Update on Malcolm Gladwell's book "Talking to Strangers"
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John Horgan refers to Frederick Crews as a literary scholar and calls his essay fascinating where Crews says that Gladwell treated Jerry Sandusky unfairly in "Talking to Strangers."
Very interesting article, I believe by Jerry Coyne titled "The case of Malcolm Gladwell vs. Jerry Sandusky" that discusses Frederick Crew's essay criticizing Gladwell not going far enough in exonerating Sandusky in his book "Talking to Strangers." Coyne strongly recommend's reading Crews's essay and mentions the following exculpatory factors for Sandusky that Crews identifies.
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Read Crews’s article to see how Gladwell, despite having hit on exculpatory factors for Sandusky, tiptoes around the issue. Here are some of the concerns raised by Crews and others:
1.) “The boy in the shower”, the linchpin of the case against Sandusky, swore in a written statement to Sandusky’s attorney that no sexual contact had occurred. After he hired a lawyer, the boy (now older) recanted. This may be because he wanted a slice of the generous settlement offered by Penn State to Sandusky’s victims—a settlement that turned out to be about $140 million, making any claimed victim a multimillionaire.
2.) None of the eight boys who eventually said they were molested by Sandusky ever told anyone about his misconduct before they spoke to police, and many continued to associate with him in the interim.
3.) Some of the accusations, like Sandusky locking a boy in the basement for three days and repeatedly raping him, with Sandusky’s wife, one floor above and oblivious to the screams, strain credulity.
4.) Some or all of the boys (it’s not clear from the piece) were subject to “recovered memory therapy”, and didn’t remember the molestations until therapists “helped” them remember the details.
The above is only a sample of other exculpatory data offered by Crews.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpres...jerry-sandusky/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
The interview is where he suggests his Dottie theory. He is also says some porn was found on Sandusky, but then why wasn’t it presented as evidence at trial?
One of their biggest mistakes was not having McQueary document exactly what happened in the shower.
I don’t believe that McQueary knew exactly what happened in the shower. It is my understanding that Curley, Schultz, and Dr. Dranov all asked Mike in 2001 what he saw in the shower and Mike was unable to say what he witnessed and did not say he witnessed a sexual assault.
Who needs to use the real evidence when you can make sh!t up.
What?? Seriously....
In an 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.
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.
Of course innocent people "regret" having to plea to a misdemeanor to avoid having to go to court to defend themselves against much more severe felony charges of a clearly corrupt and out-of-control prosecuting govt law-enforcement agency (the Pennsylvania AG in this case, the most powerful law-enforcement agency in the State) - that is the nature of "tyranny" and why our forefathers literally put their lives and all their possessions on the line committing to one another to fight to the death if necessary, so they - nor future generations of Americans - would have to live under this horrendous and immoral condition.
It amazes me that people can sit here and blithely ask such ridiculous questions rather than thank their lucky stars they have not been targeted by Pennsylvania's corrupt and broken political system (which includes both the Pennsylvania AG and Court System).... rather than be appauled at the tyrannous highly-threatening and corrupt tactics used to leverage these pleas from clearly innocent parties. It is beyond provable that the AG intentionally made false statements (i.e., lied, prevaricated, etc...) in the "Presentment Statement of Facts" (making it more accurately a "Presentment Statement of Lies"). The prosecution released this information to the public (early it turns out against the law) which completely poisoned the Jury Pool across the entire State as theses INTENTIONAL AND TYRANOUS FALSEHOODS were established in public consciousness prior to any defendants opportunity for a fair trial (and the Pennsylvania AG absolutely coordinated a National Press Conference for this purpose including having every major national broadcaster at their PC which was nothing more than the AG raising a "lynch mob" for their witchhunt using their completely bullshit, corrupt and tyrannous "Presentment Statement of Lies" and the indictments predicated upon it.).
If it had been a bigger deal, I suspect they would have. But considering Captain Swim Trunks didn't think there was a victim either.....
Pinkhippo PeanutButter said:
Which manager are you talking about... Raykovitz? Because the admins at PSU were not managers, they were executives... who are way busier, with way more responsibility than a lowly manager. When a guy tells them a story that seems like nothing, especially since what he saw didn't warrant a call to the police by himself or Dranov, and you pass that info outside the university to a properly trained manager with responsibility for the teen and Sandusky... I'm not surprised that they didn't take the time to document "nothing".
I'm going to assume your answers based on what I believe to be common sense, you can correct me if I am wrong.
- If you were accused of a crime you didn't commit, and walked into a kangaroo court and were instantly declared guilty, would you be satisfied? Would you say "aww shucks, I didn't commit the crime, but at least I had my day in court"? - Assumed answer: You would not be satisfied, you would not feel like you "had your day in court", even though you literally spent your day in court.
- You are 100% literal on this one? They (some random person) set foot in a court, had some form of trial with an outcome? So you have no assumption that the person (not Sandusky) had a fair trial? - Assumed answer: The person had a fair trial, and not that they literally just set foot in a courtroom.
