Exactly! Alternatively they could have made the notes and had MM verify that the notes were accurate.
Graham Spanier speaks out about false narrative that he was convicted on
- Thread starter francofan
- Start date
Hindsight is 20/20. Had MM told them he saw sexual activity they would have written down the details and dealt with it immediately. Since they only took some cryptic notes that should suffice that he didn't tell them anything about a sexual activity. Further, if MM had actually seen a boy being molested he, being 6' 5", 240 lb, 25 year old, division I athlete he wouldn't have walked away and told something to a football coach 6 weeks after he walked away. MM is either a liar or a coward. Think about it for one second...would any person on earth walk away while a child was being sexually molested? It didn't happen.
That's probably true, but I don't believe he, or anyone, would walk away from a child being molested. He didn't see anything sexual happening, and further he didn't think the child was in any form of danger or he wouldn't have walked away. Didn't happen.
Now clearly he didn't think it was a good idea for an adult to be alone with a child in the showers...so much so that he waited 6 weeks to tell the football coach! This particular incident is complete BS and unfortunately this is the incident that the entire case was based upon. Everything else was piling on.
Now, my position on Sandusky is the same as it's always been. Based on the sheer numbers of complaints he is most likely guilty of child abuse, but he needs a new trial.
Possibly. But think about the sheer number of accusers in 1692 Salem.
Yep. He needs a new trial. When the lead prosecutor looses his license to practice law because of what he did in the first trial it's inconceivable that he wouldn't automatically get a new trial.
Agree that the MM incident is complete BS. I don't believe Sandusky harmed any child and is guilty of any child abuse.
The number of complaints is not significant to me. What is significant is the number of complaints that hold water. There were no contemporaneous complaints. The number of claimants that Penn State made settlements with (36 or 37) is not trivial but it really not that many when you consider that Penn State in Nov. 2011 took responsibility and opened their checkbook to any and all comers that met certain criteria. It is a wonder that there weren't more. The BOT did not do any serious vetting. In the WTBOH podcast, co-host Liz Habib (Pitt alumunus, long time sports anchor at FOXLA and current Journalism professor at Syracuse) stated that WTBOH blew holes in ALL of the accuser's stories and I agree with Liz. None of the accusations stand on their own.
Well, here's what we do know. The jury amazingly enough wasn't sequestered. Matt Sandusky "flipped" after day one becoming a victim. This was national news. There was at least one juror using her cell phone during the trial that was warned for texting and ultimately dismissed for being too sick to continue. It wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude the jury learned of this.
"But by Day 5 of the trial, it became apparent that Juror 6 was having some outside contact — via texting — regarding the case that the prosecution was made aware of, which also compromised her role in the trial, according to transcripts.
Sandusky’s lawyer, Joe Amendola said a reliable source had informed him that Juror 6 had prematurely found Sandusky guilty of the crimes he was charged with committing and voiced her opinion to outside sources, according to transcripts.
The concern was also raised earlier in the trial — specifically on Day 2 — but neither the prosecution nor the defense felt it was fair to make a decision on whether to dismiss the juror until both sides had more information, according to transcripts."
After Matt flipping and this juror using her phone during the trial to text, how was this not a mistrial at this point?
Juror 6
Amendola.
Amendola.
Joe Amendola and Karl Rominger, the attorneys for Jerry Sandusky, faced a virtually insurmountable task in preparing for the trial, which Judge John Cleland was clearly intent on holding as soon as possible. Cleland was perhaps sensitive to media criticism questioning why it had taken three years from the time Aaron Fisher, “Victim 1,” first made allegations, to the time of Sandusky’s arrest.[1] The reason: it took those three years for the prosecutors to grow memories, find other alleged victims, and convince the Grand Jury and Office of the Attorney General that there was sufficient evidence to recommend an indictment, but in the hysteria over the case, no one acknowledged that reality.Judge Cleland initially set the court date for May 14, 2012.[2] Then, in response to Amendola’s increasingly anguished complaints that he had not even received the transcripts of the Grand Jury testimony, Cleland delayed the trial by a mere three weeks, until June 5.[3] Astonishingly, Pennsylvania law specified that prosecutors didn’t have to hand over testimony given during secret grand jury proceedings until each witness testified at trial.[4] The Grand Jury had essentially amounted to a kangaroo court. Not only was Amendola not allowed to cross-examine witnesses there, he was not even allowed to be present. Judge Barry Feudale, presiding judge of the 30th grand juries, ruled that the Sandusky defense team could have access to the grand jury transcripts only ten days before the first witness was scheduled to testify.Amendola and Rominger had to speed-read through the thousands of pages of discovery material that they did get. For a while, they couldn’t even get the prosecution to give them the names and birthdates of the alleged victims, along with the exact dates on which they were supposed to have been abused by Sandusky. Amendola also wanted the names of anyone who had come forward to claim abuse but who "did not fit the commonwealth's profile and/or the report was deemed to be false,” but that was not forthcoming, either. Neither was information on whatever the prosecution had discovered on Sandusky’s computer, probably because they had found nothing incriminating whatsoever – no child pornography, which was surprising if Sandusky was the compulsive pedophile he was supposed to be.·[5] “We’re really being pushed to kind of decipher this stuff,” Amendola said in February 2012 about the reams of material. “We’ll be prepared to try the case whenever the judge says, but we’re playing a lot of catch-up right now.”[6]Amendola kept complaining. He threatened to file a motion to dismiss the case, since it was very difficult to prepare a defense without exact times and dates of alleged offenses. “All we are asking is [for prosecutors] to go back to these accusers and say, ‘You went to football games — which ones?’ Give us at least something that we could check,” Amendola begged.Prosecuting attorney Joe McGettigan responded that “many of the alleged victims were abused several times a week, or month,” so it wasn’t possible to pin down a particular time. Besides, “They didn’t want to remember what happened and were even encouraged by Sandusky to forget,” he said. Here was another red flag that the alleged victims may have been in therapy searching for repressed memories, but no one picked up on it. When the prosecutors said they wouldn’t provide the information, Judge Cleland commented, "I think the answer is they can't." He thus declared that it was “futile” to demand such details. According to reporter Sara Ganim, “the state Attorney General's Office countered that Sandusky is accused of abusing boys who are now men, who were pressured into forgetting what happened and many times abused weekly for many years.”