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Spanier has a book coming out in 09/22

What silo is that? The one that accepts the Jury verdict and credible reporting not conspiracy blogs? *I* look foolish and you fools are telling us to free Jerry? LOL

How are the JoeBots wrong?
The silo that everything Penn State and all its people did was wrong and it’s all on them. If you think the prosecutors and the BOT were all above board, then you’re definitely in a silo. And who knows how anybody was wrong, that’s kind of my point….the whole situation has been so tainted that no one will ever know where the truth lies.
 
Ooh, name calling, I love internet tough guys.
You still have not answered his question. You say he is obsessed and you can't point to a single thread he has started. I'd say that most of them are started by your cultist buddies but you can't admit that, it would interfere with your narrative.

Once again, all talk and no walk. Can sling a lot of accusations but when push comes to shove you can't produce any valid data.

Want to make him go away? He probably wouldn't post if there were no active Sandusky threads, but you guys just can't control yourselves. You all get exactly what you deserve - a dose of reality.
 
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You still have not answered his question. You say he is obsessed and you can't point to a single thread he has started. I'd say that most of them are started by your cultist buddies but you can't admit that, it would interfere with your narrative.

Once again, all talk and no walk. Can sling a lot of accusations but when push comes to shove you can't produce any valid data.

Want to make him go away? He probably wouldn't post if there were no active Sandusky threads, but you guys just can't control yourselves. You all get exactly what you deserve - a dose of reality.
Wisdom. Isn't it funny how they can't see that?

"I didn't give 'em hell, I just told the truth and they thought it was hell"- Harry Truman
 
The silo that everything Penn State and all its people did was wrong and it’s all on them. If you think the prosecutors and the BOT were all above board, then you’re definitely in a silo. And who knows how anybody was wrong, that’s kind of my point….the whole situation has been so tainted that no one will ever know where the truth lies.
The BOT is PSU. But yes the evidence shows that CSS and Joe covered up for Jerry Sandusky's predations. That was proven in a court of law so how is that being in a silo?
 
He either doesn’t know or refuses to look up the responsibility TSM has legally when a student has an out of program contact. He will say TC didn’t tell him anything warranting a call to CYS. What he doesn’t want to know is an investigation has to be made as to get the details of who what when and where regardless of what TC told him. The child would have been found and contacted. To the best of my knowledge that wasn’t done because no name has been given. He can say PSU dropped the ball, and he is entitled to that opinion. But to say TSM didn’t is myopic.
Jerry Sandusky must be guilty before any research into the case in depth. After all, there was that eyewitness of shower abuse, and all those accusers. But I soon came to realize that memory malleability and suggestibility were central to how the allegations against Jerry Sandusky arose, and after in-depth research, I concluded that Sandusky is probably innocent.