Every time I read, see and think about this it makes my blood boil.
It is this crap right here the reason why a lot of this thread has defended the notion that Tim Curley is Guilty. It is a gross miscarriage of justice. If one wants to go to their grave believing and asserting he is guilty, have at it. You would be 100% wrong.
That email exchange just boggles the mind. The weak-minded McQueary was “coached up” by the prosecution. There is very little doubt about that.
Without the "anal intercourse" allegation, this would have never become a PSU scandal. Joe would have been deemed to have done exactly what he was supposed to have done. Tim's and Gary's testimonies would have been believed. More importantly, their actions would have been seen as perfectly reasonable. There would have been no grounds for any of the charges and they would have been available to testify on Sandusky's behalf. Spanier would have been spared any of this and Joe would have retired with the honor he deserved.
When you think of that email exchange and couple it with the stage show the OAG put on at the press conference, it's hard not to think PSU was implicated deliberately.
Regardless of Jerry's guilt or innocence, there's another story here and the OGBOT's behavior, including their commission of the Freeh report, is central to understanding what this has been all about. Rolling over as it did, PSU gave the press free rein to write anything it wanted. Who brought in Lanny Davis and what was his role in their actions?
Tom Corbett's fingerprints are everywhere. Why aren't we talking about that?
Professor Crews's essay is indeed fascinating. I would encourage everyone who is interested in developing an informed opinion of whether or not the OAG fed the public false narratives to read the essay. The following excerpt is Crews's response to the I believe the accusers who testified at trial, they couldn't all be lying. Crews concluded that they are all not credible!
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“I grant you all this,” some readers will say, “but what about the eight accusers who swore that Sandusky had molested them on multiple occasions? Their testimony, after all, is what put him in prison, and no amount of horseplay in the shower can gainsay it.”
Agreed. But that testimony would have looked unbelievable without the poison cloud of revulsion that enveloped it. Not one of Sandusky’s accusers, to begin with, had ever told anyone about misconduct on his part. More tellingly, most of them had remained on cordial terms with him, and some had even volunteered expressions of gratitude for his help in steering them away from trouble. They could hardly have said that about their serial rapist. And even after alleging subjection to brutal assaults, no former Second Miler could bring himself to claim that Sandusky’s many exhortations to clean living had been hypocritical. It was as if, absurdly, the young men needed to charge him with awful crimes but persisted even now in remembering him as their kindly protector.
The testimony that sealed Sandusky’s fate had been carefully shaped by attorneys who wished to remove anomalies and contradictions from their clients’ initial reports. Courtroom embarrassment was further minimized by having each young man concisely assent to propositions that would be read aloud to him. Even so, jurors who hadn’t already made up their minds (but there weren’t any!) would have been taken aback by stark implausibilities among the charges.
One accuser, Aaron Fisher, affirmed the claim that Sandusky had forced oral copulation on him more than twenty-five times. Another, Brett Houtz, attested to over forty violent assaults, occurring two or three times weekly. A third, Sabastian Paden, was supposedly molested in Sandusky’s home about 150 times. On one occasion Sandusky was said to have locked Paden in the basement for three days, starving him and raping him anally and orally while Dottie Sandusky, one floor above, ignored his screams. But all of those contentions were ludicrous on their face. What could have motivated rape victims to keep rejoining their tormentor and undergoing more of the same?
Even the most gullible jurors, one might think, would have wanted to know why several hostile witnesses had at first denied that Sandusky had done anything improper with them. Shouldn’t the timely denials, proffered without external pressure, count more heavily than later avowals scripted for judicial victory? To this objection, however, the prosecutors and their witnesses had a ready answer. The boys, it was said, had repressed their memories of abuse, and just recently they had retrieved those same memories.
It is this aspect of the case that drew the interest of the psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Richard Leo, who understand that the theory of repression lacks any scientific credit. To them, belated “recollections” such as Sabastian Paden’s tale of a three-day sadistic kidnapping bore every mark of the dreamlike pseudomemories typically conjured by patients of recovered memory therapists. Paden may simply have been lying, of course. But the authorities who targeted Sandusky were indeed working in tandem with memory enhancers. One of them subjected his patient, Aaron Fisher, to months of daily brainwashing until Fisher more or less “recalled,” or pretended to recall, scenes of violation. “It wasn’t until I was fifteen and started seeing [therapist] Mike [Gillum],” wrote Fisher, “that I realized the horror.”
