Do you and WHCANole share the same bed?
Malcolm Gladwell calls for Penn State to bring back Joe Paterno statue
- Thread starter francofan
- Start date
The negative backlash is still apparent years later with the awesome approach of giving in completely to public opinion. It was a bad approach. There’s numerous well respected public figures who have backed Paterno based on their actual research of the case. Make that public and the basis for restoring the statue and freaking stand by it. The strategy of waiting for everyone that knows who Joe Paterno is to die sucks.
All WHCANole does is hit the Like button. Has nothing to add.
You and your Sandusky cult has never had anything to add. You and your ilk are just an embarrassment to PSU. And the fact that your cult continues to prattle on about Sandusky's innocence is just fodder for those that dislike my alma mater.
I don't understand why it is so hard for some to face reality.
You and your Sandusky cult has never had anything to add. You and your ilk are just an embarrassment to PSU. And the fact that your cult continues to prattle on about Sandusky's innocence is just fodder for those that dislike my alma mater.
I don't understand why it is so hard for some to face reality.
Your name is apt for both you and the other cult members.
He is the smart one. There is nothing more to add to this sad story.
The only reason the BOT isn't rewriting this narrative is because it doesn't want to. The question is why? Is it something stupid and petty or is there more to it than that? Can anyone say TSM?
What’s crazy is how many Penn Staters are admitting that the case was full of prosecutor misconduct and that lawyers such as Andrew Shubin and Ben Andreozzi drastically embellished the abuse claims of their clients. But won’t even entertain the possibility that Sandusky could be innocent.
Nah, much deeper.
Remember, workers in hard hats toppled the 7-foot-high, 900-pound bronze statue of the late Joe Paterno from its pedestal outside Beaver Stadium. The shrouded, supine statue of the long-revered football coach, who had only been dead for six months, was carted away on a forklift, banished like the effigy of a deposed third-world dictator.
In his 46 years as head coach, Paterno had led the Penn State Nittany Lions to a record 37 bowl games, and two national championships. During that long reign, Paterno’s student-athletes graduated at the highest rate of any Division 1 football program, while the coach donated $9 million to build a library at the school, and gave generously to other charitable causes.
On Oct. 29, 2011, Paterno reached the pinnacle of his profession with his 409th career win, breaking the all-time record for most coaching victories. But just days later, Paterno’s lifelong reputation for “success with honor” would be defiled by a grand jury report leaked to the media. His coaching career at Penn State, which began as an assistant in 1950 and lasted 61 years, ended abruptly on Nov. 9, 2011, when Paterno was informed in a late-night call, via somebody else’s cell phone, that he had been fired, “effective immediately.” Two months later, the 85-year-old coach died of lung cancer.
The dismantling of the Paterno legend was just the start of the destruction at Penn State. They day after the Paterno statue was toppled, the football team he left behind was hit with some of the harshest sanctions in NCAA history, including a $60-million fine, a bowl game ban that lasted two years, the loss of 170 athletic scholarships, and the striking of Paterno’s 111 wins from 1998 to 2011 [the wins would subsequently be restored.]
The scandal that toppled Paterno began with the lurid claim that a boy approximately 10 years old had been raped in the showers at the football practice facility by Jerry Sandusky, a retired assistant coach, and allegations that Paterno and other top university officials had conspired to cover it up.
Before he was branded a pedophile, Sandusky was renowned for molding All-American linebackers and being the architect of the dominating defenses behind two national championships. Off the field, Sandusky was a church-going Methodist teetotaler dubbed “Saint Sandusky” for his charitable work. He founded The Second Mile in 1977, a charity for at-risk kids cited in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush as one of his “thousand points of light.” But on June 23, 2012, a jury convicted the 68-year-old Sandusky as a serial child rapist. Sandusky was branded “the most hated man in America,” his charity was dissolved, and he was shipped off to prison for 30 to 60 years, effectively a death sentence.