What really alerted me initially was reading the trial transcript for June 13, 2012, where I found Dustin Stuble (“Victim 7”) explaining why his testimony had changed from what he said under oath at the grand jury the previous year. “Through counseling and through talking about different events, through talking about things in my past, different things triggered different memories and have had more things come back, and it’s changed a lot about what I can remember today and what I could remember before, because I had everything negative blocked out.”
Aha! I thought. It is obvious that he was in repressed memory therapy. I was right, as Struble himself told me later, and it turned out that repressed memories lay at the core of the case against Sandusky, while other memory issues lay at the heart of the infamous shower scene that got Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier fired.
I write about how human memory works in comprehensive fashion in my new 444-page publication, Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die., as well as in the 399-page book, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment. They are “sister” publications that help to inform one another, so I urge people to read both of these books. But I realize that a summary would be helpful before readers delve into the books.
Memory is reconstructive. Our brains do not keep individual memories in one place, ready to be called forth by pulling out the proper mental file or hitting the right mental computer key. Instead, our memories are stored all over our brains, and they must be reconstructed. They are subject to contamination, confusion, change, and outright fabrication. With the proper influence, people can come to envision and believe in emotionally stressful events that never occurred.
Usually, our memories serve us relatively well, however. We tend to remember most clearly the best and worst events. We recall the nice things so that we can seek them out again, and we remember the upsetting events so that we can avoid them in the future. Some people develop post-traumatic stress disorder, which involves being unable to forget severe trauma, but continuing to recall it all too well. So it is not a matter of “repressing” or “dissociating.”
The most dramatic illustration of how destructive false memories can be created occurred during the heyday of the repressed memory epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s, when many psychotherapists blatantly led their clients to believe that they had suffered years of childhood sexual abuse but had repressed the memories. In many cases, people came to envision being in mythical satanic ritual abuse cults, where they killed and consumed babies and other grotesque fantasies.
Most people think that the repressed memory epidemic is over, but it is not. A majority of Americans and psychotherapists still believe in the myth of repressed memories (or dissociated memories, as they are often called), and, according to a recent survey of a large cross-section of Americans, about 8 percent of those going to therapy in this decade came to believe that they had suffered child abuse that they had completely forgotten, then recalled in the course of therapy.
Thus, it is not surprising that the theory of repressed memory – the idea that people often totally forget abuse though some mental defense mechanism and then remember it later – lies behind some of the Sandusky accusations. I was able to directly interview only one such alleged victim, Dustin Struble, who acknowledged his repressed memories, but there is evidence for memory distortion and/or repressed memories in many others as well. I will go through them here relatively briefly.
Let me emphasize, however, that there were other factors contributing to one of the most amazing and disturbing miscarriages of justice of the 21st century. These factors include a media blitz (and blackout of any dissent or inconvenient facts), police trawling and bias, prosecutorial misconduct, a flawed judicial process, illegal leaks, and greed.
I will summarize each of the ten alleged trial victims, some of whom clearly had recovered “repressed memories” of abuse. I’ll take them in the order in which they were numbered, plus Matt Sandusky, who did not testify, but whose story is central to the case.
Aaron Fisher, Victim 1: As a 15-year-old, Aaron Fisher initially said that Jerry Sandusky had hugged him to crack his back, with their clothes on. Over the next three years, with the urging of psychotherapist Mike Gillum, Fisher eventually came to “remember” multiple instances of oral sex. Gillum apparently believed that memories too painful to recall lie buried in the unconscious, causing mental illness of all kinds—among them, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. “They (abuse victims) just want to numb themselves and push away the unpleasant memories,” Gillum wrote in the book, Silent No More. He sought to “peel back the layers of the onion” of the brain to get to abuse memories. Nor did Aaron Fisher have to tell him anything. Gillum would guess what happened and Fisher only had to nod his head or say Yes. “I was very blunt with him when I asked questions but gave him the ability to answer with a yes or a no, that relieved him of a lot of burden,” Gillum wrote. In the same book, Aaron Fisher recalled: “Mike just kept saying that Jerry was the exact profile of a predator. When it finally sank in, I felt angry.”
Fisher explained that “I was good at pushing it (memories of abuse) all away . . . Once the weekends [with Jerry] were over, I managed to lock it all deep inside my mind somehow. That was how I dealt with it until next time. Mike has explained a lot to me since this all happened. He said that what I was doing is called compartmentalizing. . . . I was in such denial about everything.” Without the three years of therapy with Mike Gillum, it is unlikely that Aaron Fisher would ever have accused Jerry Sandusky of sexual abuse, and the case would never have gone forward.
