The Shame of It.
- Thread starter joeaubie21
- Start date
I don’t think you can discuss Paterno without discussing Sandusky. Paterno has become a non-person due to a lie the OAG told that McQueary had witnessed “anal intercourse” and told Paterno. Once you debunk that one lie, its easy to follow the rabbit trail of debunking other lies and exposing other misconduct by the police, the prosecution, and the accusers’ civil attorneys.
The way I see it, if even 10% of what John Ziegler has claimed to have uncovered is true, this should still be one of the biggest stories of the 21st century. I remember people were talking about the possibility that companies would be reluctant to hire PSU grads when Sandusky was arrested and the GJ report was leaked.
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Well...
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?
The two things you folks will NEVER get around is Joe's testimony (twice and once under oath) that fully and completely corroborates MM's report of CSA and the emails that show Joe participated in the decision not to report Sandusky and exposes the admins lie that they were told horseplay. They stand like a rock of guilt.
Even the PiT jackass Smizik stated Paterno was vindicated and guilty of nothing.
Only morons don't understand this or they don't want to. Aholes.
Only morons don't understand this or they don't want to. Aholes.
It never ends.
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.
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.
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.
So we agree it's biased so why use any articles? If you have a point make it
And the grand jury presentment wasn’t biased and filled with intentional lies?
What’s your point?
You cited an allegedly biased article
I cited and intentionally flawed GJP from which Sandusky and Penn state could never recover
You cited an allegedly biased article
I cited and intentionally flawed GJP from which Sandusky and Penn state could never recover
Wait are you trying to spin this to say Sandusky is innocent? Hopefully not
My point is...individuals continue posting articles as though they're facts. The articles are pointless. If you (or they) have something to say they say it. Don't post book for no reason.
I'm not pinning anything on Paterno or Penn State but I'm also not trying to claim Sandusky is innocent in a desperate attempt to silence those that think Paterno and Penn State are to blame. Doing that makes it far worse because it proves them right--it indicates you (and others) are so loyal to pretend that you'll create nonsense about Sandusky being innocent to try to clear Joe.
They dropped the ball by not putting nothing on paper. Joe should have instructed big red to forward him a report to document everything he saw and heard, And then Joe should d have forwarded his own report to the A/D exactly when Bag red told him of the incident. That was there is no
he said she by someone interviewed 10 yeas after the fact;
They should have all been dismissed.
An incident f this magnitude abs bot one repot by a university is unheard of,
Joe should have immediately wrote a report to cover hi ass, but he choose a phone call instead, He could have put the onus on the AD to take action.
A report in writing is worth a 100 phone calls and is a document that sty's in the files for years;
a
a
d
I never made any claim about Sandusky’s innocence one way or the other.
What I was commented on was you asserting that the article was biased. I inferred from that statement that you thought nobody should believe what was written.
I then replied that the GJP was not only biased, but it contained intentional lies. That makes the GJP both biased and misleading. The entire cases against SAndusky and CSS, and the national outrage was driven by the admitted lie that was provided in the GJP. Of all things, we as American people should have the right to expert our legal system to stand for truth and integrity. THat clearly is not the Situation here. Would you agree or not?
I work in "the legal system" and it has never been based on "truth and integrity" and, no, I don't agree. I think it's very clear what happened here and Sandusky is where he should be. Now your turn--do you believe Sandusky is innocent? because if so we can't have a rational conversation and you have zero credibility.
And Ganim strikes again.
On the tenth anniversary of the Penn State sex abuse scandal, Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Sara Ganim is hosting a podcast where she claims that Shawn Sinisi, a previously unknown alleged victim of Jerry Sandusky's, was the first alleged Sandusky victim to die as a result of that alleged abuse.
"In so many ways, Shawn Sinisi was a textbook abuse victim: he was ashamed, confused, angry, unable to admit or discuss what had happened," Ganim says on the new podcast, The Mayor of Maple Avenue, which was Shawn Sinisi's nickmame. "He was a child who seemingly overnight went from a happy go lucky and outgoing kid to a quiet, distant, and then troubled young man."
"He began to escape his pain and bury his memories of abuse with drugs and alcohol," Ganim said. "He became an addict. And when his addiction led him down a darker path, he was given yet another label: criminal."
There's only one problem with Ganim's tragic story of abuse. Shawn Sinisi, who grew up in Altoona, PA, isn't around to speak for himself; in 2018, he died of an overdose of heroin laced with fentanyl, at 26. But "during his lifetime," wrote Don Litman, a civil lawyer for Sandusky, to lawyers for the Sinisi family, Shawn Sinisi "unequivocally stated that he was not sexually abused by Mr. Sandusky."
So did Josh Sinisi, Shawn's older brother, who attended the Second Mile camps with his brother, and claimed that they stayed together overnight at Sandusky's house.
That's the story told in a trio of contemporaneous police reports from 2011 and 2012 emanating from the state attorney general's office that are marked "confidential." That's why Litman, who's defending Sandusky against a civil suit filed by the Sinisi family on March 12, 2021, has told the Sinisis, who are the featured guests on the Ganim podcast, that they are engaged in "publishing false and misleading information." So Sandusky's lawyer has called on the parents of Shawn Sinisi to cease and desist.
Litman, who referred a request for comment to Sandusky's criminal layers, has demanded that the Sinisi family take the podcast series off the internet "or we shall bring this to the attention of the Court and seek injunctive relief along with further consequences for such blatant misconduct."
Ronald Carnevali, a lawyer for the Sinisi family, did not respond to a request for comment.
But those contemporaneous police reports have a lot to say.
On May 27, 2011, Agent Anthony Sassano of the state attorney general's office interviewed Shawn Sinisi at his home.
In the Sandusky grand jury probe, Sassano was the lead investigator of a joint seven-member task force between the state attorney general's office and the state police that went out knocking on the doors of some 300 young men who had been participants in programs sponsored by The Second Mile, Sandusky's charity for wayward youth.