Meanwhile, three top Penn State officials—the university’s president, vice president and athletic director—were accused of participating in the alleged cover-up; after years of delay, each wound up being sentenced to jail for a single misdemeanor.
Last November, the Penn State debacle was still so toxic that the University of Tennessee had to hastily withdraw an offer to Greg Schiano, a long-ago former Penn State assistant, to become its head football coach, because of an unfounded claim that he had been part of the alleged cover-up. People screamed, Schiano was dumped, and the athletic director who tried to hire him was fired.
Those two men were just the latest casualties in the scandal that has ruined lives and cost the university more than $300 million. That tally includes a minimum of $118 million paid out to at least 36 men who claimed they were abused by Sandusky, $80 million in legal fees, that $60 million NCAA fine and at least $50 million spent on implementing campus reforms aimed at preventing future abuse.
On April 7th, the official storyline of the Penn State scandal will be memorialized in Paterno, an HBO movie starring Al Pacino as the disgraced coach.
But what if that official storyline is wrong? More than six years later, new evidence demands that this sordid tale gets a fresh look. That evidence includes thousands of pages of confidential documents from the various investigations, civil claims and lawsuits emanating from the scandal that Penn State’s board of trustees have stubbornly refused to release [despite a lawsuit from some of its own trustees], a report from a previously unknown federal investigation on campus in 2012, bountiful proof of official misconduct and ineptitude in the case, and disturbing questions raised about the suspect brand of psychotherapy used to elicit the testimony that convicted Sandusky.
The short version of all that’s new: just about everything you think you know about what happened in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania isn’t true.
Here’s what is true: many of the principal actors in the Penn State scandal either engaged in blatant misconduct, or just plain bungled the case. They include prosecutors who wrote a sensationalized grand jury report around a crime that in all probability didn’t happen, and police caught on tape lying to an alleged victim in order to coax testimony that incriminated Sandusky.
Psychologists used discredited “recovered memory” therapy to create testimony a renowned expert witness described as having “no credible scientific support. Meanwhile, an incompetent defense lawyer overlooked Sandusky’s medical history, which casts doubts on whether his client was physically capable of the sexual assaults he was convicted of, and reveals a distinctive characteristic of his anatomy never mentioned by any of his accusers.
The media went into overdrive, and in the resulting hysteria that followed, a panicked university board of trustees abandoned its fiduciary responsibilities by passing out at least $118 million, without having any of those alleged victims deposed by lawyers, examined by forensic psychiatrists, or even subjected to routine background checks.
Why investigate those claims of abuse? Not one of the 36 alleged victims who got paid ever told anyone about any of the attacks when they supposedly happened. Of the eight alleged victims who testified at Sandusky’s criminal trial, all of whom got paid in civil settlements, six initially told police, investigators or their own lawyers that they hadn’t been abused; the other two wouldn’t talk. Then, when those alleged victims told their stories of abuse, the details kept changing, often dramatically.
Totaling up the allegations made in 36 civil claims known to have been paid, the alleged victims stated that they had been raped or sexually abused by Sandusky at a minimum of least 520 to 620 times, with the vast majority of that alleged abuse supposedly taking place during a 14-year-period, from 1995 to 2009.
Yet there is not one piece of DNA evidence against Sandusky, no medical evidence, no physical evidence, no incriminating audio or video, and not one shred of pornography was ever found in Sandusky’s possession. At trial, no one alleged that Sandusky had plied seemingly heterosexual teenagers with alcohol or drugs. And unlike many of the sex abuse cases currently in the news, there were no payoffs, no non-disclosure agreements, no confession, and no attempted plea bargain.
During the initial investigation, a seven-member joint task force from the state attorney general’s office and the state police knocked on the doors of at least 300 young men who were alums of Sandusky’s Second Mile charity for disadvantaged youths, hunting for alleged victims. It wasn’t an easy job, even though the supposedly secret grand jury investigation of Sandusky had already been publicized in a leak to the media. As one frustrated investigator emailed on June 3, 2011, “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.”
