secret so "We can address this privilege matter at a later date." That prompted the judge to tell Fina to proceed under the assumption that "you're not going to get into any inquiry as to [Baldwin's] representation" of her former clients.
But Fina double-crossed the judge, as well as broke the rules of professional conduct. And that's not only Fox's opinion, but it was also the ruling of the state's Superior Court, when they threw out eight charges Fina filed against Spanier, Schultz and Curley.
On Oct. 26, 2012, Fina questioned Baldwin in front of the grand jury, and "did elicit" what the disciplinary board described as "extensive . . . attorney-client privileged communications between Baldwin and Curley, Schultz, and Spanier" as well as "confidential information" pertaining to the three former clients.
Fina's questioning of Baldwin was "calculated," the disciplinary board wrote, to solicit damaging information that would attack the credibility of Baldwin's three former clients. In the petition, the disciplinary board proceeded to list 73 examples from the grand jury transcript where Fina elicited confidential testimony from Baldwin that violated the attorney-client privilege, according to the petition filed by Paul J. Killion, chief disciplinary counsel, and Amelia C. Kittredge, disciplinary counsel.
That's 73 examples folks, of Fina bending the rules, and the judge going along with it. Without a defense lawyer in the secret chambers of the grand jury to say a word of protest on behalf of Baldwin's three former clients.
The actions of Fina and Baldwin in the grand jury were so egregious it prompted the state Superior Court to throw out a total of eight charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and conspiracy against Schultz, Curley and Spanier.
Baldwin has already been called to task for her alleged ethical lapses. At a two-hour disciplinary hearing on May 23 in Pittsburgh, Baldwin, a former state Supreme Court justice, contended she wasn't guilty of any misconduct. She testified that after she received grand jury subpoenas for Curley and Schultz, she allegedly told them, as well as Spanier, that she couldn't be their personal lawyer because she was representing Penn State. Baldwin also asserted that she told the Penn State officials their communication with her wouldn't remain confidential, and that they were free to get outside lawyers to represent them.
"Don't be nervous. Just tell the truth," Baldwin testified that she advised Curley.
Baldwin testified that both Curley and Schultz described a shower incident allegedly witnessed by whistleblower Mike McQueary back in 2001 involving Sandusky and a naked boy as "horseplay." Baldwin also contended that she asked the Penn State officials if they knew of any documents describing that incident that had been requested by a subpoena from the attorney general's office, and that her clients replied that they didn't know about any such documents.
Baldwin testified she felt "duped" when months later, a file kept by Schultz documenting the shower incident involving Sandusky was turned over to investigators.
In court records, Baldwin's former clients, however, tell a different story. They contend that Baldwin did not inform them of the risks of appearing before the grand jury, and misled them about the grand jury's mission. Schultz also stated that he told Baldwin about the file he kept on Sandusky.
Baldwin's former clients contend in affidavits that because of her inept representation, and outright deception about the grand jury's true mission, Baldwin transformed her clients into sitting ducks for Frank Fina.
"Ms. Baldwin informed me that the grand jury investigation focused on Jerry Sandusky, not on me or PSU, and that I was being called purely as a witness," Schultz wrote in an affidavit recently unsealed in Dauphin County. "Ms. Baldwin told me that neither I nor PSU were under investigation," Schultz wrote. "She told me that I could have outside counsel, if I wished, but at that point, seeing all the stories [of the Penn State officials] are consistent, she could represent me, Tim Curley and Joe Paterno as well."
Schultz said he told Baldwin he might have a file on Sandusky still in his office, and that it "might help refresh my memory" to review its contents. But Schultz said that Baldwin told him not to "look for or review any materials."
"Ms. Baldwin also told me that PSU and I were not targets of the investigation and that I would be treated as a witness," Schultz wrote. "There never was any discussion of the Fifth Amendment privilege or the risk of self-incrimination."
"I believed that Ms. Baldwin was representing me in connection with the grand jury proceedings and that she was looking out for my interests," Schulz wrote. "Based on her representations, I did not believe I needed a separate lawyer."
In his affidavit of Oct. 25, 2012, Schultz wrote that Baldwin only told him he needed a separate lawyer "approximately one week before the charges were filed against me."
Former Penn State University President Graham Spanier made similar, disturbing claims about the actions of Baldwin.