[7]Despite Amendola’s strenuous objections and repeated requests for a continuance, Cleland denied the requests and stuck to his promised June 5 trial date, which would take place in Centre County, where State College and Penn State were located. Incredibly, Jerry Sandusky had instructed Amendola to oppose a change in venue, assuming that his local reputation would benefit him.[8] Instead, the last place on earth that he was likely to get a fair trial was in Penn State territory, where the case had received a huge amount of horrendous publicity, and Penn State fans were bitter and angry at the impact on Coach Paterno and their beloved institution.On May 30, in a private unscheduled meeting with the judge and prosecutors, Amendola pled for a delay of the trial to allow him time to prepare for it properly. He wanted to call a psychologist as an expert witness, but the psychologist had been unable to prepare his reports because he hasn't been given access to the grand jury testimony. His jury consultant was in Puerto Rico on vacation. One of Amendola’s investigators was having surgery. Amendola and Rominger didn’t have enough time to review all the evidence. They couldn’t call Gary Schultz or Tim Curley because they had exercised their fifth-amendment rights. Cleland again denied the requested continuance, saying "No trial date is ever perfect, but some days are better than others."[9]Later that same day, in an official pre-trial hearing, Amendola asked Cleland to throw out three of the ten alleged victims before the trial. Victim 2, the unnamed Allan Myers, should be thrown out because Mike McQueary’s version of the shower incident kept changing, including the date on which it was supposed to have occurred. Victim 8, the phantom victim supposedly witnessed by the janitor who now had dementia, should be thrown out because it was pure hearsay. And Victim 6, Zachary Konstas, should be thrown out because the district attorney had decided in 1998 that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute, so to try it again amounted to a kind of double jeopardy. Cleland denied all of Amendola’s requests. All ten alleged victims would be presented to the jury.[10]On June 5, just before the process of picking a jury commenced, Amendola tried one more tactic. He filed a motion to withdraw as Sandusky’s lawyer, “based on the lack of preparation of all the things that are going on, most notably the absence of our experts and jury consultant.” A “key witness” was unavailable. “My office is still copying materials which we cannot send out to anybody because they’re all confidential. They’re all grand jury materials. My staff is ready to quit.” He said that “some day when people talk to my staff and get a real flavor for what was going on in my office for the past 30, 60 days, they’ll have a better understanding that this is not lawyering.” The reality was that “we have been so far behind, just keeping up with the discovery materials and trying to do due diligence… but we’re at a loss.” They hadn’t even had time to serve subpoenas to potential witnesses. He concluded that “we’re not prepared to go to trial at this time.”Co-counsel Karl Rominger added that he had called the Pennsylvania Bar Ethics Hotline the day before, and they had called his attention to Rule 17.1, a lawyer’s “duty of competency,” and that Rule 1.16 called upon a judge to ask lawyers to withdraw if the judge could tell that they were completely unprepared. The lawyer who answered the hotline said that they would normally render a formal opinion in such cases, but since they knew it was the Sandusky case, they didn’t want to get involved.Amendola said that he was “fully cognizant of the fact that the Court will deny but at least there will be a record.”[11] And he was right. Cleland refused to allow him to withdraw from the case, and jury selection began.
· Although there was no pornography on Sandusky’s computer, his investigators were sending “graphic and raunchy” pornography by email to one another, though the Office of the Attorney General has refused to make the emails public.
You might not think that having McQueary put something in writing was a good idea if you ever talked to him for more than ten seconds.
Having McQueary review and even sign off on a document would have been good, but not essential. Emailing him a copy with some sort of instruction to get back to the writer if there were any inaccuracies (or an alternative proviso that the memo will be deemed accurate unless advised otherwise) would have sufficed. I'd also have copied Wendell Courtney on the correspondence.
Look at the facts.
First, the crime that the former Penn State president was convicted of was Spanier's response, or alleged lack thereof, to an alleged 2001 rape in the Penn State showers of a ten-year-old boy, a crime supposedly witnessed by wacky whiste blower Mike McQueary.
Let's skip over the fact that McQueary told five different versions of the story about what he supposedly saw and heard in the shower that night, and that he later admitted in writing in an email to the prosecutor that they got the grand jury report wrong, and that he had never actually seen a rape.
The statute of limitations for child endangerment in Pennsylvania is only two years. So by the time the attorney general's office got around to charging Spanier, in 2012, the statute on the 2001 imaginary sex-in-the-showers crime had long expired.
Second, the way the resourceful prosecutors got around the statute of limitations problem at trial was to claim that Spanier had engaged in a continuing course of conduct over the years, namely a cover up that extended until the time they charged him, in 2012. But the jury at Spanier's trial found him not guilty of engaging in a continuing course of conduct to endanger the welfare of a child.
So, the conviction was on flimsy ground.
But third, the resourceful trial judge's post-conviction solution on how to get around the statute of limitations problem was to raise an exception from the Philadelphia archdiocese sex abuse case that allowed for someone accused of endangering the welfare of a child to be charged up until the year that the alleged [in our case the unknown and possibly imaginary] rape victim was 50 years old.
Again, to wrap our heads around this pretzel logic we have to forget that the alleged victim never came forward, and the prosecutor at trial claimed his identity was known "only to God."
The problem with that exception employed post-trial by the trial judge was that it was never raised before, during or after the Spanier trial by the prosecutors. So Spanier's lawyers say the exception shouldn't apply.
Fourth, Spanier's lawyers make the point that the prosecutors charged Spanier in 2011 with violating the child endangerment statute with the 2001 imaginary rape.
The problem here is that the state's 1972 child endangerment law only applied to people who had direct contact with children, such as parents, teachers and guardians. The law was amended after the Philadelphia archdiocese sex abuse scandal in 2007, to include supervisors such as Msgr. William J. Lynn, the archdiocese's former secretary of clergy, who was in charge of supervising abusive priests.
The problem in the Spanier case, his lawyers say, is that the attorney general's office is in effect charging Spanier under the 2007 amended law, which is unconstitutional for an incident that supposedly happened in 2001.