Allan Myers (“Victim 2”) was the teenager in the shower in February 2001, when Mike McQueary heard slapping sounds that he interpreted as sexual. In fact, they were the sounds of Myers and Sandusky slap boxing or snapping towels at one another. McQueary did not see Sandusky and the boy together in the shower – he only caught a glimpse of the boy in a mirror. He changed his memory nearly ten years later when the police told him that Sandusky was a serial molester. McQueary, like many people, did not require therapy to distort his memory. Influenced by current attitudes, he came to envision that he had witnessed something he had not actually seen. This is one of the well-known hazards of eyewitness testimony, as experimental psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others have demonstrated.
We do not know whether Allan Myers was ever in therapy to help retrieve abuse memories. He received several million dollars as one of the alleged Sandusky victims, but he did not testify at the trial, and he has never actually accused Sandusky of molesting him in any kind of detail. Initially, he provided a very strong defense of Sandusky, saying that he had never abused him, before becoming a client of civil attorney Andrew Shubin, who sent most of his Sandusky clients to therapy, quite likely to help retrieve repressed abuse memories. As reporter Sara Ganim wrote in November 2011, Shubin “teamed up with psychologists, social workers and a national child sex abuse organization so that these people [alleged victims] can seek mental help along with possible legal recourse.”
Jason Simcisko (“Victim 3”) told the police that nothing inappropriate had happened with Jerry Sandusky, when he was first interviewed. When the policemen asked if Sandusky had helped him rinse off in the shower, perhaps lifting him up to the showerhead, Simcisko replied, according to the police report: “There might have been something like that. I don’t exactly remember, but it sounds familiar.” This was the beginning of the process of manipulating his memory. At the end of the interview, the police report noted that Simcisko “agreed to call if he recalled anything further.”
By the time of the trial. Simcisko had remembered Sandusky touching his penis numerous times. He explained why he hadn’t revealed this earlier: “Everything that’s coming out now is because I thought about it more. I tried to block this out of my brain for years.” We don’t know for sure whether Simcisko was in psychotherapy or not, but Andrew Shubin was his lawyer.
Brett Houtz (“Victim 4”) did not make any abuse allegations to either his lawyer or the police during initial contact, but he did make allegations during a long subsequent interview with police, during which his lawyer was present. The police inadvertently left the tape recorder on, revealing their grossly leading interview methods, which can sway memory as effectively as psychotherapy. Police investigator Joseph Leiter said, “I know there’s been a rape committed somewhere along the line,” and noted that “it just took repetition and repetition” to get Aaron Fisher to say anything. He said that the police would routinely tell prospective victims: “Listen, this is what we found so far. You fit the pattern of all the other ones. This is the way he operates and the other kids we dealt with have told us that this has happened after this happened. Did that happen to you?” This is a classic illustration of “confirmation bias,” in which the police had already predetermined in their own minds what that truth was. And in this case, Leiter was intent on getting Houtz to say that Sandusky had forced him into oral sex. Eventually, Houtz did just that.
At the end of the interview, the police asked Houtz to try to remember more. “What usually happens is when you start to think about things…it may be 3 o’clock in the morning, tonight, and you go, Oh, my gosh, I remember this or I remember that or whatever.” In that case, Houtz should call them. “Sometimes things come up and you remember more things in detail.”
By the time Houtz testified in devastating fashion at the trial, he was in therapy with Mike Gillum. During the trial, Houtz said, “I have spent, you know, so many years burying this in the back of my mind forever.” It is not clear if he was talking about repressed memories, but it certainly sounds like it. On the other hand, Houtz had a long-standing reputation as a manipulative liar, and his father had initially contacted his lawyer with an obvious eye on money.
Michal Kajak (“Victim 5”) made allegations during his first contact with the police. We have no way of knowing whether Michal Kajak was in repressed memory therapy. By the time he spoke to the police on June 7, 2011, however, the abuse allegations against Sandusky had been publicized by reporter Sara Ganim, who had also contacted Zachary Konstas’s mother, who had, in turn, suggested that the police interview Kajak as a potential victim. We also know that Zach Konstas’s sister had already talked to Kajak about the allegations.
At any rate, Kajak said, according to a police report, that “he did not want to remember this stuff.” Kajak finally said that Sandusky had taken his hand and placed it on Sandusky’s erection for a few seconds during this single shower they took together. His story then was amplified somewhat over time, including a three-year shift in when the abuse allegedly occurred.
It is possible that Kajak, in envisioning the single time he had showered with Sandusky, convinced himself that this had happened. It is also possible that he spoke with his friend Dustin Struble, who was “remembering” his own abuse and might have helped him with his own shower story. Kajak’s allegations do not fit the modus operandi that the police otherwise thought Sandusky used. He was supposed to have “groomed” boys carefully before attempting more overt sexual abuse. The idea that Sandusky would have acted this way during the very first shower must have seemed odd, even to the police.