But the task force persisted until they found five former Second Milers who eventually claimed they were abused, along with a sixth who claimed Sandusky had been “grooming” him for future abuse.
The vast majority of the rest of the alleged victims who made civil claims for damages came forward after Sandusky was arrested and Paterno was out. The morning after the coach was fired, Business Insider predicted Penn State was on the hook to accusers for $100 million, and alleged victims and their lawyers suddenly began lining up for payouts. In most cases, the allegations of abuse kept escalating in “John Doe” claims where the men didn’t have to testify in open court or publicly disclose their real names.
Another reason to vet those claims: at least a dozen of the men who got paid off 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.
But rather than investigate the claims, Penn State’s strategy was to pay people off, and move on, even though those actions further damaged what was left of Paterno’s reputation, as well as greatly handicapped the ability of Penn State’s former administrators to get a fair trial. In a May 17, 2017 recorded interview, Ira Lubert, a Penn State trustee who oversaw the board’s legal subcommittee divulged how the trustees dealt with the alleged victims who had lined up for what he described as the “gravy train.”
“There’s some very bad situations,” Lubert said. “Did some people exaggerate their situations? Yes, they did. Did some lawyers step in front and say this is far worse than it was and I want more money? Absolutely, that happened. And wherever I could, I settled it.”
According to those contracts, settlements were made “without the university admitting any wrongdoing, the validity or invalidity of the allegations, guilt or liability.”
The vetting process at Penn State had so few safeguards that in 2014, XXXXX, a 31-year-old former Second Miler who was loyal to Sandusky and didn’t believe any of the alleged victims were telling the truth, purposely made up a ridiculous story--he’d allegedly been raped by Sandusky behind Joe Paterno’s house--and decided to see how far he could get with it.
Here’s what happened next: XXXXX was taken in as a client by Andrew Shubin, the leading plaintiff’s lawyer in the Penn State sex abuse scandal who represented nine other alleged victims. Shubin radically altered XXXXX's original story to make it more compatible with a possible Penn State settlement. Then, Shubin referred XXXXXX to a therapist who sent him to a psychotherapist, who certified XXXXXX as having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Finally, after more than three years of legal counsel and about 100 paid therapy sessions, XXXXX, in preparation of telling his story to Newsweek, tried to bring his "sting" to a close. At their final meeting, Shubin informed XXXX that he couldn’t pursue his claim because it was past the statute of limitations, which the state legislature repeatedly decided not to change. So the lawyer put XXXXX in touch, in writing, with the state attorney general’s office, where XXXXX could file a possible criminal complaint against Sandusky. Which, if successful, might have cleared the way for XXXXX to get paid in a civil claim. XXXXX was indeed contacted by a member of the Attorney General's office wanting to hear his story.
But rather than go any further with the charade, XXXXX decided to out himself in Newsweek. He never intended to get paid, he said, he just wanted to prove a point. As XXXXX put it, “Hopefully, people will start to realize that this whole case stinks.”
How did so many officials get so many things wrong at Penn State? Start with the boy in the showers.
John Ziegler had some interesting takes on Gladwell's visit in his weekly podcast. The segment starts a little after the 42 minute mark and runs about 10 minutes. Highlights include:
-Graham Spanier, Sue Paterno, and the purposely fake accuser were in the audience for Gladwell's talk
-Gladwell tempers his comments and is unable to say he believes that Sandusky is innocent because he has too much to lose, but he encourages people to thoroughly research the topic before coming to any conclusions
-Gladwell said the media blew it big time and created a moral panic
-Gladwell's talk received a favorable response from the audience
-JZ was beside himself over a critical article in Newsweek that headlined that Gladwell caused a backlash on twitter over his suggestion that the Paterno statue be brought back given that Newsweek squashed his cover story at the last minute that would have exposed the entire scandal as a myth
-JZ stated that his optimism level is low concerning a couple of projects in the works concerning changing the prevailing opinions in the saga. JZ said that Gladwell's book opened the door for the projects and that if the projects were to be viable, that Gladwell would take on an incredibly important role. He was unsure if Gladwell was willing and able to perform that role.