In the case of Msgr. Lynn, his conviction on one count of child endangerment in 2012 was overturned by the state Superior Court because the original law didn't apply to him. But that sensible decision was overturned by the state Supreme Court.
The state Supreme Court's decision in the Lynn case basically got around the fact that Lynn wasn't in direct contact with children by saying that if an administrator knowingly placed a sexually abusive person in proximity to children under his care, then he could be charged with child endangerment.
During the Spanier trial, however, his lawyers argue that the prosecution failed to offer any evidence that Spanier, the president of a university, "owed a duty of care to minor children, or that he was supervising the welfare of those children."
Spanier was sentenced to a jail term of between four and twelve months, a $7,5000 fine, 200 hours of community service, as well as being on the hook for paying the costs of prosecuting him.
We have to take into account that a mother called the state police to check into JS's abuse of her son.
The police came to her house, and listened in on Sandusky who just barely escaped convicting himself as they listened.
So, you have to explain how that happened if JS isn't a pedophile?
I mean, of course it is POSSIBLE that she misunderstood, but then you have to deal with all the other complaints.
In the end, the most likely explanation for all the accusations is that JS IS a pedophile.
Nothing is 100%, but this is where Occam's razor is best.
ALL I can provide is firsthand circumstantial proof that there once was a time when NOBODY considered Sandusky a pedophile, and in fact, lauded him for creating The Second Mile to provide help for at-risk kids. BTW - The charity said its youth programs served as many as 100,000 children annually. Did ANYBODY take the time to interview any these millions of children that were directly involved with the charity over the course of its 39 years of operation, as to their experiences with the program?
I have a rather unique perspective, being that I personally knew several of the major actors involved - Tim Curley & Rick Dandrea were both in my fraternity pledge class, and a bit latter - Dr. Paul Suhey, who became FIJI's chapter president. I also knew many of the football team members and other sports athletes of that era through the fraternity. Many a weekend or Wednesday night party I would chat with these guys and girls and listen to their wide array of tales. After a few beers, sometimes conversations turned to some sort of "incident" involving the student athletes. Sordid or mundane, folks felt free to talk about such topics in our in party room because they were mostly speaking amongst peers. I suppose it was cathartic for them. HOWEVER... during all the years I lived there and spending too much time in that party room... I NEVER heard anyone say "there's something strange about Sandusky." And believe me they would be talking about him, just like they talked about Joe. Their favorite stories were about being called to visit the "Rat" at his office... that was their "affectionate" name for Joe. Some players even acted their situation out and had a pretty good imitation of his voice. lol... EVERYBODY would laugh... as it was all in good fun, usually.
ON THE OTHERHAND... I also knew Jim Calhoun. My girlfriend's father owned several apartment buildings in town and was kind enough to employ me part-time throughout the week. Jim also worked for Mr. Baker whenever he had larger maintenance projects. Jim was a large, strong, no-nonsense Army Vet at the time. I'm saddened to have learned that he was suffering dementia in a nursing home.
But my greatest grief is that Jim Calhoun may have been the only witness to SEE how monstrous Jerry Sandusky is/was/might be. However... I HIGHLY doubt there was a conspiratorial cover-up. More likely the case of a cleaver sexual-predatorial groomer that even deceived experts. imo
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/new...-sandusky-child-sex-abuse-penn-state/1917869/
I have a rather unique perspective, being that I personally knew several of the major actors involved - Tim Curley & Rick Dandrea were both in my fraternity pledge class, and a bit latter - Dr. Paul Suhey, who became FIJI's chapter president. I also knew many of the football team members and other sports athletes of that era through the fraternity. Many a weekend or Wednesday night party I would chat with these guys and girls and listen to their wide array of tales. After a few beers, sometimes conversations turned to some sort of "incident" involving the student athletes. Sordid or mundane, folks felt free to talk about such topics in our in party room because they were mostly speaking amongst peers. I suppose it was cathartic for them. HOWEVER... during all the years I lived there and spending too much time in that party room... I NEVER heard anyone say "there's something strange about Sandusky." And believe me they would be talking about him, just like they talked about Joe. Their favorite stories were about being called to visit the "Rat" at his office... that was their "affectionate" name for Joe. Some players even acted their situation out and had a pretty good imitation of his voice. lol... EVERYBODY would laugh... as it was all in good fun, usually.
ON THE OTHERHAND... I also knew Jim Calhoun. My girlfriend's father owned several apartment buildings in town and was kind enough to employ me part-time throughout the week. Jim also worked for Mr. Baker whenever he had larger maintenance projects. Jim was a large, strong, no-nonsense Army Vet at the time. I'm saddened to have learned that he was suffering dementia in a nursing home.
But my greatest grief is that Jim Calhoun may have been the only witness to SEE how monstrous Jerry Sandusky is/was/might be. However... I HIGHLY doubt there was a conspiratorial cover-up. More likely the case of a cleaver sexual-predatorial groomer that even deceived experts. imo
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/new...-sandusky-child-sex-abuse-penn-state/1917869/
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Read - Ditka is fascinating.
On March 21st, Deputy Attorney General Laura Ditka asked McQueary when he first heard that Jerry Sandusky was going to get arrested. Sandusky is the retired coach that McQueary allegedly saw naked in the Penn State showers with a boy.
It was during a bye week in the 2011 football season, McQueary told Ditka.
"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," McQueary said. "And there was one of those little trams. The AGs called," he said, specifically naming Assistant Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach. And, according to McQueary, Eshbach "said we're going to arrest folks and we are going to leak it out."
Then, McQueary, perhaps catching himself, said, "Let me back up a little bit. We heard rumors that I had heard that -- the week before that arrests were imminent and that it was going to be more than Jerry Sandusky."
The state Attorney General's office has a known problem with leaks. Former state Attorney General Kathleen Kane lost her job after she was convicted last August of nine criminal charges, including leaking "confidential investigative information" in 2014 from a past grand jury probe to Chris Brennan, then a Philadelphia Daily News reporter.
Kane had to resign from her job and was sentenced to 10 to 23 months in jail after she was convicted of perjury, conspiracy, leaking grand jury information and then lying about it, to cover it up.