What the task force that worked under Sassano and then Deputy Attorney Jonelle Eshbach were looking for was victims of sex abuse, but they weren't very successful.
On Jan. 4, 2012, Sassano testified that the special task force had interviewed 250 men who were former members of the Second Mile charity, but they only found one man who claimed to be a victim of abuse.
According to a Penn Live story that was based on Ganim's "reporting" for her new podcast, "The Sinisis say that Shawn disclosed a small part of his abuse to detectives when Sandusky came under a grand jury investigation, but he was already mired in the underworld of drugs and addiction by the time the case went to trial. His mother said investigators told her it wasn’t worth pitting two brothers against each other."
The police reports, however, tell a different story.
What Shawn Sinisi Told Agent Sassano Of The A.G.'s Office
When Sassano went to see Shawn Sinisi on May 27, 2011, the then 19-year-old told the agent that he and his older brother Josh had attended the Second Mile summer camps annually for one week between 2004 and 2007, when he would have been between approximately 12 and 16, until Shawn "lost interest in the programs as he became older."
The programs at the Second Mile had been recommended to Josh Sinisi, who had "mental problems" similar to Attention Deficit Disorder by Josh Sinisi's counselor, Shawn Sinisi told Sassano, according to the police report.
Shawn Sinisi, then 19 years old, told Sassano that he and his brother stayed overnight at Sandusky's home seven or eight times, and that the two brothers "always were together in these overnight stays and summer camp stays."
"Shawn indicated he did not know why Sandusky showed a special interest in him and/or his brother," Sassano wrote. "He indicated that Sandusky would tell him he loved him and occasionally gave him a kiss on the head. He indicated that he did not view these acts as sexual in nature."
On March 30, 2011, Ganim, then working for the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, published the first story that disclosed there was a secret grand jury of Sandusky under way, amid allegations that Sandusky was a serial sexual abuser of children.
"He [Shawn Sinisi] indicated he never felt uncomfortable around Sandusky and would tell me if anything inappropriate had occurred," Sassano wrote.
"He [Shawn Sinisi] elaborated that he [Sandusky] has a current legal charge of rape pending against him and if something was done by Sandusky, he would report it," Sassano wrote.
But Shawn Sinisi wasn't claiming to be a victim. Instead, he was a booster of Sandusky.
"Shawn indicated he believes Sandusky is a great role model as he helps people in need," Sassano wrote.
What Shawn Sinisi's Older Brother Told Agent Sassano Of The A.G.'s Office
Four days after he interviewed Shawn Sinisi, on May 31, 2011, Agent Sassano returned to interview Josh Sinisi, then 23.
Josh Sinisi told Sassano that he began attending Second Mile events in 2001, when he was a 12 year-old seventh grader, and stayed in the program until 2005 or 2006, when he was 16 or 17.
Josh Sinisi said he developed a "closer relationship" with Sandusky, and stayed overnight with his brother at Sandusky's house about a dozen times. Josh Sinisi said he used to attend Sandusky family tailgate parties at Penn State football games, and then go to the football games.
Josh Sinisi said that Sandusky used to throw footballs to him, and that they played Polish soccer together, and lifted weights.
As the task force typically did, Agent Sassano of the state attorney general's office proceeded to ask a bunch of leading questions.
"I asked him [Josh Sinisi] if Sandusky ever touched him physically in any way that made him feel uncomfortable," Sassano wrote, and Josh Sinisi "indicated no."
"I asked if Sandusky ever tried to get him to take a shower with him at PSU, and if so, did he touch him and again he indicated no," Sassano wrote.
Josh "Sinisi indicated that if Sandusky had ever done touched him in a sexual manner, he would have let his mother know and he would not have tolerated it even at his younger age," Sassano wrote.
Not even the free publicity from Sara Ganim was beneficial for the state attorney general's investigation of Sandusky, when it came to Agent Sassano's interviews with the Sinisi brothers.
Josh "Sinisi indicated he heard of the allegations against Sandusky in the news and that he does not believe they are true," Sassano wrote. "He indicated that Sandusky is a very generous and most positive person who helps people [kids] with problems. He indicated to this day, he has occasional contact with Sandusky via phone and considers him a friend."
That's the story that Josh Sinisi told, but it wasn't the story that Sassano was hoping to hear.
Agent Sassano Interviews Shawn's Brother A Second Time
On May 9, 2012, when the state attorney general's office was getting ready to prosecute Sandusky at trial, Sassano returned to visit Josh Sinisi again to see if he would tell a different story, as did so many of Sandusky's accusers after they had initially said they weren't abused.
But Josh Sinisi didn't change his story.
Josh Sinisi told Sassano that he first met Sassano at the Penn State swimming pool, where Sandusky was often "horsing around in the pool with a lot of the kids."
When he stayed over at Sandusky's house, Josh Sinisi told Sassano, he brought his girlfriend along, as well as his brother, Shawn.
"He [Josh Sinisi] aways felt very comfortable with Jerry Sandusky and also brought a lot of his cousins with him to go to games and hang out at the Sanduskys' house," Sassano wrote.
"He stated that after staying at Sandusky's house many, many times, he knows that Sandusky would have had ample opportunity to abuse him if he was so inclined to do so," Sassano wrote.
But, "He [Sandusky] never once tried anything out of line with Sinisi," Sassano wrote. Instead, Josh "Sinisi stated that Sandusky is kind of a grandfatherly, huggy type of guy and genuinely tries to encourage kids with his enthusiasm. His hugging and caring for the kids is never sexual at all."
Josh Sinisi told Sassano "that he does not believe that these allegations are true and feels that this might be some attempt by these kids to get money from Penn State and Jerry Sandusky."
Josh Sinisi added that "he has never heard anyone speak about Jerry Sandusky in a negative way" and that Sandusky "always had a tremendous impact on a lot of kids."
Josh Sinisi also told Sassano that "Sandusky was a positive influence in his life to say the least. Sandusky set Sinisi on his life course and Sinisi feels he would have never gotten into college and would never bein the position he is in today without Sandusky's help," Sassano wrote. "He [Josh Sinisi] said that Sandusky was extremely influential in his life."