In a Jan. 16, 2013 affidavit, Spanier wrote that prior to his grand jury appearance, Baldwin "did not reveal that I had been subpoenaed, and I believed that I was going voluntarily. She did not inform me that Penn State and I were targets of the investigation. As far as I knew, the investigation focused solely on Sandusky."
When Spanier appeared before the grand jury in 2011, "I believed that Ms. Baldwin was representing me during and in connection with the grand jury proceedings and that she was acting in my best interests," Spanier wrote. " Although Ms. Baldwin mentioned that I was entitled to a separate attorney, she did not encourage me to retain one, or explain why I might want one. Based on her representations, I did not believe I needed a separate lawyer."
"On the day of my grand jury testimony, Ms. Baldwin accompanied my swearing in" before the judge, and "stated that she was representing me in connection with my testimony," Spanier wrote. "And I had no reason to think otherwise."
"Ms. Baldwin sat with me in the grand jury room," Spanier wrote. "I was asked by the OAG attorney whether I was represented by counsel. I responded that I was, and identified Ms. Baldwin. She did not say anything."
"Ms. Baldwin first told me that I should retain a separate attorney on Nov. 8, 2011, after Sandusky, Schultz and Curley had been indicted," Spanier wrote. "At no point did I waive my right to confidentiality in my communications with Mrs. Baldwin or otherwise waive attorney-client privilege."
Tomorrow, it will be Fina's turn to answer those charges of misconduct.
In a response to the disciplinary board's accusations, Fina's lawyers, Dennis C. McAndrews and Joseph E. McGettigan 3d, contend that Fina "has not violated any rule of conduct" and they request that the board dismiss the charges against him.
In attempting to extricate Fina from his ethical dilemma and blatant misconduct in flipping the pliable Baldwin, Fina's lawyers resorted to wrapping themselves up in the flag of righteousness in the Sandusky case. They did that by pointing out the jury verdict, the pretrial demonization of Sandusky by a hysterical media, and the actions of pliable judges in the case who kept giving the prosecutors nothing but green lights.
It's like the scene in Animal House, where Otter is confronted before a kangaroo student court with charges that he and his fellow frat brothers at Delta house "broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests."
"We did," Otter says, winking at Dean Wormer, an admission that Fina's lawyers won't be making tomorrow. Otter then asks the dean and the court if it's fair for them to hold "the whole fraternity system" accountable for the actions of "a few, sick, twisted individuals?"
And if they're going to indict the whole fraternity system, Otter asks, "isn't this an indictment of our educational systems in general," as well as "an indictment of our entire American society?"
"Well," an indignant Otter sniffs, "You can do whatever you want to us, but I for one am not going to stand here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!" Then he and the Deltas march out of the courtroom humming the Star-Spangled Banner.
In their filing, Fina's lawyers describe their client as "instrumental in convicting the most notorious serial child molester in American history." Fina, according to his lawyers, was also "developing evidence that administrators at [Penn State] . . . failed to act in accordance with their legal, professional and/or ethical responsibilities in taking steps to prevent future harm to the children of this Commonwealth by that predator."
The lawyers assert that Fina did nothing improper before the grand jury. To do that, they quote the Louis Freeh report, which has some serious credibility problems, and Judge Feudale, the grand jury judge subsequently removed by the state Supreme Court amid allegations of misconduct and an alleged loss of objectivity.
In remarks quoted by Fina's lawyers, the discredited judge concluded that nothing went wrong in his courtroom after Fina plainly lied to him about what he was planning to do with Baldwin. And that after "a careful review of the testimony of attorney Baldwin before the grand jury," Judge Feudale concluded that "Baldwin's testimony did not [in this court's review] violate any attorney-client or work product privilege."
Never mind those 73 damaging quotes contained in the court transcript.
Fina's defense, as laid out by his lawyers, seems pretty lame. According to our system of justice, every accused defendant, even a serial killer, deserves a lawyer in their corner who would at least tell them if they're the target of a grand jury investigation. Cynthia Baldwin flunked that basic test. And then she went out and sold her clients down the river, behind closed doors in the grand jury, and neglected to tell them about it.
And speaking of Frank Fina, why did he have to lie and cheat and break the rules during that secret grand jury proceeding, where he already had the judge on his side, and he held all the cards?