Zachary Konstas (“Victim 6”) never actually claimed that Sandusky abused him, although under the influence of the investigation and trial, he came to believe that Sandusky had “groomed” him for abuse in a 1998 shower. The day after the shower, Konstas emphatically denied that any abuse had taken place. Over the subsequent years, Konstas expressed his admiration and gratitude to Jerry Sandusky for his role in his life through notes and greeting cards. In 2009, as a twenty-three-year-old, Konstas wrote: “Hey Jerry just want 2 wish u a Happy Fathers Day! Greater things are yet 2 come!” Later that year he wrote: “Happy Thanksgiving bro! I’m glad God has placed U in my life. Ur an awesome friend! Love ya!”
But Zachary Konstas’s perceptions were altered drastically between the fall of 2010 and June 2012. As Allan Myers did, Konstas got a lawyer. Although he never accused Sandusky of sexually abusing him, but he made it sound as though the coach had wanted to, that Sandusky had been “grooming” him for abuse. He also implied that perhaps Sandusky had abused him, but that he, Konstas, had forgotten it. Konstas may have come to believe that he had “repressed” the memories. He had asked his friend, Dustin Struble (“Victim 7”) “if [he] remembered anything more, if counseling was helping,” and Konstas himself was clearly undergoing psychotherapy. At Sandusky’s sentencing hearing, he said, “I have been left with deep, painful wounds that you caused and had been buried in the garden of my heart for many years.”
Konstas’s attorney, Howard Janet, explained in an interview how Konstas and the other alleged victims could “create a bit of a Chinese wall in their minds. They bury these events that were so painful to them deep in their subconscious.”
Zachary Konstas may not have recovered specific memories of abuse, but his reinterpretation of his past, along with implications that he may have repressed the memories, were enough for the jury to find Sandusky guilty of planning to abuse him.
Dustin Struble (“Victim 7”) admitted to me that he was in repressed memory, and his trial testimony makes that obvious as well. He had no abuse memories until the police contacted him, and he considered Sandusky a friend and mentor until then. State Trooper Joseph Leiter interviewed Struble for the first time on February 3, 2011. By that time Struble had been thinking about the way Sandusky used to put his hand on his knee while driving, and now he thought he remembered Sandusky moving his hand slowly up towards his crotch sometimes. And other times, he thought Sandusky may have been trying to slide his hand down his back under his underwear waistband. Yes, he had taken showers with Sandusky, but nothing sexual had taken place there. He’d given him bear hugs at times, but not in the shower. They had wrestled around, but Sandusky had never touched him inappropriately.
At the end of the interview, Leiter was excited that Struble was open to the idea that Sandusky might have abused him, but that wasn’t enough. In ending the interview he “advised Struble that as he recalls events to please contact me and we can set up another interview. Also, if he begins having difficulties with his memories to contact me so that assistance can be found.” Struble entered psychotherapy less than three weeks later.
By the time of the trial, Struble had changed his story, asserting that Sandusky gave him bear hugs, washed his hair in the shower, and then dried him off. He said that Sandusky had put his hand down his pants and touched his penis in the car, that Sandusky had grabbed him in the shower and pushed the front of his body up against the back of Dustin’s body. On the stand, he explained: “That doorway that I had closed has since been re-opening more. More things have been coming back…. Through counseling and different things, I can remember a lot more detail that I had pushed aside than I did at that point.” Struble went on to explain more about how his repressed memories had returned in therapy. He further explained: “The more negative things, I had sort of pushed into the back of my mind, sort of like closing a door, closing—putting stuff in the attic and closing the door to it. That’s what I feel like I did.”
In 2014, I interviewed Struble in his home in State College, PA. In a follow-up email, he wrote: “Actually both of my therapists have suggested that I have repressed memories, and that’s why we have been working on looking back on my life for triggers. My therapist has suggested that I may still have more repressed memories that have yet to be revealed, and this could be a big cause of the depression that I still carry today. We are still currently working on that.”
Phantom Victim (“Victim 8”) is the product of double hearsay testimony that should never have been allowed at the trial. A janitor named Ron Petrosky said that another janitor, Jim Calhoun, had told him in the fall of 2000 that he saw Sandusky giving oral sex to a young boy in a Penn State locker room shower. By the time of the June 2012 trial, Calhoun had Alzheimer’s and could not testify, but the judge allowed Petrosky to do so. Sandusky was found guilty of molesting this unidentified boy.
But in a taped interview on May 15, 2011, Jim Calhoun had told the police that Sandusky was not the man he saw giving oral sex to a young man in the shower. The defense apparently had not listened to the tape and never entered it into evidence in the trial.
Sabastian Paden (“Victim 9”) came forward after the explosive Grand Jury Presentment became public on November 4, 2011, and the Office of the Attorney General publicized a hotline for prospective Sandusky victims. At that point, it was clear to civil lawyers and alleged victims that there was a possible financial windfall to be had.
Paden’s changed attitude towards Sandusky occurred incredibly quickly, after his mother called his school to ask them to contact the police. When the police appeared at his door, Paden denied having been abused. Sometime in October 2011, the high school senior was seated in Beaver Stadium beside Sandusky, enjoying a Penn State football game with a friend. Less than a month later, however, Paden rocked the grand jury with accounts of his former life as a virtual captive in the Sandusky basement, where he claimed to have screamed for help, to no avail, even though the basement was not soundproofed and there was no way to lock him down there. Paden said that he was forced to perform oral sex on numerous occasions, and that Sandusky attempted anal intercourse over sixteen times, with actual penetration at times.
