This is one of the key mysteries/ flaws in Pendergast's book. First, Dottie & Jerry did not really match in their descriptions/ count per week. Second, it dosen't jive with his supposed condition. Third, the supposed condition wasn't diagnosed or didn't surface til 2007, so no impact vis a vis the accusations.
The whole area is potentially significant, but pendergast just lets it all slide.
That's a red flag that his book wasn't trying to get to the truth.
Actually, there are no flaws in the Pendergrast book, pure facts on every page.
Jerry Sandusky is a name well known—and well hated—to most Americans. Before retiring as an assistant coach of Penn State’s football team, he founded The Second Mile, an organization to help deprived young people in Pennsylvania. But his association with young boys eventually led to his downfall, and to the downfall of others. In 2008 the police began investigating Sandusky for sexual abuse of children, discerning a pattern of grooming and then of diverse forms of sexual abuse. A grand jury was convened a year later, and in 2011 Sandusky was charged with 52 counts of sexual abuse. Four charges were dropped, and in 2012 Sandusky was convicted of 45 of the remaining 48 charges of sex abuse. He was sentenced to between 30 and 60 years in prison—a life sentence for someone who was 67. He’s now in solitary confinement, as convicted pedophiles don’t fare well in prison, since they’re often attacked by fellow inmates.
At the time of the trial, nobody had any doubt about Sandusky’s guilt, and the press jumped on the story. It wasn’t just Sandusky who was involved: someone who
thought he saw Sandusky raping a boy reported it to Penn State’s iconic football coach Joe Paterno, who, along with three other University officials, were found in an internal review to have covered up reports of Sandusky’s abuse. Paterno was fired after a long career (he died of cancer not long thereafter), and the three officials, who were also fired, were convicted or pleaded guilty to child endangerment, perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. Graham Spanier, the President of Penn State, was forced to resign, and the university was fined $860 million as well as giving $109 million to those who claimed to be Sandusky’s victims.
Then, in October of last year, Mark Pendergrast, who’s also published on
the fallacy of “recovered memory”, came out with a book called
The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgement . In his view, Sandusky is “probably innocent.” But how could that be, with ten alleged victims in the trial and the press backing up the allegations?
I haven’t read Pendergrast’s book, but the
Skeptic article by Fred Crews, “
Trial by therapy: the Jerry Sandusky case revisited“, summarizes the book in an accessible way. I’d recommend reading it, as Crews isn’t somebody who is gullible, and has spent his career as a skeptic, largely about Freud and issues of recovered memory. I note as well that THE expert on the fatal flaws of “recovered memory”, Elizabeth Loftus, has also endorsed Pendergrast’s book:
“If potential readers are convinced that Jerry Sandusky is guilty, they need to read
The Most Hated Man in America. This meticulously researched, provocative, and wonderfully written book by Mark Pendergrast, an enormously important contributor to the repressed memory debate, will certainly make them see another side. Maybe they will think twice.”
—ELIZABETH LOFTUS, Distinguished Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, author,
The Myth of Repressed Memory and other books.
While Crews’s article is best fleshed out by reading the book, it summarizes the main problems with the case. These include a completely lame defense for Sandusky, with his lawyers not even presenting exculpatory evidence, and, most of all, the fact that every accusation against Sandusky seems problematic, with many based on flawed or faulty recollections and even on prompting by police and therapists who
wanted Sandusky to be guilty. A huge swath 0f testimony is based on this kind of forced “recovered memory”, and research has shown that forgotten memories of trauma are deeply problematic and almost always wrong. Crews goes through each of the ten alleged victims of Sandusky’s abuse featured at the trial, including the accusation of Sandusky was seen raping a young man in the shower (this eyewitness report appears to be wrong). The judge admitted 12-year-old hearsay testimony, and some witnesses who said they saw or experienced no sexual abuse later changed their minds after treatment with recovered memory therapy and pressure from the police.