Joe’s own testimony describes indecent assault and he gave it twice. Once under oath.
They were dealing with an abused child and their guilt is shown by their ignoring the child and focusing only on Jerry. You have turned criminal neglect into something noble that they were just trying to help poor Jerry. This is why JoeBots are monstrous.
They were “vulnerable” to prosecution because they did not report Sandusky then and Spanier is pointing that out.
Quite the opposite as the OAG showed in court. The jury felt that was the case because they weren’t JoeBots. Justice was served.
No, they covered it up and rightfully went to jail for it.
That is a conspiracy theory.
Why else would there be people like you who exist solely for its perpetuation?
No, I oppose people like you who defend bad people who abused children or enabled those who did. You exist to rewrite history, I exist to refute you.
The Ziegler McQueary connection explains much.
On Nov. 10, 2011, six days after the state Attorney General's office released its official grand jury report on the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal, deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach was trying to calm Mike McQueary, her distraught star whistle-blower.
McQueary had emailed Eshbach earlier that day to tell her that the grand jury report that told the world that McQueary had witnessed a naked Sandusky in the Penn State showers having anal intercourse with a 10-year-old boy was wrong. In that same email, McQueary complained to the A.G.'s office that they had "twisted" his words about "whatever it was" that he had actually seen or heard in the showers.
Now there's a star witness you can have confidence in.
In a second email sent that same day, McQueary complained to Eshbach about "being misrepresented" in the media. And then McQueary tried to straighten out a couple of misconceptions, writing that he never went to Coach Joe Paterno's house with his father, and that he had never seen Sandusky with a child at a Penn State football practice.
"I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect and it is hard not to respond," Eshbach emailed McQueary. "But you can't."
That email exchange, divulged in a couple of posts by Penn State blogger Ray Blehar, have people in Penn State Nation talking about prosecutorial misconduct. Naturally, the A.G.'s office has nothing to say about it, as an office spokesperson declined comment today.
The 2011 grand jury report said that back when he visited the Penn State showers in 2001, Mike McQueary heard "rhythmic, slapping sounds." Then, he peered into the showers and "saw a naked boy, Victim No. 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Jerry Sandusky."
But McQueary wrote Eshbach, while copying Agent Anthony Sassano, "I feel my words are slightly twisted and not totally portrayed correctly in the presentment."
"I cannot say 1000 percent sure that it was sodomy. I did not see insertion," McQueary wrote. "It was a sexual act and or way over the line in my opinion whatever it was."
McQueary also complained about the media attention he was getting.
"National media, and public opinion has totally, in every single way, ruined me," McQueary wrote. "For what?"
Later that same day, McQueary wrote a second email to Eshbach and Sassano.
"Also," McQueary wrote, "I never went to Coach Paterno's house with my father . . . It was me and only me . . . he was out of town the night before . . . never ever have I seen JS [Jerry Sandusky] with a child at one of our practices . . . "
The reference about his father not accompanying him to a meeting with Joe Paterno was probably McQueary's attempt to correct a mistake in a Nov. 5, 2011 Sara Ganim story about the grand jury presentment that ran in the Harrisburg Patriot News.
In her story, Ganim wrote that according to the indictment, "On March 1, 2002, the night before Spring Break, a Penn State graduate assistant walked into the Penn State football locker room around 9:30 p.m. and witnessed Sandusky having sex with about 10 years old . . . The next morning, the witness and his father told head football coach Joe Paterno, who immediately told athletic director Tim Curley."
Then, McQueary returned to the subject of the bad publicity he was getting over the grand jury report.
"I am being misrepresented in the media," McQueary wrote. "It just is not right."
That's what prompted Eshback to write, "I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect and it is hard to to respond. But you can't."
Former NCIS and FIS Special Agent John Snedden, a Penn State alum, was blown away by Eshbach's email response to McQueary.
"It's incredible, it's evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, trying to steer a witness's testimony," Snedden said. "It shows that the prosecution's manipulating the information, throwing out what they don't want and padding what they do want . . . It very strongly suggests a fictitious presentment."
During the defamation suit McQueary filed against Penn State, Eshbach was sworn in as a witness and asked to explain what she meant by telling McQueary not to talk.