In the Jerry Sandusky case, prosecutors testified at a post-trial hearing last August that they had no knowledge of how the media found out that Sandusky and others in the Penn State scandal were about to be arrested. And how the media knew that there was a grand jury investigation of Sandusky in progress.
"If we can establish there were leaks by government agents, it could result in dismissal of case," Al Lindsay, Sandusky's lawyer, told reporters after the appeals hearing last August.
When reached for comment late today, Lindsay was on the case.
"We received a portion of that transcript from Mike McQueary," Lindsay said. "And it's certainly something we're studying to see whether or not it might be a fertile field for us to develop with regard to Mr. Sandusky's motion for a new trial," Lindsay said on behalf of client, now serving 30 to 60 years in prison.
A spokesperson for the state Attorney General's press office, where they're known for hiding under their desks, did not respond to a request for comment.
On the witness stand at the Spanier trial last month, McQueary testified that immediately after the AG's office told him they were going to leak news of the impending arrests, he ran over to the office of Assistant Athletic Director Fran Ganter.
"I remember it clearly," McQueary testified. "And I said, you gotta call Timmy's. Those guys are in trouble."
"Tim Curley," Ditka asked, referring to the former athletic director at Penn State.
"Yeah," McQueary testified. "And, you know, he kind of passed it off or shrugged me off," McQueary said about Ganter. "I'm not sure they believed me. And that's all that happened with that."
"So, a week later, I'm in that airport and I get a call," McQueary testified. "And then the media starts gettin' ahold of everything, and it's all kind of downhill after that."
Amen, brother.
When McQueary testified about the AG planning to "leak it out," I was in the courtroom but did not grasp the significance of what McQueary said. I had to have others explain it to me. And then it took a while to get the court transcript via a money order sent out snail mail to the Dauphin County Courthouse, to verify what McQueary had to say.
But Penn State veterans got it right away. Like Maribeth Roman Schmidt, the head of Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship.
"Mike's assertion under oath that the AGs leaked information about the PSU admins' arrests confirms suspicions we've had all along about prosecutorial misconduct on a number of levels," she said.
"It's now exceedingly obvious that the Attorney General was trying to manipulate public perception of the Penn State case from the very beginning, and they were willing to commit a crime to do it."
"This bombshell places the integrity of the entire Penn State case squarely at the feet of [newly elected AG] Josh Shapiro," Schmidt said about the new Attorney General who's yet to come out of hiding.
"If he's serious about restoring confidence in the AG's office," Schmidt said, "There is no other place for him to start than reviewing the conduct of prosecutors in this case from top to bottom."
Ray Blehar, who writes a blog, notpsu.blogspot.com, first reported the McQueary admission on March 25th, after he was tipped by Schmidt, who called it the "shocker of the day."
"McQueary Becomes Real Whistleblower," was Blehar's headline. In his blog post, Blehar quoted a transcript from McQueary's whistleblower and libel suit against Penn State, where McQueary scored a total of $12 million.
In the transcript from the McQueary trial, McQueary recounts how he was traveling to Boston, from Philadelphia Airport terminal B. It was Friday Nov. 4th after the Illinois game. McQueary testified how he got a phone call from then Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach.
"And she said a screw up had occurred or some kind of leak or a computer system malfunction, and she said all of the charges are going to be released," McQueary testified.
"However, it appears that McQueary's testimony at the Spanier trial goes a step further to state that Eshbach intentionally leaked the information," Blehar wrote.
"For years, Penn Staters have complained about the lack of an investigation into the leaks related to Jerry Sandusky," Blehar wrote. "Now, AG Josh Shapiro has the name of at least one of the Sandusky leakers. And it came from the Commonwealth's star witness in the Sandusky and Spanier cases."
Blehar called for Eshbach to be prosecuted "just as vigorously as former AG Kathleen Kane."
Eschbach, now running for York County District Attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.
For reporter John Ziegler, another regular chronicler of the Penn State scandal, the McQueary admission at the Spanier trial shines some light on a bigger picture.
"Anyone who uses his brain can only interpret this statement as an accidental admission that, just as I have long assumed, the AG's office prematurely leaked the grand jury presentment so that their favorite reporter, Sara Ganim, could 'find' it and start to set their false narrative," Ziegler said.
"Once you realize this is true, you must then also conclude that the entire basis of Ganim's article from March of that year revealing the existence of the grand jury was illegal AG leaks intended to jumpstart a case that was extremely weak because they had no credible accusers."
Related: Ziegler responds to those who want to get him fired.
Blehar: Is Frank Fina facing a perjury rap?
v6 seems to me to most likely witness to be telling the truth. In a 14+ friendly relationship with Sandusky, he never alleged that he was sexually assaulted by Sandusky in spite of having repressed memory therapy to help visualize a sexual assault. If you want to use occam's razor, the most likely scenario is that the contemporaneous investigation in 1998 by the Centre County DA, CYS, State College police and Penn State police got it right when they decided not to criminally charge Sandusky and not to indicate him for CSA. The most likely scenario for all of the accusations given that there were no contemporaneous reports, basically no vetting and that their stories don't hold water is that they were all money grabs.
He had plenty of problems.
Then McQueary revealed that he himself had been molested as a child. Perhaps because he had been sexually abused, McQueary was particularly alert to possible abuse, and so he leaped to the conclusion that the slapping sounds he heard in the Lasch Building locker room were sexual.
It is clear from the testimony of Dr. Dranov and others, however, that McQueary did not witness sodomy that night in February 2001. He thought something sexual was happening, but as he emphasized later, the entire episode lasted 30 to 45 seconds, he heard the sounds for only a few seconds, and his glance in the mirror was even quicker.
Ten years after the event, his memory had shifted and amplified, after the police told him that they had other Sandusky victims. Under that influence, his memory made the episode much more sexually graphic.
As I have written previously, all memory is reconstructive and is subject to distortion. That is particularly true when many years have intervened, and when current attitudes influence recall of those distant events. It is worthwhile quoting here from psychologist Daniel Reisberg’s 2014 book, The Science of Perception and Memory: A Pragmatic Guide for the Justice System.