It is unlikely that repressed memory therapy was involved in encouraging Sabastian Paden’s memories, at least at the outset, since his grotesque allegations arose within just a few days of his mother’s initial phone call. It is instead likely that he was either telling the truth or that he was consciously lying, at the urging of his mother and in search of remuneration and sympathetic attention.
Ryan Rittmeyer (“Victim 10”) also responded to the Sandusky hotline after the case exploded in the media. He had been incarcerated twice—for burglary in 2004, at age seventeen, and in September 2007, when he was twenty, for burglary and assault. He and a teenager assaulted an elderly man on the street, punching him in the face and leaving him with permanent injuries. Rittmeyer was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison and was released in 2009. At the time of the trial, he was married, with a pregnant wife. After he called the hotline, Rittmeyer was represented by lawyer Andrew Shubin.
At his first police interview with officer Michael Cranga on November 29, 2011, Rittmeyer said that Jerry Sandusky had groped him in a swimming pool. Then, while driving a silver convertible, Sandusky had allegedly opened his pants to expose his penis and told Rittmeyer to put it in his mouth. When he refused, Sandusky became angry and told him that if didn’t do it, Rittmeyer would never see his family again. “His life went downhill” subsequently, Cranga wrote in his report, which Rittmeyer apparently blamed on this traumatic event.
During his grand jury testimony on December 5, 2011, Rittmeyer changed and amplified his story. Now he said that something sexual occurred almost every time he saw Sandusky throughout 1997, 1998, and part of 1999, once or twice a month. Finally, Rittmeyer said that he eventually complied and gave Sandusky oral sex, and vice versa.
Jerry Sandusky never owned any kind of convertible, nor was it likely that he borrowed or rented one, which would have been quite out of character for him. The Ryan Rittmeyer testimony, filled with inconsistencies as well as a mythical silver convertible, appears even more questionable because the Sanduskys said that they couldn’t even remember him, whereas they readily admitted knowing the other Second Mile accusers. He may have been one of the Second Mile kids who came to their home, but Dottie Sandusky didn’t know his name, and Jerry Sandusky said that if he met him on the street, he would not recognize him.
There was apparently no repressed memory therapy necessary in Rittmeyer’s case, though it is likely that Shubin sent him for subsequent counseling.
Matt Sandusky didn’t testify at trial, so he never received a victim number. The last of the six children to be adopted by Dottie and Jerry Sandusky, at the age of 18, Matt had supported his accused parent during the investigation. In 2011 he had testified in front of the grand jury that his adoptive father had never abused him. But in the middle of the June 2012 trial, apparently after entering psychotherapy, he “flipped,” going to the police to say that Jerry Sandusky had abused him.
Matt told the police that he was working with a therapist and that “memories of his abuse are just now coming back,” according to the NBC announcer who played portions of the leaked interview tape. When the police asked whether Sandusky had sodomized him or forced him into oral sex, Matt answered: “As of this time, I don’t recall that.”
But by the time Matt appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s television show in 2014, he had remembered oral sex. He made it clear to Winfrey that he had not recalled sexual abuse until he was in repressed memory therapy, but this apparently did not make her skeptical in the least. “So based upon what you’re telling me,” Winfrey said to him, “you actually repressed a lot of it.” And Matt replied, “Uh-huh, absolutely. The physical part is the part that, you know, you can erase.”
When she asked him about first coming forward to talk to the police during the trial, he said, “It was a confusing time.” It wasn’t as if he heard Brett Houtz and all his own abuse memories came rushing back. “My child self had protected my adult self,” he explained. “My child self was holding onto what had happened to me—and taken that from me—so I, I didn’t have the memory of—I didn’t have these memories of the sexual abuse—or with him doing all of the things that he did.”
As he listened to the testimony of Brett Houtz and other alleged victims, he felt somehow that “they were telling my story,” but he apparently didn’t remember abuse right away. “They were telling—you know, all of these things start coming back to you, yes, [and] it starts to become very confusing for me and you try and figure out what is real and what you’re making up.”
In summary, then, repressed memories were key to many of the Sandusky accusations, including the first case which was also the only case for the first two years of the investigation. Then, when Mike McQueary’s memory of the 2001 shower morphed into actually seeing abuse, the police began a frantic search for more alleged victims, who were “developed,” as prosecutor Jonelle Eshbach put it, through suggestive, leading interview tactics and civil lawyer and therapist involvement. The jurors did not have the information they needed to evaluate the spoken testimony in its proper context. If they had known how the testimony was nurtured and created, their opinions about the authenticity of the event might have been altered.
Instead, as we know, they found Sandusky guilty. After the verdict, Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly held a triumphant press conference outside the courthouse, during which she referred directly to the importance of repressed memories in the Sandusky case: “It was incredibly difficult for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”
 