"My advice to Mr. McQueary not to make a statement was based on the strengthening of my -- and saving of my case," Eshbach testified. "I did not want him [McQueary] making statements to the press at that time that could at some time be used against him in cross-examination. He [McQueary] was perfectly free to make a statement, but I asked him not to."
There's another angle to the prosecutorial misconduct story line -- this email exchange between McQueary and Eshbach that was reported on by Blehar was not turned over by the prosecution to defense lawyers during the Sandusky trial and the trial of former Penn State president Graham Spanier.
While we're on the subject of prosecutorial misconduct, at the Spanier trial, it was McQueary who testified that during the bye week of the 2011 Penn State football season, he got a call on his cell phone from the attorney general's office, tipping him off that "We're going to arrest folks and we are going to leak it out."
The fact that Mike McQueary didn't see a naked Jerry Sandusky having anal intercourse in the showers with a 10-year-old boy isn't the only erroneous assumption that came out of that shoddy 2011 grand jury report, Blehar wrote.
"The Sandusky grand jury presentment of Nov. 4, 2011 provided a misleading account of what eyewitness Michael McQueary reported to Joe Paterno about the 2001 incident," Blehar wrote. "Rather than stating what McQueary reported, it stated he reported 'what he had seen' which led the media and the public to erroneously conclude the specific details were reported to Paterno."
Keep in mind what the grand jury report said McQueary had seen -- a naked Sandusky having anal intercourse in the showers with a 10-year-old boy -- never actually happened, according to McQueary.
The grand jury report said:
"The graduate assistant went to his office and called his father, reporting to him what he had seen . . . The graduate assistant and his father decided that the graduate assistant had to promptly report what he had seen to Coach Joe Paterno . . . The next morning, a Saturday, the graduate assistant telephoned Paterno and went to Paterno's home, where he reported what he had seen."
Blehar cited the words of Joe Paterno, who issued a statement on Nov. 6, 2011, saying that McQueary had "at no time related to me the very specific actions contained in the grand jury report."
McQueary agreed.
On Dec. 6, 2011, McQueary was asked under oath whether he had ever used the term "anal sodomy" in talking to Paterno.
"I've never used that term," McQueary said. "I would have explained to him the positions they were in roughly, but it was definitely sexual, but I have never used the word anal or rape in this since day one."
So what exactly did you tell Paterno, the prosecutor asked McQueary.
"I gave a brief description of what I saw," McQueary testified. "You don't -- ma'am, you don't go to Coach Paterno or at least in my mind and I don't go to Coach Paterno and go into great detail of sexual acts. I would have never done that with him ever."
Blehar also points out that not even the jury in the Sandusky case believed that Sandusky had anally raped Victim No. 2 in the Penn State showers, because they came to a not guilty verdict on the count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.
Blehar then cites four other witnesses in the case who also testified that McQueary never used sexual terms in describing what he had allegedly seen in the shower.
"Subsequent testimony in numerous proceedings from 2011 through 2017 by John McQueary, Dr. [John] Dranov, [former Penn State Athletic Director Tim] Curley and [former Penn State VP Gary] Schutz confirmed that no explicitly sexual terms were used by McQueary when he described what he actually saw," Blehar wrote.
In his second email to Eshbach, McQueary stated, "I never went to Coach Paterno's house with my father . . . It was me and only me . . . he was out the night before . . ."
In the email, McQueary doesn't say who the he was who was out the night before. In his blog post, Blehar takes the he as a reference to McQueary's father.
"Wait, what?" Blehar writes. "Paterno was in State College on Friday night. If this statement is true, then Mike did NOT meet with his father (and Dr. Dranov) immediately after the incident(because John Sr. was 'out of town.')"
"Another fabrication?" writes Blehar. "And the AG knew it."
In handwritten notes written in 2010, McQueary doesn't mention any meeting with his father and Dr. Dranov. Instead, he writes that he "drove to my parents' house" and "spoke with my father about the incident and received advice."
He also reiterates, "to be clear: from the time I walked into the locker room to the time I left was maybe one minute -- I was hastened & a bit flustered."
A hazy one-minute memory that McQueary himself admitted he had no idea "whatever it was" he had actually witnessed.
But it was a hazy, one-minute memory that the AG's office wrote an entire grand jury presentment around. How weak is that?