“Connections between a specific memory and other, more generic knowledge can allow the other knowledge to intrude into our recollection,” Reiserberg notes. “Thus, a witness might remember the robber threatening violence merely because threats are part of the witness’s cognitive ‘schema’ for how robberies typically unfold.”
That appears to be what happened to McQueary, who had a “schema” of what child sexual abuse in a shower would look like. He had thought at the time that some kind of sexual activity must have occurred in the shower. The police were telling him that they had other witnesses claiming that Sandusky had molested them. Thinking back to that long-ago night, McQueary now visualized a scene that never occurred, but the more he rehearsed it in his memory, the more real it became to him.
“As your memory for an episode becomes more and more interwoven with other thoughts you’ve had about that episode, it can become difficult to keep track of which elements are linked to the episode because they were, in truth, part of the episode itself and which are linked merely because they are associated with the episode in your thoughts,” Reisberg writes. That process “can produce intrusion errors – so that elements that were part of your thinking get misremembered as being actually part of the original experience.”
In conclusion, Reisberg writes, “It is remarkably easy to alter someone’s memory, with the result that the past as the person remembers it differs from the past as it really was.”
On Nov. 23, 2010, McQueary wrote out a statement for the police in which he said he had glanced in a mirror at a 45 degree angle over his right shoulder and saw the reflection of a boy facing a wall with Sandusky standing directly behind him.
“I am certain that sexual acts/the young boy being sodomized was occuring [sic],” McQueary wrote. “I looked away. In a hurried/hastened state, I finished at my locker. I proceeded out of the locker room. While walking I looked directly into the shower and both the boy and Jerry Sandusky looked directly in my direction.”
But it is extremely unlikely that this ten-year-later account is accurate. Dranov was adamant that McQueary did not say that he saw anything sexual. When former Penn State football player Gary Gray went to see Joe Paterno in December 2011, the month before he died, Gray told Paterno that he still had a hard time believing that Sandusky had molested those children. “You and me both,” Paterno said.
In a letter to the Penn State Board of Trustees after the trial, Gray recalled their conversation about McQueary’s telling Paterno about the shower incident. “Joe said that McQueary had told him that he had seen Jerry engaged in horseplay or horsing around with a young boy. McQueary wasn’t sure what was happening, but he said that it made him feel uncomfortable. In recounting McQueary’s conversation to me, Coach Paterno did not use any terms with sexual overtones.”
Similarly, in November 2011, when biographer Joe Posnanski asked Paterno about what McQueary told him back in 2001, Paterno told him, “I think he said he didn’t really see anything. He said he might have seen something in a mirror. But he told me he wasn’t sure he saw anything. He just said the whole thing made him uncomfortable.”
If McQueary had told Paterno, Curley or other administrators that he had seen Sandusky in such a sexual position with the boy, it is inconceivable that they would not have turned the matter over to the police.
This was not a “cover-up.” Sandusky didn’t even work for Penn State by the time of the incident, so what was there to cover up? Paterno and Sandusky had never really liked one another, and Paterno was famed for his integrity and honesty. If he thought Sandusky was molesting a child in the shower, he would undoubtedly have called the police.
It is clear that Paterno, Curley, Schultz, and Spanier took the incident for what it apparently was – McQueary hearing slapping sounds that he misinterpreted as being sexual.
McQueary gave five different versions of what he heard and saw, but all were reconstructed memories over a decade after the fact. They changed a bit over time, but none of them are reliable.
McQueary had painted himself into a difficult corner. If he had really seen something so horrendous, why hadn’t he rushed into the shower to stop it? Why hadn’t he gone to the police? Why hadn’t he followed up with Paterno or other Penn State administrators to make sure something was being done? Why had he continued to act friendly towards Sandusky, even taking part in golfing events with him?
When angry people began to ask these questions, that first week in November 2011, McQueary emailed a friend. "I did stop it not physically but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room,” he wrote. He now said that he had in essence contacted the police about the incident by alerting Joe Paterno, which led to Gary Schultz talking to him about it, and Schultz was the administrator the campus police reported to.
“No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30-45 seconds," McQueary said. "Trust me…. I am getting hammered for handling this the right way ... or what I thought at the time was right … I had to make tough, impacting quick decisions.”
Subsequently, McQueary changed his story somewhat. He now recalled that he had loudly slammed his locker door, which made Sandusky stop the abuse, and that he had taken yet a third look in the shower to make sure they had remained apart.
At the trial, he said that he had “glanced” in the mirror for “one or two seconds,” then lengthened his estimate to “three or four seconds, five seconds maybe.” During that brief glance, he now said that he had time to see Sandusky standing behind a boy whose hands were against the shower wall, and that he saw “very slow, slow, subtle movement” of his midsection.
But neither the newly created sodomy scene nor the slammed locker would save McQueary’s career.
The Elusive Allan Myers [From Chapter 13]
By the time of the trial, eight accusers had been “developed,” as Assistant Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach put it. But Allan Myers, the boy in the shower in the McQueary incident, had been so public and vehement in his previous defense of Sandusky that the prosecution did not dare call him to testify.
When police inspector Joseph Leiter first interviewed him on September 20, 2011, Myers had emphatically denied that Sandusky had abused him or made him uncomfortable in any way.
After the Grand Jury Presentment was published on November 5, 2011, with its allegations that Mike McQueary had witnessed sodomy in a locker room shower, Myers realized that he was “Victim 2,” the boy in the shower that night, but that the sounds McQueary heard were just snapping towels or slap boxing. Myers then gave a detailed statement to Joseph Amendola’s investigator, Curtis Everhart, denying that Sandusky had ever abused him.
But within two weeks, Myers had become a client of Andrew Shubin. For months, Shubin refused to let the police interview Myers without Shubin being present, and he apparently hid Myers in a remote Pennsylvania hunting cabin to keep them from finding him.
After a February 10, 2012, hearing, Shubin verbally assaulted Anthony Sassano, an agent for the attorney general's office, outside the courthouse, cursing him roundly. “He was very vulgar, critical of me,” Sassano recalled. “Let’s call it unprofessional [language], for an attorney.”
Shubin was angry because the Attorney General’s Office wouldn’t interview Myers, who, he claimed, had stayed at Sandusky’s house “over 100 times” where he had been subjected to “both oral and anal sex.” But the police still refused to allow Shubin to be present during any interview.