What Marianne Sinisi Told The Newspapers
When Sandusky retired as a football coach, in a Sept. 17, 2010 story published in the Altoona Mirror, Josh Sinisi described Sandusky in an email as "kind, loving, caring, generous, strong, positive, successful."
In the story dug up by blogger Ray Blehar, Josh Sinisi, who had attention deficit disorder as a child, told the newspaper that Sandusky "taught me to be strong and never let anything [or anyone] stand in my way between what I wanted."
"He's an amazing man," agreed Marianne Sinisi.
When the sex abuse scandal hit the media, the Sinisis didn't change their story, and they continued to publicly defend Sandusky.
On Nov. 6, 2011, after Ganim's bombshell on the leaked grand jury report, Marianne Sinisi was quoted on statecollege.com as saying about the charges against Sandusky, "I don't believe it. I think he is a good man, and they are railroading him.
In the story, disclosed on Twitter by reporter John Ziegler, Josh Sinisi added, "I don't think it is true at all . . . I just went to a Penn State game with him a few weeks ago . . . I think it is ridiculous. I don't believe the charges are true at all."
Josh Sinisi told statecollege.com that he spent a lot of time with Sandusky. "He had the opportunity to do things with me and my brother," he said, but it never happened.
A year after her son's death, in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature story on Dec. 24, 2019, Marianne Sinisi discussed her tragic loss, as well as the work of a charity she founded to aid the families of drug addicts. But according to the story that was posted on Twitter by Ziegler, Marianne Sandusky never even mentioned Sandusky.
On the new podcast, however, Marianne Sinisi tells Sara Ganim an entirely different story.
According to the Penn Live story based on Ganim's reporting, "Years would pass before Shawn told his mother and a lawyer that he was sexually abused by Sandusky. Afraid of disappointing his family, who were fans of Sandusky’s mentorship for Josh, Shawn began coping by self-medicating, first with alcohol and marijuana, quickly escalating to hardcore drugs."
And now, according to Penn Live, Josh Sinisi has changed his story as well.
According to the Penn Live story, "Brother Josh, who was also in Sandusky’s orbit, said the convicted child molester used his good relationship with him to intimidate Shawn into being silent. It worked for many years. Shawn kept his abuse bottled up, instead turning to drugs to cope, starting at age 13."
Phil Lauer, a criminal defense lawyer who is representing Sandusky in his appeal of his conviction, "I was not aware of the Sinisi family ever coming forward in the previous ten years."
Sara Ganim's Story Of Abuse
"In the summer of 2019, I got a call from a woman who identified herself as Marianne Sinisi," Ganim said. "She wanted to talk to me about her son Shawn — and what had happened just a year earlier, when Shawn was found unconscious on the floor of a McDonald’s bathroom in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shawn died that night of an overdose. He was just 26 years old."
"Marianne sounded somewhat frantic on the phone that day as she described what had happened to her youngest child," Ganim said. "She reached out to me to share her story, because Shawn had also been a victim. A victim of a man who is now one of the most well known serial pedophiles, Jerry Sandusky."
"Jerry Sandusky’s conviction was punishment for what he had done, and it ensured that he could not harm any other children, but it couldn’t undo the abuse — or the consequences and myriad of ways it would manifest in his victims’ lives," Ganim said according to a transcript of the first episode of the podcast posted online.
"As someone who had followed the Sandusky story since the very beginning, I recognized immediately: that Shawn’s death marked a grim milestone — a fatality stemming from Jerry Sandusky’s abuse," Ganim said according to the transcript.
The Sinisi family is suing Penn State. The Penn Live story, based on Ganim's reporting, states, "Penn State had agreed to pay for Shawn to go to The Meadows, a treatment facility in Arizona with a sterling reputation . . ."
"What they [the Sinisi family] did know is that after just eight days in the rehab center, Shawn was told to leave. He was put on a plane to Pittsburgh, with no safe destination lined up for him."
"His family doesn’t know exactly what happened from there. He ended up at a McDonald’s and overdosed in the bathroom."
“Our poor Shawn,” his mother Marianne told Penn Live. “I felt like he wasn’t cared for at all ... not even leaving the planet."
In a Nov. 3rd press release, Meadowlark Media announced the new multi-episode podcast chronicling the Jerry Sandusky scandal that would be broadcast "on the 10th anniversary of his arrest."
'"The Mayor of Maple Avenue' is a multi-part investigative podcast with reporting by Sara Ganim," the press release states.
"Sinisi died in 2018 at the age of 26 from an opioid overdose. He is the only one of Sandusky’s victims known to have died since the former coach was convicted on 45 counts of sexual child abuse."
The press release says the podcast is a "joint project between the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Pulitzer Center for Local Reporting."
“Sara’s powerful reporting details how Shawn spent 14 years bouncing between jail, rehab facilities, and homelessness," the press release says. "The endless roadblocks the young man and his family faced, as they attempted to overcome addiction and trauma, clearly point to a national rehab system in drastic need of overhaul.”
"The Mayor of Maple Avenue will debut Thursday, Nov. 4 (the 10th anniversary of Sandusky’s arrest and indictment), available on your podcast platform of choice, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify."
To get a response to this story, I emailed or tweeted Ganim, Meadowlark Media, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Pulitzer Center for Local Reporting, but all of these alleged champions of the First Amendment are stonewalling.
Not one of them respond to my requests for comment.
More Holes In Ganim's Story Of Abuse
There are a few more problems with the story that Ganim and the Sinisis are peddling.
If Shawn Sinisi was an alleged victim of Sandusky's, why didn't he come forward any time after Sandusky was convicted on June 22, 2012 until Sept. 4, 2018, when Sinisi died?
That's what 41 men did and 36 of them got paid a total of $118 million, or an average of $3.3 million each. But when Penn State was taking in all those claims, investigating nothing and writing some big checks, Shawn Sinisi wasn't on the list of alleged victims.