It was flimsy evidence like this that led Special Agent Snedden to conclude that McQueary was not a credible witness back in 2012 when Snedden was investigating whether former Penn State President Spanier deserved to have his high-level security clearance with the federal government renewed. Snedden wrote a recently declassified 110-page report that concluded there was no cover up at Penn State because there was no sex crime to cover up.
Because McQueary gave five different accounts over the years of what he supposedly witnessed during that one minute in the Penn State showers.
"I'd love to see McQueary's cell phone records, absent whatever dick pics he was sending out that day," Snedden cracked, referring to the day McQueary witnessed the shower incident, and then called his father to figure out what to do.
"Did he even call his dad?" Snedden wondered.
Snedden renewed his call for an independent investigation of the entire Penn State scandal, and the attorney general's role in manipulating evidence in the case.
"Anybody who cares about justice needs to be screaming for a special prosecutor in this case," Snedden said.
John Ziegler, a journalist who has covered the Penn State scandal since day one, agreed.
"This seems like blatant OAG misconduct and an indication that they were acutely aware their case had major problems," Ziegler wrote in an email. "Eshbach's response is stunning in that it admits errors in grand jury presentment and tells Mike to shut up about it."
Ziegler said the possibility that Mike McQueary never met with his father and Dr. Dranov, his father's boss, in an emergency meeting, if true, was big news.
"This is HUGE for several reasons," Ziegler wrote. The meeting, which supposedly occurred on the night McQueary witnessed the shower incident was the "ONLY piece of evidence that has EVER been consistent with Mike witnessing something horrible/dramatic" in the Penn State showers. And that's why "Dranov was brought in to meet with him [Mike McQueary] late on a Friday night in February," Ziegler said.
The AG's office, Ziegler speculated, "is desperate for evidence that Mike did something dramatic in reaction to" witnessing the shower incident.
And if the he McQueary was referring to in the email to Eshbach wasn't his father but was really Joe Paterno, Ziegler said, then that's another problem with the official Penn State story line. Because according to his family, Joe Paterno was in town that night and presumably available for an emergency meeting with a distraught assistant who had just witnessed a horrible sex crime in the shower.
If he really did see an anal rape ongoing in the shower, however, does the McQueary story, in any of its versions, make any sense?
McQueary didn't rush into the shower and try to save a helpless, 10-year-old boy.
He didn't call the police.
Studies show men are unlikely to act...women are far more likely to intervene
Not calling the police is a great question that probably has a complicated issue that we wouldn't like about how things are handled at Penn State
These are good people. They were railroaded by a corrupt system to serve an agenda. You serve that same agenda. May you get what you deserve!
They weren't all railroaded...come on...this comes across as delusional
C/S/S were initially charged with 15 felonies between them. All fifteen of those charges were eventually dropped. Curley and Schultz were convicted on one count each of failure to report. However, the incident occurred in 2001. The law was not enacted until 2005.
Polling of potential jurors in Curley's case showed over 50% of the respondents wanted C/S/S to be punished, even if it was shown that they broke no laws.
The narrative was pushed by all the legacy media. Given Joe Paterno's reputation, earned over a lifetime of excellence and honor, don't you find it odd that not one news outlet came to his defense? Think about it! Without the perjury, conspiracy, etc., how does the narrative to call Joe a pedophile enabler hold up? He did exactly what the law and university policy proscribed.
They had to be convicted of something so the OAG/Tom Corbett could declare victory and preserve the narrative.
Railroaded is too polite a term to describe what happened to those men.
Yeah, facts sometimes need clarity.
Remember, Samuel W. Silver, the lawyer for former Penn State President Graham Spanier, stood up in a Harrisburg courtroom and without calling a witness, told the judge that the defense was resting its case.
Five minutes later, Silver began his closing argument to the jury by declaring, "There was no evidence of a crime by Graham Spanier."
"This case involves judgment calls," Silver told the jury. "They made judgment calls," Silver said about Spanier and his two alleged co-conspirators -- Tim Curley and Gary Schultz -- before they pleaded guilty and became government witnesses.
"They made judgment calls," Silver repeated about Spanier, Curley and Schultz. "They did not engage in crimes; they did not engage in a conspiracy."
