This will not move the needle even remotely in the slightest.
NOTHING will change the narrative.
True
The CNN story, Snedden said, is the product of either "trying to either cover your ass or bolster your position. It appears to me that she [Ganim] doesn't even go through the motions of asking if it's accurate."
John Ziegler, a reporter who has covered the Penn State story for years, was even harsher in his assessment of Ganim's work.
"This one [Ganim's new story] is the biggest piece of crap yet," Ziegler said. "Ganim is pretending that we don't know" about the 1998 shower incident, Ziegler said. "If she was at the [Sandusky] trial she would know that what she's reporting is ancient news. It's got cobwebs on it."
Ziegler went at Ganim's work from another angle -- logic.
"This is actually exculpatory," Ziegler said about Ganim's latest scoop.
When McQueary is telling Joe about the 1998 shower incident, which is almost identical to the 2001 shower incident, Ziegler said, "Joe is immediately flashing back to 1998."
"That tells us that McQueary never said anything [to Paterno] about a sexual assault because Joe already knows that 1998 [the first alleged shower incident] is a nothing burger," Ziegler said. "Had McQueary actually said something about a sexual assault Joe would have never connected it to 1998, because the [Centre County] D.A. had already cleared Sandusky."
Ziegler said he has come to the conclusion that Ganim "was a very ambitious and also very naive or stupid person who got used" by the prosecutors in the Sandusky case to basically "put out a Craig's list ad" for more victims of sexual abuse.
Ziegler said that Ganim's story goes beyond any claims of the prosecutors. Former Chief Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina, the lead prosecutor in the Sandusky case, went on 60 Minutes Sports in 2013 and declared that there was no evidence that Joe Paterno had ever participated in a cover up.
"I did not find that evidence," Fina said on 60 Minutes
Sports.
"It does reek of deception," Ziegler said about Ganim's latest effort to prop up the official Penn State story line. "They have to be worried about something," Ziegler said, who devoted a
podcast to it. "This story makes me think that even she doubts it."
Mark Pendergrast, an author who has written a book about Jerry Sandusky,
The Most Hated Man In America; Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, said that McQueary "
revised his memory a decade after the Feb. 2001 shower incident, in which he heard slapping sounds but did not see Sandusky and a boy in the shower -- he only fleetingly saw a boy, in the
mirror."
McQueary's "memory of his meeting with Paterno in 2001was also subject to revisions and this appears to be more evidence of that," Pendergrast wrote in an email. "In other words, this is Sara Ganim once more raising a non-issue based on Mike McQueary's revised memory, and referring as well to highly questionable anonymous allegations dating back to the 1970s."
The 1970s alleged victims
In May 2016, Ganim
reported on CNN that a man who claimed to have been sexually abused by Sandusky at a rest stop after he was picked up as a hitchhiker. The alleged victim also claimed that he was personally ordered by Joe Paterno to keep quiet about the abuse.
"Stop it right now" or "we'll call the authorities," the alleged victim claimed that Paterno had told him on the phone.
The alleged victim told Ganim that he had no doubt it was Paterno on the other end of the line ordering him to keep quiet.
"There was no question in my mind who Joe was," the alleged victim told Ganim. "I've heard that voice a million times. It was Joe Paterno."
Sure it was. Penn State's gullible trustees decided, OK, we'll just take your word for it. So the alleged victim got paid $200,000.
Now we come to the most ridiculous part of our story, namely the man referred to in Ganim's most recent opus as "John Doe 150," an alleged sex abuse victim of Jerry Sandusky's dating back to June 1976.
Another ancient claim of abuse that Joe allegedly knew about.
John Doe 150 was represented in his civil claim by Slade McLaughlin and Paul Lauricella, two Philadelphia lawyers who represented Danny Gallagher AKA "Billy Doe" in his bogus claim against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where Gallagher collected $5 million.
Gallagher is the
lying, scheming altar boy who claimed he was the victim of three separate rapes by a couple of priests and a Catholic school teacher. But then the lead investigator in the case, retired detective Joe Walsh, came forward to say that he caught Gallagher telling one lie after another, and that Gallagher even admitted he
"made up stuff." Which led the detective to conclude that all of Gallagher's allegations were false.
In the John Doe 150 case, the alleged victim, who is 56 years old, claimed that back in 1976, when he was 15, he attended a Penn State football summer camp for a week. According to alleged victim, he was taking a shower when 10 other kids when Jerry Sandusky, who had just introduced himself, stopped by. And then, after the other boys left the shower, Sandusky "came up to me and began soaping my back and shoulders."
And then "he stuck his finger in my ass," the alleged victim claimed. Sandusky allegedly apologized, saying he didn't realize he was getting that close.
What allegedly happened next is even more unbelievable.
John Doe 150 claims, at 15 years old, that he had the guts to talk about the incident to an anonymous Penn State football player, who told him that Sandusky "does this with all of his, I guess, boys."
According to John Doe 150, at 15, he then had the moxie to hunt down Joe Paterno at his Penn State office, and corner him in the hallway. John Doe 150 supposedly told Paterno what just happened with Sandusky. And Paterno supposedly replied, "I don't want to hear about any of that stuff, I have a football season to worry about."
Have you ever heard a more absurd story? A 15-year-old kid molested on the first day he ever met Jerry Sandusky? No grooming? No box of candy or six-pack first?
A 15-year-old kid who has just been victimized who has the nerve to track down and confront a legendary football coach?
Who would believe this crap? Oh that's right, the same lawyers who bought Billy Doe's lies and made $5 million off of it.
Before he collected his $300,000 settlement, John Doe 150 was never questioned by any lawyers or any psychiatrists representing Penn State. The Penn State Board of Trustees just paid John Doe 150 as one of 32 such claimants who collected a total of $93 million.
What an irresponsible expenditure of money. Even the lawyers who were ripping off Penn State had to know it was bogus. Actually, one of them did, and said so.
In a 2016 interview, Paul Boni, one of John Doe 150's lawyers, said that he knew of no "direct irrefutable evidence" that Paterno knew about any prior abuse by Sandusky dating back to the 1970s.
"I think you need more than anecdotal evidence or speculative evidence" to attack Paterno, Boni said.
So Sara Ganim keeps serving up more fairy tales and asking us to believe them. Only the stories just keep getting crazier.