Why not? Why would Shawn Sinisi and/or his family miss out on the gold rush?
Instead, the Sinisi family filed a lawsuit two years after Shawn's death in Philadelphia in 2020 but waited until March 12th of this year to notify the defendants in the case about the civil complaint in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.
The complaint is filed against Sandusky, the Second Mile, and Jack Raykovitz, former president, CEO and executive director of the Second Mile, and his wife, Katherine, who was the charity's executive vice president. In that lawsuit, Penn State is not listed as a defendant.
In the 77-page complaint, the lawyer for the Sinisis reprises the entire now-discredited narrative of the Penn State sex abuse scandal, complete with the alleged anal rape of a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State showers that was an invention of the fiction writers in the state attorney general's office, and the alleged cover up conducted by top Penn State officials, which was the invention of the authors of the Freeh Report.
On this blog, I have printed an 8,000 word summary of what really happened in the case, compiled from thousands of pages of court records, and hundreds of pages of confidential records that are still under seal.
It's a synopsis that thoroughly debunks the entire false narrative from start to finish. If you haven't read it previously, you might want to take a look.
The typical pattern with most of Sandusky's accusers was that they initially denied they'd been abused. And then they'd hire a lawyer, undergo scientifically-discredited recovered memory therapy, and then they'd say that the doors of their minds had been opened, and now they recalled all kinds of abuse that they had apparently forgotten about.
But nowhere in the 77-page complaint filed by the Sinisis does it mention any recovered memory therapy undergone by Shawn. While the complaint claims that Shawn Sinisi was alone when he was abused by Sandusky, the complaint never mentions Josh Sinisi, Shawn Sinisi's older brother, who, according to the three police reports was always with Shawn whenever they attended a Second Mile event, or stayed over at Sandusky's house.
The Civil Claim Filed By The Sinisis Against Sandusky
The complaint does state that in the summer of 2000, Shawn Sinisi, then eight years old, attended a summer camp sponsored by the Second Mile that was held on the Penn State campus.
That's in stark contrast to Shawn Sinisi's interview with Agent Sassano, when he states that he began attending Second Mile events in 2004, when he was approximately 12 years old.
The complaint is also in stark contrast with older brother Josh Sinisi's interview with Agent Sassano, where he stated he began attending Second Mile events in 2001, when he was a 12-year-old seventh grader.
But the complaint states that back in 2000, when Shawn was eight, that Sandusky "began to groom Shawn Sinisi to become a victim of his sexual assaults."
"During that summer camp, Sandusky would, among other things, swim in the pool with Shawn Sinisi and grope his genitalia," the lawsuit claims. The following summer, in 2001,Sandusky continued to sexually assault Shawn Sinisi, including while in the showers of the Lasch Building."
"Over the next several years, Sandusky continued to groom Shawn Sinisi, spend excessive time with Shawn Sinisi, purchase gifts for Shawn Sinisi and his family, and sexually assault and abuse Shawn Sinisi," the complaint states.
"Sandusky continued to invite Shawn Sinisi to events hosted by Penn State and The Second Mile; invited Shawn Sinisi to attend various sporting events as his guest, including Penn State, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Philadelphia Eagles football games; invited Shawn Sinisi to attend football camps hosted by Penn State and The Second Mile on various Penn State campuses; invited Shawn to his home in State College, Pennsylvania, where Shawn was encouraged to spend the night on numerous occasions; and invited Shawn Sinisi to Penn State athletic facilities in order to exercise and spend time with Sandusky."
"During these activities, Sandusky sexually assaulted Shawn Sinisi in various manners," the complaint states.
"As a direct and proximate result of the sexual abuse suffered by Shawn Sinisi at the hands of Sandusky, Shawn Sinisi began to utilize drugs and alcohol in order to manage and/or cope with the physical and emotional trauma, physical and mental pain, and other damages and injuries, as set forth above."
"Shawn Sinisi continued to utilize drugs and alcohol to manage and/or cope with the damages and/or injuries he suffered, as set forth above, until around or about September 4, 2018, when he overdosed on heroin and died," the complaint concludes.
"The death of Shawn Sinisi is a direct and proximate result of the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Sandusky."
The Problems With Sara Ganim's Reporting
Ganim, who, at 24, won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on Sandusky, was the beneficiary of many leaks about the supposedly secret grand jury investigation of Sandusky, leaks that would forever poison Sandusky's reputation, and deprive him of his right to a fair trial.
Ganim reported on a prior 1998 investigation into another Sandusky shower incident that turned out to be unfounded. Somebody in the know had leaked to Ganim a police report from the prior 1998 case that had turned up no crime, a police report that was supposed to be expunged.
Who gave Ganim that police report? There's a short list of suspects, a few of whom were employed by the state Attorney General's office.
In a 79-page diary compiled by former FBI Agent Kathleen McChesney, who was an investigator for former FBI Director Louis Freeh during his civil investigation into an alleged cover up at Penn State, McChesney recorded that one of the first documents that Freeh's investigators sought was a "1998 investigation report [that] has been provided," regarding the investigation of that first shower incident, a police report that was supposed to have been expunged.
On Jan. 4, 2012, McChesney wrote that during a meeting with investigator Anthony Sassano and another official from the state attorney general's office, she learned that the "1998 police report" was "out of sequence and filed in administrative rather than criminal." And that the Penn State police chief and the original investigator from the 1998 incident were the "only ones who knew."
McChesney recorded that the Freeh Group was going to notify deputy Attorney General Frank Fina that they wanted to interview Ronald Schreffler, the investigator from Penn State Police who probed the 1998 shower incident. After he was notified, McChesney wrote, "Fina approved interview with Schreffler."
Scrheffler became convinced that there was a leak in the state attorney general's grand jury investigation of Sandusky.
On March 12, 2012, the retired detective called Richard Sethman, one of Freeh's investigators.
What did Schreffler have to say? According to a confidential report from Sethman, the retired detective stated that "it has been clear to him from the beginning that there has been a leak of information in the attorney general's grand jury investigation of Sandusky."