"They took the matter seriously," Silver said about the now familiar plot line of the Jerry Sanduskysex scandal. "They did not stand by and do nothing."
Silver's announcement to the judge came as somewhat of a surprise. The day before, when the government rested its case, there was talk among Penn State loyalists that the defense was planning to call up to four witnesses. The defense case was supposedly built around expected testimony from John Snedden, a Federal Investigative Services special agent who had done a background check of Spanier for a top-security government clearance in 2012, and had found no evidence of wrongdoing by Spanier at Penn State.
But Silver made his own judgment call that the prosecution didn't prove its case. So he went right to his closing argument.
The defense lawyer began by going through the law regarding the crimes that Spanier is charged with: two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, and one count of conspiring to endanger the welfare of a child.
To find Spanier guilty of endangering the welfare of a child, Silver said, the jury would have to find that Spanier interfered with or prevented someone from making a report of suspected child sex abuse.
The problem with that, Silver said, was that the government did not present any evidence that Spanier was ever told that Jerry Sandusky "was engaging in sexual crimes with minors."
"Nobody told Graham Spanier," Silver said. The defense lawyer went through every one of the fifteen witnesses called by the government, who turned out to be the only witnesses in the case.
"Her witnesses," Silver said, referring to his courtroom rival, Deputy Attorney General Laura Ditka. "Her witnesses made the defense case."
Silver returned to the language of the child endangerment statute. To find Spanier guilty, Silver said, the jury would have to conclude that the government had presented evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Spanier had "knowingly violated" his alleged duty of care to protect the welfare of children that he was supposedly supervising.
"Graham Spanier was not aware that children's welfare would be endangered," Silver said. To find Spanier guilty, the jury would also have to conclude that Spanier was supervising the welfare of Second Mile child victims abused by Sandusky, many of whom were visitors to the Penn State campus.
The jury would also have to find that Spanier had acted "knowingly, intentionally and recklessly" when he allegedly interfered with or prevented anyone from reporting a suspected crime of child sex abuse.
Another element to the crime of child endangerment, Silver said, was the jury would have to find that in the course of performing his official duties Spanier "came into contact" with the child that he had allegedly endangered, the boy in the showers. Because the child endangerment statute required that Spanier would have had to knowingly endangered the welfare of the child he was supervising.
But the government presented no evidence of that.
To find Spanier guilty of conspiracy, Silver said, the jury would have to believe that Spanier "agreed to enter into a conspiracy to commit endangering the welfare of a child." And that Spanier and his co-conspirators had "agreed to put children in danger," and took actions toward that goal.
To anybody who sat through the two days of fact-free testimony that constituted the government's case, any of those findings would be a stretch. But this is sex abuse we're talking about, Penn State style, starring naked good old boy Jerry Sandusky bumping and grinding in the shower with little boys. It's like dousing a house made of straw with a couple cans of gasoline and waiting for a spark to fly.Silver talked about the government's cooperating witnesses, former Penn State Athletic Director Curley, and former Penn State Vice-President Gary Schultz.
"These were the stars of their show," Silver said about the government's cae. But going by their testimony, Silver said, neither Curley nor Schultz ever told Spanier that what Mike McQueary witnessed in the showers was sex abuse.
Silver repeated what Schultz told the jury: "Jerry was always horsing around," Silver quoted Schultz as saying. "Schultz told Spanier it was horseplay."
Of all the government's fifteen witnesses, Silver said, only two, Curley and Schultz, testified that they spoke directly to Spanier about what McQueary told them.
McQueary, Silver reminded the jury, never spoke directly to Spanier about what he witnessed in the showers.
There was no conspiracy at Penn State, Silver said, summing up. Nobody told McQueary, or anybody else, to "keep things quiet, to keep their mouths shut." On the witness stand, both of the government's star witnesses, Curley and Schultz, testified that took the matter seriously. They were trying to do the right thing, Silver said. And they also testified that they did not participate in any conspiracy to cover up, and not report the infamous shower incident.
"There is no evidence that Graham Spanier knowingly endangered the welfare of children," Silver said. He concluded by asking the jury to find his client not guilty.
When Deputy Attorney General Laura Ditka stood up to give her closing, she wanted to clear up one thing right away.