Soon afterwards, Shubin relented, allowing a postal inspector named Michael Corricelli to talk to Allan Myers alone on February 28, 2012. But during the three-hour interview, Myers never said Sandusky had abused him. On March 8, Corricelli tried again, but Myers again failed to provide any stories of molestation. On March 16, Corricelli brought Myers to the police barracks for a third interview in which Anthony Sassano took part. Asked about three out-of-state trips, Myers denied any sexual contact and said that Sandusky had only tucked him into bed.
“He did not recall the first time he was abused by Sandusky,” Sassano wrote in his notes, nor did Myers recall how many times he was abused. “He indicated it is hard to talk about the Sandusky sexual abuse because Sandusky was like a father to him.” Finally, Myers said that on a trip to Erie, Pennsylvania, Sandusky put his hand inside his pants and touched his penis. Sassano tried valiantly to get more out of him, asking whether Sandusky had tried to put Myers’ hand on his own penis or whether that had been oral sex. No.
Still, Myers now estimated that there had been ten sexual abuse events and that the last one was in the shower incident that McQeary overheard. “I attempted to have Myers elaborate on the sexual contact he had with Sandusky, but he refused by saying he wasn’t ready to talk about the specifics,” Sassano wrote. Myers said that he had not given anyone, including his attorneys, such details. “This is in contrast to what Shubin told me,” Sassano noted.
On April 3, 2012, Corricelli and Sassano were schedule to meet yet again with the reluctant Allan Myers, but he didn’t show up, saying that he was “too upset” by a friend’s death.
“Corricelli indicated that Attorney Shubin advised him that Myers had related to him incidents of oral, anal, and digital penetration by Sandusky,” Sassano wrote in his report. “Shubin showed Corricelli a three page document purported to be Myers’ recollection of his sexual contact with Sandusky. Corricelli examined the document and indicated to me that he suspected the document was written by Attorney Shubin. I advised that I did not want a copy of a document that was suspected to be written by Attorney Shubin.” Sassano concluded: “At this time, I don’t anticipate further investigation concerning Allan Myers.”
That is how things stood as the Sandusky trial was about to begin. Karl Rominger wanted to call Myers to testify as a defense witness, but Amendola refused. “I was told that there was a détente and an understanding that both sides would simply not identify Victim Number 2,” Rominger later recalled. The prosecution didn’t want such a weak witness who had given a strong exculpatory statement to Curtis Everhart. Amendola didn’t want a defense witness who was now claiming to be an abuse victim. “So they decided to punt, to use an analogy,” Rominger concluded.
Mike McQueary Takes The Stand [From Chapter 15]
Mike McQueary then took the stand to tell his latest version of the shower incident with “Victim 2” (i.e., the unnamed Allan Myers), where he heard “showers running and smacking sounds, very much skin-on-skin smacking sounds.” (Later in his testimony, he said he heard only two or three slapping sounds that lasted two or three seconds.) He had re-framed and re-examined his memory of the event “many, many, many times,” he said, and he was now certain that he had looked into the shower three separate times, for one or two secondseach, and that he saw “Coach Sandusky standing behind a boy who is propped up against the shower. The showers are running and, and he is right up against his back with his front. The boy’s hands are up on the wall.” He saw “very slow, slow, subtle movement.” After he slammed his locker, McQueary said, they separated and faced him. Surprisingly, he said that Sandusky did not have an erection. When Amendola failed to object, Judge Cleland inserted himself, obviously fearful of future appeal or post-conviction relief issues. “Wait, wait, wait, just a second,” he warned McGettigan. “I think you have to be very careful for you not to lead this witness.”A few minutes later, the judge asked both lawyers to approach the bench. “I don’t know why you’re not getting objections to this grossly leading [questioning],” he told McGettigan, who said, “I’m just trying to get through it fast.”McQueary recounted how he had met with Joe Paterno.“I made sure he knew it was sexual and that it was wrong, [but] I did not go into gross detail.” Later, he said, he met with Tim Curley, the Penn State athletic director, and Gary Schultz, a university vice president. In an email quoted during his testimony, McQueary had written, “I had discussions with the police and with the official at the university in charge of the police.” He now explained that by this he meant just one person, since Schultz oversaw the university police department. With only an hour’s warning, Joe Amendola asked Karl Rominger to conduct the cross-examination of McQueary and handed him the file. Rominger did the best he could, asking McQueary why in 2010 he had told the police that he’d looked into the showers twice but had now added a third viewing, and he questioned him about his misremembering that the shower incident occurred in 2002 rather than 2001. Rominger also noted that McQueary had told the grand jury, “I was nervous and flustered, so I just didn’t do anything to stop it.” Now he was saying that he slammed the locker, which allegedly ended the incident. Without meaning to, McQueary indirectly helped Sandusky’s case by explaining the demanding work schedule of a Penn State football coach, typically reporting to work Sunday through Tuesday at 7 a.m. and working until 10 p.m. or later. Then, Wednesday through Friday, it was 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. If Sandusky kept the same hours, it was difficult to see when he would have managed to molest all those boys, at least during preseason training and football season.
Finally, McQueary revealed that he had filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Penn State for having removed him from his football coaching job in the midst of the Sandusky scandal. “I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong to lose that job," he said.
What Mike McQueary Told Dr. Dranov [From Chapter 16]
In his brief appearance for the defense, physician Jonathan Dranov recalled the February night in 2001 that his friend and employee, John McQueary, had called to ask him around 9 p.m. to come over, because his son Mike was upset by something that had happened in a Penn State locker room.
When he came in, Mike was sitting on the couch, “visibly shaken and upset.” The younger McQueary said he had gone to the locker room to put away some new sneakers and “he heard what he described as sexual sounds.”
Dranov asked him what he meant. “Well, sexual sounds, you know what they are,” McQueary said. “No, Mike, you know, what do you mean?” But he didn’t explain. “He just seemed to get a little bit more upset. So I kind of left that.”
McQueary told him that he looked toward the shower “and a young boy looked around. He made eye contact with the boy.” Dranov asked him if the boy seemed upset or frightened, and McQueary said he did not. Then, as Dranov recalled, McQueary said that “an arm reached out and pulled the boy back.”