How did Schreffler know that?
"In March of 2011," the report says, "Sara Ganim, a reporter for the Patriot News in Harrisburg came to his residence and asked pointed questions about the 1998 Sandusky investigation," Sethman wrote after his conversation with the retired detective.
"Ganim advised Schreffler that she had a copy of the Pennsylvania State University Police report. She made specific reference to what Schreffler had written in the report. Schreffler asked Ganim how she got a copy of the report but Ganim would not reveal her source."
Besides publishing grand jury leaks that permanently destroyed Sandusky's chances for a fair trial, Ganim also functioned during the secret grand jury probe of Sandusky as an official courier for the A.G.'s office.
According to a brief filed by Sandusky's appeal lawyers, at a time when the grand jury probe was struggling to find victims, and in danger of expiring, Ganim "approached the mother of accuser 6," Deb McCord, according to the testimony of State Police Corporal Joseph Leiter, and gave McCord the name and phone number for an investigator assigned to the attorney general's office.
Ganim, according to the brief, had a 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."
At Sandusky's trial, rather than have Ganim testify in court, the prosecutors from the state attorney general's office admitted in a legal stipulation that Ganim had acted as a messenger for the state attorney general's office by contacting McCord.
Another Bogus Ganim Scoop
In 2017, Ganim, then working for CNN, struck again with a highly prejudicial scoop that was the result of another leak.
Ganim claimed she had obtained a one-page police report about the 1998 shower incident that "bolsters evidence" that the late Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, "knew years before Jerry Sandusky's arrest that his longtime assistant might be abusing children."
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, which she never published, supposedly "lays out an account from whistleblower Mike McQueary," who was telling Paterno about the since-discredited story about the rape in the showers of 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."
As somebody who's read a lot of police reports, those are some pretty dramatic flourishes.
Here's the rest of the story, as reported by Ganim:
"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."
Ganim's 2017 scoop was immediately denounced as false by both the Paterno family and Sandusky's wife.
"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 [shower] 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," Dottie Sandusky wrote.
"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."
To sum up, this month marks the tenth anniversary of Sara Ganim's report of the illegal grand jury leak of the grand jury presentment that contained the false allegation that Jerry Sandusky had been by seen a lone witness raping a 10-year-old boy in the showers. The leak to Ganim set off the entire media firestorm over the alleged sex abuse scandal at Penn State.
Now on the tenth anniversary of that sorry event, Sara Ganim has taken it upon herself to provide all of us with a fresh example of how, when it comes to Jerry Sandusky, her reporting can't be trusted.
Schultz and Curley both wanted new trials.
Curley had the right idea, but execution a little off.
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.
After 8 p.m., the judge finally relented and dismissed the jury for the evening.
You have claimed he is innocent before along with @PSU2UNC .
It was not and did not.
Nope
Wasn't a lie.
Disagree.
I do not know if he is guilty or not.
I do know his trial was unfair.
I do know that the GJP was written with an intentional lie within it.
It is deeply discouraging and sad that one cannot trust the legal system in this state.
Place the false narrators on ignore. They contribute nothing.
Just look at the obvious connection between Freeh and Snedden.
What if everything you thought you knew about the so-called Penn State sex abuse scandal wasn't true?
What if that infamous locker room incident that Mike McQueary supposedly witnessed 16 years ago -- featuring a naked Jerry Sandusky cavorting in the showers with an underage boy -- had nothing to do with sex? And what if the only two officials at PSU who ever spoke directly to former PSU President Graham Spanier about that incident really did describe it as just "horseplay" and not sex?
And what if the guy advancing this contrarian story line was not some crackpot conspiracy theorist, but a decorated U.S. special agent? A guy who had already done a top-secret federal investigation five years ago into the so-called Penn State scandal but nobody knew about it until now?
There would be no pedophilia scandal at Penn State to cover up. And no trio of top PSU officials to convict of child endangerment. The whole lurid saga starring a naked Jerry Sandusky sexually abusing little boys in the shower would be fake news. A hoax foisted on the public by an unholy trio of overzealous prosecutors, lazy and gullible reporters, and greedy plaintiff's lawyers.
Yesterday, on veteran TV reporter John Ziegler's podcast, John Snedden, a former NCIS agent who is a special agent for the Federal Investigative Services, talked about his six-month top secret investigation of Graham Spanier and PSU.
Back in 2012, at a time when nobody at Penn State was talking, Snedden showed up in Happy Valley and interviewed everybody that mattered.
Because Snedden was on a mission of the highest importance on behalf of the federal government. Special Agent Snedden had to decide whether Graham Spanier's high-level security clearance should be renewed amid widespread public accusations of a coverup.
And what did Snedden find?
"There was no coverup," Snedden flatly declared on Ziegler's podcast. "There was no conspiracy. There was nothing to cover up."
The whole world could have already known by now about John Snedden's top secret investigation of Spanier and PSU. That's because Snedden was scheduled to be the star witness at the trial last week of former Penn State President Graham Spanier.
But at the last minute, Spanier's legal team decided that the government's case was so lame that they didn't even have to put on a defense. Spanier's defense team didn't call one witness before resting their case.
On Ziegler's podcast, "The World According To Zig," the reporter raged about that decision, calling Spanier's lawyers "a bunch of wussies" who set their client up for a fall.
Indeed, the defenseless Spanier was convicted by a Dauphin County jury on just one misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child. But the jury also found Spanier not guilty on two felony counts. Yesterday, I asked Samuel W. Silver, the Philadelphia lawyer who was Spanier's lead defender, why they decided not to put Snedden on the stand.
"No, cannot share that," he responded in an email. "Sorry."
On Ziegler's podcast, Snedden, who was on the witness list for the Spanier trial, expressed his disappointment about not getting a chance to testify.
"I tried to contact the legal team the night before," Snedden said. "They were going to call me back. I subsequently got an email [saying] that they chose not to use my testimony that day."