You still have not answered his question. You say he is obsessed and you can't point to a single thread he has started. I'd say that most of them are started by your cultist buddies but you can't admit that, it would interfere with your narrative.

Once again, all talk and no walk. Can sling a lot of accusations but when push comes to shove you can't produce any valid data.

Want to make him go away? He probably wouldn't post if there were no active Sandusky threads, but you guys just can't control yourselves. You all get exactly what you deserve - a dose of reality.
Swing and a big miss….I am not a “cultist” by any means, but way to lump any one with an actual independent thought in with a group, very intellectual of you. So not starting a thread, but spending days on one that had little to do with the original post is not obsessive…ok, got it.
 
The BOT is PSU. But yes the evidence shows that CSS and Joe covered up for Jerry Sandusky's predations. That was proven in a court of law so how is that being in a silo?
So everything ever shown in court is the truth? Hm, I guess that means no innocent person has ever been convicted….wow, who knew? And the evidence shows, huh? I guess evidence has never been manipulated or faked to get a verdict….again, who knew. You need to do better than that.
 
Swing and a big miss….I am not a “cultist” by any means, but way to lump any one with an actual independent thought in with a group, very intellectual of you.
If it's got an Adams apple it prolly a man.
So not starting a thread,
You concede that
but spending days on one that had little to do with the original post is not obsessive…ok, got it.
So, I don't start posts about Sandusky but respond, refute, rebut and kill conspiracy theories advanced by JoeBots in this silo so they (cultists) hear the truth from which they can't escape. NOW, you've got it.
 
So everything ever shown in court is the truth? Hm, I guess that means no innocent person has ever been convicted….wow, who knew? And the evidence shows, huh? I guess evidence has never been manipulated or faked to get a verdict….again, who knew. You need to do better than that.
So hyperbole is stupid and used by fools. If you think it isn't the truth and the jury did wrong, simple, prove it. You haven't and I think can't so maybe YOU need to do better?
 
Swing and a big miss….I am not a “cultist” by any means, but way to lump any one with an actual independent thought in with a group, very intellectual of you. So not starting a thread, but spending days on one that had little to do with the original post is not obsessive…ok, got it.
Please feel free to point out where I called you a "cultist".
 
He's got a financial interest in the "gold rush" that hit Centre County a decade ago. Lot's of attorneys and "financial consultants" etc. live in fear of the truth surfacing. If not, they would welcome debate and a retrial for Sandusky. Hell, PSU OGBOT are afraid their motives will reach the surface as well.
In Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, Penn State University was being sued by its own insurance carrier. The Pennsylvania Manufacturer's Association had taken issue with the large multimillion payouts the university was awarding to 36 young men like Victim No. 4, payments to date that have totaled $118 million.
Steven J. Engelmyer, the lawyer representing Penn State's insurance carrier, had a simple question for Swisher-Houtz, who just a year earlier, on Sept. 12, 2013, had collected a confidential settlement from Penn State of $7.25 million.

“Has anybody from Penn State ever spoken to you?" the lawyer wanted to know.
“Not that I’m aware of,” the witness replied.
In terms of legal battles, it was easy money. In sex abuse cases, alleged victims can potentially face a grilling from a private investigator, a deposition by a lawyer, and an extensive evaluation conducted by a forensic psychiatrist. They can also be asked to submit to a polygraph test to see if they're telling in truth.

Instead, here's what happened with Swisher-Houtz. On Dec. 4, 2012, lawyers Benjamin D. Andreozzi and Jeffrey Fritz, who did not respond to requests for comment, filed a three-and-a-half-page civil claim on behalf of the alleged victim. It was reviewed on behalf of Penn State by Barbara Ziv, a consulting forensic psychiatrist from Flourtown, PA, as well as law firm headed by Kenneth Feinberg of Washington, D.C.