Other memories were refreshed as it became apparent that any new claims against Sandusky were likely to be believed. “I tried to block this out of my brain for years,” one turncoat declared. Another reflected, “That doorway that I had closed has since been reopening more.” A third stated, ”I have spent, you know, so many years burying this in the back of my head forever.” And after Sandusky was remanded to prison, Pennsylvania’s attorney general at the time, Linda Kelly, congratulated the ex-Second Milers for having dredged their damning scenes from the unconscious. “It was incredibly difficult,” she pronounced, “for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”
The one major question that remains is what induced beneficiaries of Sandusky’s kindness to betray him so cruelly. Ziegler and Pendergrast know the answer — but so does Gladwell. “According to Ziegler’s reporting,” he remarks in the middle of a long endnote, where it will escape most readers’ attention, “at least some of Sandusky’s victims are not credible. They appear to have been attracted by the large cash settlements that Penn State was offering and the relatively lax criteria the university used for deciding who would get paid.”
“Some of Sandusky’s victims”? No, all of them. In a paroxysm of needless remorse,the Penn State trustees had broadcast the availability of a vast compensation fund that would eventually approach $140 million. An incentive was thus created for any young man who had once been helped by Sandusky, and even for some who had never met him, to spin a preposterous yarn and become an overnight multi-millionaire. And that is exactly what happened — for example, with the lawyered-up shower boy, Allan Myers. At last count, some thirty-five applicants, feigning PTSD at Sandusky’s hands, had availed themselves of Penn State’s princely largesse.
Ironically, the hounding of Jerry Sandusky could have perfectly illustrated the second half of Gladwell’s argument: once someone has been demonized, his whole record will be held against him. Sandusky had titled his autobiography Touched — surely a mark of pedophilia. What devilish impudence he had shown, furthermore, in publishing photographs of himself surrounded by happy eleven-year-olds! All of his assistance to at-risk children, such as adopting six of them (of both sexes) and raising them to be studious, self-disciplined, and drug free, was now reconfigured as grooming.
It's incredible that an institution the size of PSU didn't have (or decided not to follow) a whistleblower policy. Most companies with 100 employees have such things where reports and resolution of such reports are clearly documented. Think how different things would have turned out if there was a clear record of what MM actually said to C&S and why they made the decision to handle things the way they did.
You're still acting like this was on the up and up. PSU was set up!
The answers you seek are in the notes and emails and corroborated, not only by their own testimonies, but also by Raykovitz's suggestion that Jerry wear swim trunks in the shower and Allan Meyer's unsolicited statement to Amendola.
For C/S/S, this was all about prevention. They managed what was in their control, which was the PSU facilities. Beyond that, it this was all TSM's responsibility.
How is Spanier still fighting for his freedom, while Jack Raykovitz has not been charged with a thing?
I think @UncleLar’s point is that Schultz &/or Curly should have procured a documented witness statement with a signature — and FWIW I absolutely agree with this point.
If you think you need to go that far, in my judgment you Instead just call the authorities (CSA, DPW, police, take your pick) and let them handle it. Based on what they knew at the time, they all decided they didn’t need to go that far. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m sure they wish they had.
Instead of talking about what C/S/S should have done differently, maybe we should be talking about what Mike should have done differently?
I'm not sure having a signed statement by Mike is useful. Think of everything that's happened in this case... do you think that would change anything?
It might have helped on the margin, not sure, but I think the lynch mob would be saying something like “if you felt like you needed to take the VERY unusual step of getting this signed witness statement from an employee saying there was no sexual abuse witnessed, why didn’t you just call the “experts” at CSA or the police and let them decide what to do?”.
For all we know, maybe they did take notes and were just misplaced at some point. Or perhaps the OAG destroyed them because they hurt their case? It would not surprise me since it is likely they ignored the rest of Schultz’s notes and emails in 2010/11 (so they could pretend the incident happened in 2002 and would not run into statute of limitations challenges). But then only claimed the discovered Schultz’s “secret file” in 2012 after Sandusky’s already objected to the 2002 date!
Without the fabricated "anal intercourse" allegation, there would have been no lynch mob.
Or they would have fabricated a story saying he was coerced into signing it. It's just like what they would have done if Joe had 'done more'... "why didn't he just report it up the chain and step aside?!?!?!" They will make up any excuse to blame PSU/Paterno, it's quite sad really.
Your "understanding" and reality are two far different things. And this horse is not only dead but now resembles ground meat. Get a life.
Agreed, but I contend that Mike didn't know what happened until the OAG gave him the script.
And even that allegation needed the appearance of the "immaculate stool." LOL
One reality we all understand is that you are a useless idiot. You don’t just resemble one, you are one. Trust me on this.
Mike spoke to Joe for about a minute......I believe Sue has spoken on this. Is she part of the "cover up?" LOL All of this and its still very possible that MM's report to Joe came weeks after the incident.
We're on the same page (110%) about the hindsight thing, though I disagree that documentation=report to authorities.
Fact 9: If MM wasn't running his mouth on a message board about privileged information WHILE HE WAS A COACH ON A D 1 FOOTBALL TEAM, I think this mess would be a whole lot clearer.
Considering that what was reported in 2000/2001/2002 remains very much in dispute to this day and in all likelihood shall remain so in perpetuity? I absolutely and unequivocally believe it would have changed everything.