When Snedden called Spanier's lawyers back, Snedden said on the podcast, the lawyers told him he
wasn't going to be called as a witness "not today or not ever. They indicated that they had chosen to go a minimalistic route," Snedden said.
What may have been behind the lawyers' decision, Snedden said, was some legal "intel" -- namely that jurors in the Mike McQueary libel case against Penn State, which resulted in a disasterous $12 million verdict against the university, supposedly "didn't like Spanier at all."
"The sad part is that if I were to have testified all the interviews I did would have gone in" as evidence, Snedden said. "And I certainly think the jury should have heard all of that."
So what happened with Spanier's high-level clearance which was above top-secret -- [SCI -- Sensitive Compartmented Information] -- Ziegler asked Snedden.
"It was renewed," Snedden said, after he put Spanier under oath and questioned him for eight hours.
In his analysis of what actually happened at Penn State, Snedden said, there was "some degree of political maneuvering there."
"The governor took an active role," Snedden said, referring to former Gov. Tom Corbett. "He had not previously done so," Snedden said, "until this occurred."
As the special agent wrote in his 110-page report:
"In March 2011 [Gov.] Corbett proposed a 52 percent cut in PSU funding," Snedden wrote. "Spanier fought back," publicly declaring the governor's proposed cutback "the largest ever proposed and that it would be devastating" to Penn State.
At his trial last week, Graham Spanier didn't take the witness stand. But under oath while talking to Snedden back in 2012, Spanier had plenty to say.
"[Spanier] feels that his departure from the position as PSU president was retribution by Gov. Corbett against [Spanier] for having spoken out about the proposed PSU budget cuts," Snedden wrote.
"[Spanier] believes that the governor pressured the PSU BOT [Board of Trustees] to have [Spanier] leave. And the governor's motivation was the governor's displeasure that [Spanier] and [former Penn State football coach Joe] Paterno were more popular with the people of Pennylvania than was the governor."
As far as Snedden was concerned, a political battle between Spanier and Gov. Corbett, and unfounded accusations of a coverup, did not warrant revoking Spanier's high-level security clearance. The special agent concluded his six-month investigation of the PSU scandal by renewing the clearance and giving Spanier a ringing endorsement.
"The circumstances surrounding subject's departure from his position as PSU president do not cast doubt on subject's current reliability, trustworthiness or good judgment and do not cast doubt on his ability to properly safeguard national security information," Snedden wrote about Spanier.
At the time Snedden interviewed the key people at Penn State, former athletic director Tim Curley and former PSU VP Gary Schultz were already under indictment.
Spanier was next in the sights of prosecutors from the attorney general's office. And former FBI Director Louie Freeh was about to release his report that said there was a coverup at Penn State masterminded by Spanier, Curley and Schultz, with an assist from Joe Paterno.
Snedden, however, wasn't buying into Freeh's conspiracy theory that reigns today in the mainstream media, the court of public opinion, and in the minds of jurors in the Spanier case.
"I did not find any indication of any coverup," Snedden told Ziegler on the podcast. He added that he did not find "any indication of any conspiracy, or anything to cover up."
Snedden also said that Cynthia Baldwin, Penn State's former general counsel, "provided information to me inconsistent to what she provided to the state." Baldwin told Snedden that "Gov. Corbett was very unhappy" with Spanier because he "took the lead in fighting the governor's proposed budget cuts to PSU."
That, of course, was before the prosecutors turned Baldwin into a cooperating witness. The attorney-client privilege went out the window. And Baldwin began testifying against Spanier, Curley and Schultz.
But as far as Snedden was concerned, "Dr. Spanier was very forthcoming, he wanted to get everything out," Snedden said.
"Isn't possible that he just duped you," Ziegler asked.
"No," Snedden deadpanned. "I can pretty well determine which way we're going on an interview." Even though he was a Penn State alumni, Snedden said, his mission was to find the truth.
"I am a Navy veteran," Snedden said. "You're talking about a potential risk to national security" if Spanier was deemed untrustworthy. Instead, "He was very forthcoming," Snedden said of Spanier. "He answered every question."
On the podcast, Ziegler asked Snedden if he turned up any evidence during his investigation that Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile.
"It was not sexual," Snedden said about what Mike McQueary allegedly heard and saw in the Penn State showers, before the prosecutors got through hyping the story, with the full cooperation of the media. "It was not sexual," Snedden insisted. "Nothing at all relative to a sexual circumstance. Nothing."
About PSU's top administrators, Snedden said, "They had no information that would make a person believe" that Sandusky was a pedophile.
"Gary Schultz was pretty clear as to what he was told and what he wasn't told," Snedden said. "What he was told was nothing was of a sexual nature."
As for Joe Paterno, Snedden said, "His involvement was very minimal in passing it [McQueary's account of the shower incident] to the people he reported to," meaning Schultz and Curley.
Spanier, 68, who was born in Cape Town, South Africa, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1955. When Snedden interviewed Spanier, he couldn't recall the exact date that he was approached by Curley and Schultz with the news about the shower incident supposedly witnessed by McQueary.
It was "approximately in the early 2000 decade," Snedden wrote, when Spanier recalled being approached by Schultz and Curley in between university meetings. The two PSU administrators told Spanier they wanted to give him a "head's up" about a report they had received from Joe Paterno.
"A staff member," Snedden wrote, "had seen Jerry Sandusky in the locker room after a work out showering with one of his Second Mile kids. [Spanier] knew at the time that Jerry Sandusky was very involved with the Second Mile charity," Snedden wrote. "And, at that time, [Spanier] believed that it only involved high school kids. [Spanier] has since learned that the charity involves younger disadvantaged children."
Because it was Spanier's "understanding at that time that the charity only involved high school kids it did not send off any alarms," Snedden wrote. Then the prosecutors and their friends in the media went to work.
"Curley and Schultz said that the person who had given the report was not sure what he had seen but that they were concerned about the situation with the kid in the shower," Snedden wrote.