"Gary Schultz and Tim Curley are not our star witnesses," she said, "They're criminals." And you can't count on criminals to tell you that they knowingly committed crimes.With a paucity of facts to draw on, Ditka, Iron Mike's niece, turned to fireworks. Spanier, Curley and Schultz, she said, were all guilty of turning their backs on the welfare of children, in favor of protecting themselves and Penn State from scandal.
"Jerry Sandusky was left to run wild," she said.
She talked about the plan that Spanier, Curley and Schultz had agreed on. To confront Jerry Sandusky with the shower incident. And to inform Sandusky that he was no longer allowed to bring children onto Penn State property.
The PSU officials were hoping that Sandusky would admit to a problem and agree to seek help. If not, the PSU officials planned to report the shower incident to the child psychiatrist who led the Second Mile charity that employed Sandusky as a counselor. And also report the shower incident to the Department of Public Welfare, so they could investigate whether Sandusky's conduct amounted to sex abuse.
But there was a "downside" to that approach, as Ditka reminded the jury while she quoted from an email sent by Spanier. The downside was "if the message wasn't heard" by Sandusky, Spanier wrote to Curley and Schultz, then Spanier, Curley and Schultz "become vulnerable for not having reported it."
When you're conspiring to cover up sex abuse, it's not too smart to lay out the plot in an email chain that subsequently become a government exhibit. That's not usually how coverups work. But Ditka skipped over all that to blast the usual villains in the Penn State sex scandal narrative, starring that naked Jerry Sandusky cavorting in the showers with little boys.
"All they cared about was their own self interest," Ditka told the jury about Penn State's top officials. "Instead of putting him [Sandusky] on a leash," she said, "they let him run wild."
Ditka recounted to the jury the first incident Sandusky was ever accused of. Back in 1998, a mother went to the cops because Sandusky had allegedly given her 11-year-old son a naked bear hug in the shower. And he allegedly picked the boy up and stuck him under a shower head to allegedly wash the soap out of his ears.
The boy, a member of the Second Mile charity, had been lured into the showers by the promise of a pair of "Joe Paterno sox," Ditka reminded the jury. "The lure of Penn State football is strong."
Ditka spoke about what she described as the cover-up mode employed by those at the "top of the totem pole" at Penn State, namely Spanier, Curley and Schultz. And then she vividly contrasted it with the whistle blowing of Mike McQueary, whom she described as "the low man on the totem pole."
Ditka dove once more into all the salacious details of the McQueary shower story -- Sandusky's naked "body moving slowly," "slapping sounds," and "skin against skin."
"What do you think?" she asked the jury. "That's horseplay?"
If it's horseplay, she said, why was the Penn State president and two of his top officials meeting about it on the weekend? Why are Schultz and Curley sitting around Joe Paterno's kitchen table on a Sunday morning if it's just horseplay they're talking about, Ditka argued.
"Skin to skin, hips moving against a boy is not horsing around," she repeated. This is Penn State, she said, where they have ten thousand kids.
"Every time a towel is snapped," Ditka asked, do university officials gather at Graham Spanier's house?
They knew what they were doing, Ditka said about Spanier, Curley and Schultz. "They come up with
a plan," she said. "You have to keep it a secret."
That's why they waited ten days to interview whistle-blowing eyewitness McQueary, Ditka said. Because they didn't want to know the truth. They just wanted to keep the truth under wraps.
"They had a problem and they didn't want to deal with it," Ditka said. The result was, "They own it."
"They prevented a report of sex abuse," Ditka said. "They knew what they were dealing with."
Instead of tackling the problem head on, Ditka said, by hauling McQueary in and finding out exactly what had happened in the shower, PSU's top officials tried "to soft-shoe it."
And when time dragged by, Ditka said, Spanier assured a worried Gary Schultz that "It's taken care of."
Here, Ditka was taking some liberties with trial testimony. When asked on the witness stand who had told him that the shower incident had been investigated and "taken care of," Schultz couldn't remember.
"I can't say for sure that it was Graham Spanier," Schultz told the jury.
It was a quote that Silver had read to the jury. Then he warned that if Ditka tried to use that quote to prove Spanier was guilty, it fell far short of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
But that wasn't going to stop Ditka.