Was that all he saw? No, McQueary said “something about going back to his locker, and then he turned around and faced the shower room and a man came out, and it was Jerry Sandusky.” Dranov asked McQueary three times if he had actually witnessed a sexual act. “I kept saying, ‘What did you see?’ and each time he [Mike] would come back to the sounds. I kept saying, ‘But what did you see?’ “And it just seemed to make him more upset, so I back off that.”
Karl Rominger asked Dranov, “You’re a mandatory reporter?” Yes, he was, meaning that he was legally bound to report criminal sexual activity to the police. He did not do that, since he obviously didn’t conclude that it was warranted. He only told Mike McQueary to report the incident to his immediate supervisor, Joe Paterno.
As a follow-up witness, a Second Mile administrator named Henry Lesch explained that he had been in charge of the annual golf tournament, in which Mike McQueary had played in June 2001 and 2003. The implication was that this seemed strange behavior, supporting an activity in which Jerry Sandusky was a leading sponsor and participant, if McQueary had witnessed sodomy in the shower in February 2001.
Allan Myers Takes The Stand [From Chapter 20]
One last hearing took place three months later, on November 4, 2016, when Allan Myers finally took the stand. He had evaded all subpoena attempts for the August hearings. Jerry Sandusky could hardly
recognize the overweight, bearded, sullen 29-year-old, who clearly didn’t want to be there.
He wouldn’t use Sandusky’s name, referring to him as “your client” in response to Al Lindsay’s questions. Yes, he had gone to the Second Mile camps for a couple of years “until your client hand-picked me,” he said. He admitted, however, that he had regarded Sandusky as a father figure and that he had lived with the Sandusky’s the summer of 2005, before he attended Penn State. “I left because he was controlling,” Myers said.
Lindsay had him read the notes of his September 2011 police interview, in which he said that Sandusky never made him uncomfortable and had not abused him, and that he didn’t believe any of the allegations.
“That would reflect what I said then,” Myers said, “not what I would say now.” That would become his refrain during his testimony, which appeared to be well-rehearsed, along with “I don’t recall.”
Yes, he had told Curtis Everhart that “Jerry never violated me while I was at his home or anywhere else….I felt very safe and at ease at his home, whether alone with Jerry or with others present.” Yes, he had denied any anal or oral intercourse or any abuse at all. “That’s what I said then," he said.
Yes, Shubin was Myers’ lawyer for his DUI charge, and then he represented him as a claimed Sandusky victim, and yes, he had received a settlement from Penn State. And yes, he said, he was Victim 2.
During her cross-examination, Jennifer Peterson asked Myers, “And you told him [Anthony Sassano] that you were sexually abused by Mr. Sandusky, right?” Surprisingly, he didn’t agree. “I don’t remember exactly what I said in the meetings. I know then I was more forthcoming, but not all the way coming, because still processing everything and dealing with it.” It sounded as if he might have been in repressed memory therapy.
Peterson asked again, “Were you sexually abused?” This time he answered, “Yes,” although he didn’t actually say that it was Sandusky who had abused him. And there the matter was left.
* * *
Meanwhile, several Sandusky-related legal decisions came down, all of them relying on the truth of the abuse narrative.
Three weeks before Cleland’s recusal, Mike McQueary won his whistleblower lawsuit against Penn State, with the jury awarding the former Penn State coach $7.3 million.
At the end of November 2016, Judge Thomas Gavin ruled that that amount wasn’t enough, so he added another $5 million. In doing so, he cited prosecutor Jonelle Eshbach’s testimony during the trial that McQueary had been a terrific grand jury witness: “He was rock solid in his testimony as to what he had seen,” Eshbach said. “He was very articulate. His memory was excellent.”
Eshbach, the author of the notorious Grand Jury Presentment, was correct that McQueary had been articulate, but his “rock solid” testimony had morphed from what he told his father and Jonathon Dranov in February 2001 – that he heard sounds but witnessed no sexual abuse – to his grand jury testimony ten years later.
And he kept modifying his story and memory after that. Nonetheless, the judge ruled that McQueary had suffered “humiliation” when Graham Spanier publicly supported Curley and Schultz, which by implication impugned the assistant coach. Gavin later added another $1.7 million to pay for McQueary’s lawyers’ fees.
The Fallout [From Chapter 23]
Former federal investigator John Snedden, who interviewed many players in the Penn State drama soon after the trial, concluded that there was no cover-up because there was nothing to cover up. Mike McQueary had only heard slapping sounds in the shower. If McQueary really thought he was witnessing a sexual assault on a child, Snedden said, wouldn't he have intervened to stop a "wet, defenseless naked 57-year-old guy in the shower?"
Snedden’s boss told him, as a rookie agent, that the first question to ask in an investigation is, “Where is the crime?” In this case, there didn’t appear to be one. "I've never had a rape case successfully prosecuted based only on sounds, and without credible victims and witnesses.”
* * *
In 2016, psychologist Julia Shaw published The Memory Illusion, a summary of her own and others’ work. “[My colleagues and] I have convinced people they have committed crimes that never occurred, suffered from a physical injury they never had, or were attacked by a dog when no such attack ever took place,” she wrote.
The Memory Hackers (2016), a Nova public television program, featured one of Shaw’s subjects recalling an illusory crime in three sessions. In that study, over 70 percent of her subjects developed false memories.
“What could have been turns into what would have been turns into what was,” the experimental psychologist explained. Her conclusion? “Any event, no matter how important, emotional or traumatic it may seem, can be…misremembered, or even be entirely fictitious…. All of us can come to confidently and vividly remember entire events that never actually took place.”
Experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett made similar observations in his classic 1932 text, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Our memories, he noted, “live with our interests and with them they change.” We tend to incorporate details of what really happened, along with other inserted elements, perhaps from a movie we saw or a book we read, or a story someone else told us. This kind of “source amnesia” is amazingly common. In fact, many of us are sure something happened to us, when it was our sibling who actually experienced it.