Curley and Schultz told Spanier that the person who had given the report "was not sure what he saw because it was around the corner and that what he has reported was described as "horse play" or "horsing around." In his report, Snedden said that Spanier "assumed the terminology of horse play or horsing around came from Joe Paterno."
"They all agreed that Curley would talk to Jerry Sandusky, tell him not to bring kids into the locker room facilities," Snedden wrote. "And Curley was to tell the Second Mile management that it was not good for any of the Second Mile kids to come to the athletic locker room facilities, and that they should suspend that practice."
Spanier, Snedden wrote, never was told "who the person was who made the report. But "nothing was described as a sexual or criminal in any way," Snedden wrote.
The initial conversation between Spanier, Curley and Schultz about the Sandusky shower incident lasted 10 minutes, Snedden wrote. A few days later, Curley told Spanier "in person that the discussion had taken place and that everything went well."
"The issue never came up again with Curley, Schultz, Paterno, Sandusky, or anyone," Snedden wrote. "It did not appear very significant to anyone at the time."
Gary Schultz corroborated Spanier's account. Schultz told Snedden that back in February 2001, Tim Curley told him "something to the effect that Jerry Sandusky had been in the shower with a kid horsing around and wrestling. And Mike McQueary or a graduate assistant walked in and observed it. And McQueary or the graduate assistant was concerned."
Schultz believed the source of Curley's information was Joe Paterno, and that the conduct involved was horseplay.
"McQueary did not say anything of a sexual nature took place," Snedden wrote after interviewing Schultz. "McQueary did not say anything indicative of an incident of a serious sexual nature."
While Snedden was investigating Spanier, Louie Freeh was writing his overpriced $8.3 million report where he came to the opposite conclusion that Snedden did, that there was a coverup at Penn State. Only Louie Freeh didn't talk to Curley, Schultz, Paterno, McQueary or Sandusky. Freeh only talked to Spanier relatively briefly, at the end of his investigation, when he had presumably already come to his conclusions.
Ironically, one of the things Spanier told Freeh was that Snedden was also investigating what happened at Penn State. But that didn't seem to effect the conclusions of the Louie Freeh report, Snedden said. He wondered why.
He also wondered why his report had no effect on the attorney general's office, which had already indicted Curley and Schultz, and was planning to indict Spanier.
"I certainly think that if the powers that be . . . knew what was in his report, Snedden said, "They would certainly have to take a hard look at what they were doing."
Freeh and the AG, Snedden said, should have wanted to know "who was interviewed [by Sneddedn] and what did they say. I mean this is kind of pertinent to what we're doing," Snedden said of the investigations conducted by Freeh and the AG.
"If your goal in any investigation is to determine the facts of the case period, the circumstance should have been hey, we'll be happy to obtain any and all facts," Snedden said.
Snedden said he understood, however, why Freeh was uninterested in his report.
"It doesn't fit the narrative that he's [Louie Freeh] going for," Snedden said.
Freeh was on a tight deadline, Ziegler reminded Snedden. Freeh had to get his report out at a highly-anticipated press conference. And the Freeh report had to come out before the start of the football season. So the NCAA could drop the hammer on Penn State.
"He [Freeh] doesn't have time to read a hundred page report," Snedden said. He agreed with Ziegler that the whole disclosure of the Freeh report was "orchestrated" to come out right before the football season started.
It may have been good timing for the news media and the NCAA, Snedden said about the release of the Louie Freeh report. But it didn't make much sense from an investigator's point of view.
"I just don't understand why," Snedden told Ziegler, "why would you ignore more evidence. Either side that it lands on, why would you ignore it?"
Good question.
Snedden was aghast about the cost of the Louie Freeh report. His six-month federal investigation, Snedden said, "probably cost the federal government and the taxpayers $50,000 at the most. And he [Freeh] spent $8.3 million," Snedden said. "Unbelievable."
In a statement released March 24th, Freeh hailed the conviction of Spanier as having confirmed and verified "all the findings and facts" of the Freeh report. On Ziegler's podcast, however, Snedden was dismissive of Freeh's statement.
"It's like a preemptive strike to divert people's attention from the actual conviction for a misdemeanor," Snedden said about Freeh. Along with the fact that he jury found "no cover up no conspiracy," Snedden said.
"In a rational world Louie Freeh is completely discredited," Ziegler said. "The Freeh report is a joke." On the podcast, Ziegler ripped the "mainstream media morons" who said that the jury verdict vindicated Freeh.
"Which is horrendous," Snedden added.
Ziegler asked Snedden if he had any doubt that an innocent man was convicted last week.
"That's what I believe, one hundred percent," Snedden said about the "insane jury verdict."
About the Penn State scandal, Snedden said, "I've got to say it needs to be examined thoroughly and it needs to be examined by a competent law enforcement authority." And that's a law enforcement authority that "doesn't have any political connections with anybody on the boards of trustees when this thing hit the fan."
As for Snedden, he left the Penn State campus thinking, "Where is the crime?"
"This case has been all about emotion," Ziegler said. "It was never about facts."
"Exactly," Snedden said.
As someone who has spent the past five years investigating the "Billy Doe" case, I can testify that when the subject is sex abuse, and the media is involved, the next stop is the Twilight Zone. Where hysteria reigns, and logic and common sense go out the window.
Earlier in the podcast, Ziegler talked about the "dog and pony show" put on by the prosecution at the Spanier trial. It's a good example of what happens once you've entered the Twilight Zone.
At the Spanier trial, the 28-year-old known as Victim No. 5 was sworn in as a witness in the judge's chambers. When the jury came out, they were surprised to see Victim No. 5 already seated on the witness stand.
As extra sheriff's deputies patrolled the courtroom, the judge announced to the jury that the next witness would be referred to as "John Doe."
I was in the courtroom that day, and I thought the hoopla over Victim No. 5's appearance was bizarre and prejudicial to the case. In several sex abuse trials that I have covered in Philadelphia, the victim's real name was always used in court, starting from the moment when he or she was sworn in in the courtroom as a witness.