When asked to specify the facts of his alleged abuse, "where it happened and the date on which it happened," Swisher-Houtz's lawyers wrote, "The instances of abuse were so frequent that Mr. Swisher-Houtz cannot be expected to list them here. In summary, Mr. Sandusky forced Mr. Swisher to engage in oral sex on countless occasions and attempted to penetrate his anus. See Sandusky trial transcript or grand jury reports related to Victim No. 4." The lawyers also submitted a report on the victim's behalf from a licensed psychologist.
Nearly a year later, Swisher-Houtz hit the lottery when the university paid him $7.25 million.

It could have been a rougher road to settlement. In the case of Swisher-Houtz, there was stone-cold proof on tape that the cops had deliberately lied to him to elicit more details of alleged abuse. A suspect therapist had also used widely discredited memory-recovery therapy on Victim No. 4 to elicit testimony that a prominent memory expert stated in court had no credible scientific basis.

At the very least, a skillful interrogator might have succeeded in driving down the price of a settlement. But according to Swisher-Houtz, nobody from the university ever bothered to ask him anything. Instead, Penn State just wrote out another big check in its quest to purchase an atonement from scandal.

The Conductor on the Gravy Train

The university trustee who oversaw victim settlements isn't talking, but we have some insight into his mindset thanks to a brief May 17, 2017 recorded interview between a would-be author and Ira Lubert. The Philadelphia real estate guru is the Penn State trustee who oversaw the board’s legal subcommittee, which approved the first 26 multi-million dollar settlement awarded to the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky. Those 26 claims were subsequently ratified en masse by the entire board, after Lubert assured his fellow trustees that the claimants had been thoroughly vetted.

In a remarkably candid interview of just three and a half minutes, obtained by reporter John Ziegler, Lubert talked about the alleged victims of Sandusky, none of whom had attended Penn State. Lubert colorfully described the claimants as being lined up "at the trough" waiting on the “gravy train.”
A gravy train on which Lubert was the conductor.


Lubert blamed the university's plight on poor judgment exercised by Penn State's top officials. He was presumably talking about former university President Graham Spanier, Vice President Gary Schultz, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Coach Joe Paterno.
"I believe all four of them were great people; I have a lot of respect for all of them," Lubert said.

In the taped interview, Lubert, who did not respond to several requests for comment, was generous in his praise of Penn State's top officials, before burying them.

"I think they did amazing things for the university," Lubert said. "But all four used poor judgment and poor leadership. And as a result of that, they couldn't continue to lead our university."

Lubert singled out Spanier for not being proactive in his discussions with other administrators about Sandusky's habit of showering with young boys, as evidenced by two separate incidents in 1998 and 2001. According to Lubert, Spanier supposedly decided, "I'm not gonna call human services or research any further whether something happened or didn't happen" when it came to Sandusky and the boys in the shower.

"And then it cost us $200 million to settle this. And he stays on as president," Lubert huffed about Spanier. "That can't happen."

Lubert turned his attention to the question of whether Penn State's top officials committed any crimes.

"I was surprised when they pled guilty," Lubert said, presumably about Schultz and Curley. "I don't think they broke the law. I think they used very poor judgment. And, as I said to you, very poor leadership . . . That doesn't make them bad people. It just means you can't work at Penn State or any other university or any company when you demonstrate that failure in leadership."

"I fired him for that reason," Lubert said, presumably talking about Spanier. "Not because he broke the law but because he used bad judgment."

Lubert talked about "all these theories" and various "snippet of information" out there about the Sandusky case, and then returned to his bottom line.

"But at the end of the day, we have five people," Lubert said, presumably throwing Sandusky into the mix, along with Spanier, Schultz, Curley and Paterno.

"Two were convicted, two pled guilty and one said in hindsight, I wished I'd done more," Lubert said. He was talking in private to a would-be author who was a former Second Mile kid himself, somebody who believed that Sandusky was innocent, and that the young men who accused him of sex abuse were lying.

But Lubert wasn't buying it.

"To say you think nothing happened and that Jerry was totally innocent, I just have trouble with all of the other facts surrounding why all that happened to all those five guys," Lubert said, returning to the top Penn State officials caught up in the scandal.

Lubert repeated his mantra: Sandusky and Spanier got convicted, Curley and Schultz pled guilty, and Paterno "said when he was alive, in hindsight I'd wish I'd done more."