That is how Mike McQueary’s memory of the infamous 2001 shower changed. The night of the shower, he said he had heard slapping sounds but had not seen anything incriminating. Ten years later, his retrospective bias led him to have questionable memories of seeing Sandusky moving his hips behind a boy in the shower. With rehearsal, his new memories were solidified, and he became quite confident in them. That phenomenon, called “the illusion of confidence” by The Invisible Gorilla authors, is not unusual, either.
There may have been other factors influencing McQueary's recollections of that infamous shower incident.
When he was first contacted by police, Mike McQueary, at that time a married man, apparently sent a “sexting” photo of his own penis to a female Penn State student in April 2010. He may have thought that was why the police wanted to talk to him, and why he didn’t want to meet with them in his home.
ESPN journalist Don Van Natta, Jr, initially intended to include this information in a feature article about McQueary, but it was cut from the published piece.
In 2017 McQueary, now divorced, texted another photo of his erect penis to a woman. Investigator John Ziegler obtained the text messages and photo and published them at framingpaterno.com.
That’s a fair question. How was it not a mistrial at that point? How often does this type of thing happen? Is this a common occurrence? I have no idea.
Not sure that I follow you. Sole of objective of my suggestion is to have someone independent (i.e. not employed by) of PSU to keep it on file. Would not expect the recipeint to do more.
Courtney was the only person I could think of. I'm not married to him if you have a better choice.
I've been observing this board for some time now. It's been very interesting. I will miss watching the back and forth about this scandal. I found it fascinating and rate it far superior to Area 51 and JFK theories. Oh well, all good things must come to an end.
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt"WHCAHole said:
and they didn't get 3 or 4 million dollars to make up their stories.
Good to hear from you. Actually became a little concerned..don't you have a few kids that need their father?
@Richard Schnyderite, I hope you want to get this crap and Sandusky Enthusiasts off of your website.
YIKES..they found their way thru the rules and regulations of the new Nittany Lounge threads.
I hope he appreciates the search for truth. I strong suggest he check out the podcast "With the Benefit of Hindsight"
Did you see the new movie about the Bakker's? Makes Falwell look exactly what I thought he would be...A two-faced, lying prick that clearly doesn't follow the word. What do you think? Proud of him now?
I was silent in order to watch you guys. Otherwise I would have been banned. It was too much fun to watch. This case is quite fascinating and like Area 51 and JFK full of conspiracy theories and subplots. But it's mostly you guys who make it so entertaining!
MM can be very funny!
Schiano had been selected as the next head football coach at the University of Tennessee. His hiring was to be announced on Sunday night, Nov. 26, 2017. Instead, after a series of rumor-mongering tweets and political grandstanding, and a graffiti-covered rock on campus proclaiming “SCHIANO COVERED UP CHILD RAPE AT PENN STATE,” he was abruptly dropped like a hot potato.
Why? Because of Mike McQueary, who changed his memory from hearing slapping sounds in a shower (of Sandusky snapping towels with a 13-year-old boy) to witnessing sexual abuse, ten years after the event. And because McQueary then massaged his memory yet again two years ago in a deposition for a civil case, and recalled someone else (assistant coach Tom Bradley) allegedly telling him that Schiano, who was an assistant coach at Penn State from 1990 to 1995, had supposedly said that he saw Sandusky doing something bad to a boy in a shower.
So this is 25 years ago he said he said he said he saw something. Both Bradley and Schiano deny ever having heard anything about Sandusky abusing anyone.
That’s because Schiano never said such a thing to Bradley, and Bradley said no such thing to McQueary.
And Sandusky did no such thing. The real story here is too much for the mass media to acknowledge. The media are invested in the narrative of Jerry Sandusky the serial pedophile, the Monster. But guess what? The imprisoned former Penn State football coach may be an innocent man, a victim of a moral panic fed by the sensationalistic media, police trawling, memory-warping psychotherapy, and greed, as I document in my book, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment.
It is a fascinating, complex case that richly deserves this book-length treatment. Thus, I am unlikely to convince anyone in an article. (But see this link to a good summary article already available on this website.) Nonetheless, I can’t keep silent when yet another career is being ruined through slanderous triple-hearsay about crimes that never occurred in the first place.
In the hothouse atmosphere of college football, politics, money, and moral panics, the mere mention of the named Sandusky is enough to tarnish anyone. Tennessee bigwigs fell all over themselves condemning Schiano with zero evidence but plenty of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy. One state representative said, “We don’t need a man who has that type of potential reproach in their life as the football coach. It’s egregious to the people.” On the contrary, his statement is what is egregious. Three gubernatorial candidates hastened to condemn Schiano as well, while another politico tweeted that “a Greg Schiano hire would be anathema to all that our University and our community stand for.”
And what does the University stand for? Freedom of expression? Innocent until proven guilty? Or avoiding any controversy like the plague? The latter seems to be the current academic approach. Penn State University threw in excess of $100 million at virtually anyone who claimed to be a Sandusky victim, without any investigation, in the same sort of mad rush to keep up appearances.
We could all be accused via triple-hearsay of a non-existent crime, especially if we ever had anything to do with Jerry Sandusky – or Mike McQueary, it appears.
You haven’t even heard the craziest stuff yet. Unfortunately you might never get to now.
I started to listen to the latest With the Benefit of Hindsight podcast episode with EJ Sandusky. Can't wait to finish it. I suggest any and all who think it is absurd to question Sandusky's guilt give it a listen. If anything might start to change your mind, this will.
I've listened to it and read everything about the scandal I could find. Keep in mind the voluminous information available about the JFK assassination as well as Area 51. Movies have been made about them and in the case of JFK a well respected director Oliver Stone did one too. Didn't seem to move the needle.
I did have one question for the board. Early on the guy who the board was named for said he had inside information about what really happened. He said that he couldn't say what it was but might later on if his informer released him from his oath. Did that ever happen? I may have missed it. What was that inside information?
Your analogies to Area 51 and the JFK Assassination fall apart very quickly. The podcast has interviews with people that were actually involved, as well as documented evidence.
If you have actually listed to all 50+ hours of the podcast and don't at least have some doubt that justice was served, you are either closed minded or did not understand what you listened to.
He never divulged this info, whatever it is. All I remember him saying about it was that if made public, it would make some of those involved look worse than they already do, and would make others look better than they already do.