The judges and the prosecutors could always count on the media to censor itself, by not printing the real names of alleged victims out of some misguided social justice policy that borders on lunacy. At the exact same time they're hanging the defendants out to dry.
Talk about rigging a contest by what's supposed to be an impartial media.
At the Spanier trial, the prosecutor proceeded to place a box of Kleenex next to the witness stand. John Doe seemed composed until the prosecutor asked if he had ever been sexually abused. Right on cue, the witness started whimpering.
"Yes," he said.
By whom, the prosecutor asked.
By Jerry Sandusky, John Doe said, continuing to whimper.
The actual details of the alleged sex abuse were never explained. The jury could have left the courtroom believing that Victim No. 5 had been sexually assaulted or raped.
But the sexual abuse Victim No. 5 was allegedly subjected to was that Sandusky allegedly soaped the boy up in the shower and may have touched his penis.
For that alleged abuse, Victim No. 5 collected $8 million.
I kid you not.
There was also much confusion over the date of the abuse.
First, John Doe said that the abuse took place when he was 10 years old, back in 1998. Then, the victim changed his story to say he was abused the first time he met Sandusky, back when he was 12 or 13 years old, in 2000 or 2001, but definitely before 9/11, because he could never forget 9/11. Next, the victim said that he was abused after 9/11, when he would have been 14.
At the Spanier trial, the prosecution used "John Doe" or Victim No. 5 for one main purpose: to prove to the jury that he had been abused after the infamous Mike McQueary shower incident of February, 2001. To show the jury that more victims were abused after Spanier, Curley and Schultz had decided to initiate their alleged coverup following the February 2001 shower incident.
But there was only one problem. To prove John Doe had a relationship with Sandusky, the prosecution introduced as an exhibit a photo taken of the victim with Sandusky.
Keep in mind it was John Doe/Victim No. 5's previous testimony that Sandusky abused him at their first meeting. The only problem, as Ziegler disclosed on his podcast, was the photo of Victim No. 5 was taken from a book, "Touched, The Jerry Sandusky Story," by Jerry Sandusky. And according to Amazon, that book was published on Nov. 17, 2000.
Three months before the alleged shower incident witnessed by Mike McQueary. Meaning that in a real world where facts matter, John Doe/Victim No. 5 was totally irrelevant to the case.
It was the kind of thing that a defense lawyer would typically jump on during cross-examination, confusion over the date of the abuse. Excuse me, Mr. Doe, we all know you have suffered terribly, but when did the abuse happen? Was it in 1998, or was it 2000, or 2001 or even 2002? And hey, what's the deal with that photo?
But the Spanier trial was conducted in the Twilight Zone. Spanier's lawyers chose not to ask a single question of John Doe. As Samuel W. Silver explained why to the jury in his closing statement: he did not want to add to the suffering of a sainted victim of sex abuse by subjecting him to cross-examination. Like you would have done with any normal human being when the freedom of your client was at stake.
That left Spanier in the Twilight Zone, where he was convicted by a jury on one count of endangering the welfare of a child.
To add to the curious nature of the conviction, the statute of limitations for endangering the welfare of a child is two years. But the incident that Spanier, Schultz and Curley were accused of covering up, the infamous Mike McQueary shower incident, happened back in 2001.
At the Spanier trial, the prosecution was only able to try the defendant on a charge that had long ago expired by throwing in a conspiracy charge. In theory, that meant that the defendant and his co-conspirators could still be prosecuted, because they'd allegedly been engaging in a pattern of illegal conduct over sixteen years -- the coverup that never happened --- which kept the original child endangerment charge on artificial respiration until the jury could decide the issue.
But the jury found Spanier not guilty on the conspiracy charge. And they also found Spanier not guilty of engaging in a continuing course of [criminal] conduct.
That means that Spanier was convicted on a single misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child, dating back to 2001. A crime that the statute of limitations had long ago expired on.
On this issue, Silver was willing to express an opinion.
"We certainly will be pursuing the statute of limitations as one of our post-trial issues," he wrote in an email.
You and @PSU2UNC have said he was innocent before.
It was not and has withstood all appeals.
It was not. MM told the OAG he thought he saw Anal Sodomy.
It is deeply disturbing and sad that some people continue to support a convicted pedophile and his convicted enablers because of love for a football team and a dead coach. Priorities are really messed up.
Dude you need to get a hobby - sicne you are a Noles fan i am sure it will have some form of cheating - The Joe/Sandusky incident is in the far past - hopefully all the victims can try to heal - maybe you should mosy over the the Michigan State board and ask about Nasser and their schools cover up.
Replying to wackanole bullshit is exactly what he wants. Put the pud on ignore.
The fact that you think you do know he was guilty is even more concerning. There's enough reasonable doubt, conflicts of interest and prosecutorial misconduct in this mess to free half the prisoners on death row.
Wow....the Onion just came out with "favorite comfort foods by state". For example, Arkansas is twice tortured chicken. PA's? Jerry Sandusky's Famous Tuna Noodle Casserole.
www.theonion.com
Favorite Snack In Every State
Americans all across the country love to stuff their dumb ****ing faces. The Onion examines the favorite snack in every state.
www.theonion.com
This is one of many many hobbies don't you know. Cheating at FSU? LOL They never covered up for a pedophile. Why do you guys keep trying to defend CSS and Joe. Accept the guilt, take your medicine, realize that you never were as righteous as you thought and move on.
You probably think OJ was innocent too
Listen you creating this false narrative about it being on the legal system (it's not) to distract from Penn State and Paterno's involvement. You pretend he might be innocent because that's the only thing that nationally restores Joe's legacy. This is all bias from you.
The BOT was protecting themselves, family and friends due to their involvement with TSM. Under the by laws of TSM, they would be personally responsible for any criminal activity.
These turds made a lot of money providing goods and services to TSM.
I think you nailed it. The media was in such an uproar, the effort was to save your ass. PSU was the deep pocket used to make it go away and JVP/C/S/C were the scapegoats.