It was like the scene in Animal House when Bluto gave the speech to his frat brothers about the Germans bombing Pearl Habor. Otter wondered whether he should correct Bluto, but Boon told him, "Forget it, he's rolling."Like Bluto, Ditka was rolling.
"Graham Spanier told him [Schultz] 'Its taken care of," Ditka yelled. Before she was done, Ditka would not only declare that it was Spanier who had told Schultz "It was taken care of." She would also ccuse Spanier of deliberately "lying to Schultz."
Next, Ditka reminded the jury that when the Penn State sex abuse scandal exploded, Spanier insisted on running on the university's website two letters of support for Curley and Schultz.
"I support Gary and Tim," Ditka recounted the statements as basically saying. "Not a thought about the kids," she lamented. "They didn't care about kids."
The most entertaining part of Ditka's closing argument was when she trashed both of her star witnesses.
"Tim Curley," she declared, was "untruthful 90 percent of the time."
"Gary Schultz, I would suggest to you was more truthful," Ditka told the jury. That's because he cried on the witness stand.
You can't stage a courtroom tragedy without tears.
"He was crying for a whole lot of reasons," Ditka told the jury. Such as having to appear in court to testify against his old friend, Graham Spanier. But to counter those tears in her courtroom soap opera, Ditka brought up the tears of Victim No. 5.
Victim No. 5 was another government witness brought into the courtroom with much fanfare and extra security. Victim No. 5 had testified about being abused by Jerry Sandusky in the same showers where McQueary had previously seen Sandusky frolicking with another naked boy.
Victim No. 5, Ditka told the jury, wakes up crying on "a lot of mornings."
Ditka's weakest moment came when she left her emotional appeals behind to delve briefly into the law in the case, which for her sake, was probably best left undisturbed.
"There's more than enough proof," she concluded. "They knew the animal they were letting loose on the world," she said. Then she asked the jury to "find him [Spanier] guilty."
By the time she sat down, it was quite a performance. If the jury goes strictly by the law, Spanier walks. But if the jury is swayed by emotion, Spanier is toast.
It's as simple as that.
And God help the defendant if the jury ignores the judge's instructions and tunes in to the media coverage of the case, where they're playing all the old familiar tunes in the Penn State scandal, as sung by the attorney general's office, Sara Ganim and Louie Freeh.
There's a reason why Curley and Schultz pleaded guilty. It's an uphill battle when you're fighting a story line that everyone thinks they know.
There are problems with defending Graham Spanier. The former PSU president comes off as an intellectual who's aloof. He also didn't take the stand in his own defense. Even though the judge told the jury that they should consider Spanier "an innocent man," some jurors may believe he's hiding something.Spanier is also on trial before a Dauphin County represented by a button-down Philadelphia lawyer. That might be another problem.
Meanwhile, the prosecution has Iron Mike Ditka's folksy niece tossing red meat at the jury. And the problem of his two former co-defendants having already pleaded guilty.
Incited by Iron Mike's niece, a Dauphin County jury might just decide to teach Graham Spanier a lesson with some frontier justice.
Or they could see through all the hype and emotion, glimpse the law, and send Spanier on his merry way, so he can proceed with lawsuits against Penn State and Louie Freeh.
Today, after Judge John Boccabella went over the legalities of the charges in the case, the jury began deliberating. Within 15 minutes, they had a question for the judge. They subsequently had two more questions.
The jury asked the judge to give them the definition of a conspiracy. They wanted to know the definition of acting recklessly. They also asked in order to have a conspiracy, does a crime necessarily have to have been committed?Absolutely, the judge said.
Ditka had to be seething over this. If only she could have gotten in front of the jury one more time for a rebuttal. She could have talked about the tears of Victim No. 5. And that animal named Sandusky that the guys at the top of the totem pole at Penn State had knowingly turned loose on helpless children that they didn't care about.
By 7 p.m., after dinner was brought in, the jury was still deliberating. One of the jurors asked the judge if they could take a vote on whether to retire for the night.
No, the judge said. He alone would decide when they were going home.
These are not "good people".
They created a false image that they were good but were willing to let kids suffer to protect that image.
The only people harmed in this debacle were those children.
You serve the same evil agenda that CSS and Joe did.
I suspect you have already got what you deserve but more is coming.
I will continue the truth bombing. Otherwise, the lessons learned from this will not be remembered.