-Graham Spanier, Sue Paterno, and the purposely fake accuser were in the audience for Gladwell's talk
-Gladwell tempers his comments and is unable to say he believes that Sandusky is innocent because he has too much to lose, but he encourages people to thoroughly research the topic before coming to any conclusions
-Gladwell said the media blew it big time and created a moral panic
-Gladwell's talk received a favorable response from the audience
-JZ was beside himself over a critical article in Newsweek that headlined that Gladwell caused a backlash on twitter over his suggestion that the Paterno statue be brought back given that Newsweek squashed his cover story at the last minute that would have exposed the entire scandal as a myth
-JZ stated that his optimism level is low concerning a couple of projects in the works concerning changing the prevailing opinions in the saga. JZ said that Gladwell's book opened the door for the projects and that if the projects were to be viable, that Gladwell would take on an incredibly important role. He was unsure if Gladwell was willing and able to perform that role.
Here is a link to the Newsweek article that bashes Gladwell. It is truly amazing to me that a publication that was so close to blowing the lid off the false narratives that permeate the fiasco would publish a story that highlights opinions from people who are ignorant of the facts of the case. At least the comments on the article come from people who know what they are talking about.
https://www.newsweek.com/malcolm-gladwell-joe-paterno-backlash-1484882
Good observation.
Agree about the comments. That Tim Berton seems to have a good handle on this. I've seen his name pop up before.
Tim Berton comments often in Ralph Cipriano's bigtrial blog as well as in Ray Blehar's blog.
I like Joseph Stains comments as well. He is the Methodist minister who wrote the 5 part series in the Johnstown Tribune-Review a couple of weeks ago.
Here is an excerpt and a link to the entire 5 columns.
While public outrage has faded somewhat, the name Sandusky remains toxic.
Yet a growing number of researchers with no vested interest in Sandusky personally or the institutions deeply invested in the guilt narrative are reaching troubling conclusions about the truth of the accusations and the moral panic that clouds otherwise level-headed efforts to find the truth.
In 2017, acclaimed science writer Mark Pendergrast published “The Most Hated Man in America,” a thoroughly documented review of the Sandusky case, from early investigations through the trial and appeal. His work uncovers stark inconsistencies between initial statements to police in early interviews and final testimonies in court; legal irregularities in the police interview procedures; and palpable signs that debunked repressed-memories therapy techniques were applied to at least two accusers.
The bulk of information in this five-day column series is based on Pendergrast’s research.
http://www.framingpaterno.com/sites...Reconsidering_Sandusky_A_Five_Part_Series.pdf
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And jury's never make mistakes? What a dumb... stupid comment if that is the primary reason that you believe he is guilty.
Although I do not know whether Sandusky is innocent or guilty (I'm not to the point that I believe him to be totally innocent), I do know that he did not get fair treatment with regard to his trial. The trial was definitely a sham and rush to judgement.
Truth be told, I'm thinking most of those from this board falling into this category, who have bothered to read any of this, harbor at least some doubt. They just won't admit it. Too much invested in their stance. In this regard they're no different than the mainstream media.
I've seen just enough to believe he should get a new trial. If he's still found guilty, then so be it. He might very well be guilty as sin. But he still deserves a FAIR trial.
Never said he is innocent. I don't know, and I try to look at all sides. And, unlike yourself, I'm not concerned so much with optics. I will say that those here that do lean toward his innocence have presented a heck of a lot more than someone like you who has nothing to say but "that's what the jury decided". Pretty lame in light of the many shortcomings of the trial. Clearly, you and your lackey are here only to agitate.
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