About the claimants, Lubert stated categorically, "They're not all victims. There's some that were on the gravy train. There's some [claims] that we settled for $100,000 that would have cost us more to litigate. But there were some real victims. . . [some who] tried to commit suicide. I was in a position to see it."
“There’s some very bad situations,” Lubert concluded. “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. But believe me when I tell you, there was some bad stuff going on."

The Master of Disasters

To initiate their claims of abuse, lawyers for the alleged victims typically filed a "confidential intake questionnaire" that marked the official start of the "Feinberg & Rozen Claims Resolution Process." In a couple of cases, the victims also filed civil lawsuits where university officials and trustees were deposed.

To get paid, an alleged victim had to be a verified member of the Second Mile, Sandusky's charity for at-risk kids. It also helped to have testified against Sandusky at his criminal trial in 2012, as did eight of the 36 alleged victims, a trial where Sandusky was found guilty of 45 counts of abuse.

For an alleged victim to get paid, it also helped to have reports from licensed psychologists, and medical records submitted for review. To get paid, a claimant had to have his paperwork reviewed by Dr. Ziv, and receive a favorable recommendation to settle the case from the law firm of Feinberg Rozen LLP of Washington D.C.


Kenneth Feinberg, dubbed "
The Master of Disasters," is the lawyer they called in to approve mass billion-dollar payouts to the victims of 9/11, the BP oil spill, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the Boston Marathon bombing. Besides presiding over terrorist attacks and natural disasters, Feinberg has overseen large billon dollar settlements in class action suits for pain and suffering caused by Agent Orange and the Dalkon Shield. In big disaster cases, Feinberg takes a global approach to settlements, rather than duking it out on one claim after another in the civil courts.

"In certain very limited types of mass disasters, there's gotta be a better way than one-by-one courts," Feinberg told The Observer in 2016. "These programs . . . do that. And they're very successful."

It was also successful for Feinberg Rozen, which, as of January 2017, had been paid $1,484,094 by Penn State, after the law firm approved the first 28 settlements in the Sandusky case.

Feinberg, responding to an email requesting comment, said there wasn't much light he could shed on the process of vetting claims at Penn State.

"The mediation process was highly confidential and I am not at liberty to answer any questions you may pose concerning the value of the claims or other related details," Feinberg wrote in an email. He referred questions to Joseph O'Dea, the lawyer who represented Penn State in the claim mediation process. O'Dea declined comment, referring questions to Lawrence Lokman, a university spokesperson.

"We have no comment for you," Lokman wrote in an email. "The university's perspective on the settlements, and Ken Feinberg's Op-ed describing the process are a matter of public record."

In that 2016 Op-ed piece, Feinberg wrote, "The [claim mediation] process was thorough, fair, respectful and characterized by full arms-length debate in each case." He described the resulting settlements as "a remarkable achievement given the high-profile nature of the cases."

"Preventing years of expensive, protracted, and uncertain litigation will save Penn State millions of dollars, while sparing the victims who brought their cases forward the agony of an extended legal battle," Feinberg wrote. "I believe the Penn State mediation is a model of how such a dispute resolution process should work."
An "Absence of Documentation"

Not everyone agreed with Feinberg's rosy assessment of the claim mediation process. In 2013, the payouts prompted the university’s insurance carrier, the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association Insurance Company (PMA), to sue Penn State and the various “John Doe” claimants. The lawsuit ended three years later in a confidential settlement that lawyers in the case say they are prohibited from discussing.
One of those lawyers is Eric Anderson of Pittsburgh, an expert witness who testified on behalf of the insurance carrier. Although he declined to talk about the case, Anderson wrote a report that was disclosed in court records, a report that ripped the university.

“It appears as though Penn State made little effort, if any, to verify the credibility of the claims of the individuals,” Anderson wrote on October 5, 2015. In his report, Anderson decried “the absence of documentation” in the claims, saying in many cases there was “no signed affidavit, statement or other means of personal verification of the information which I reviewed."
“I do not know why so many of the cases were settled for such high sums of money,” Anderson wrote.

The lawyer suggested that “potential punitive damages . . . factored into Penn State’s evaluations,” along with “a concern about publicity and a desire to resolve the matters very quickly.”

The Catholic Comparison

The average settlement at Penn State was $3.3 million, more than double the highest average settlements paid out to alleged victims of sex abuse in the Catholic clergy scandals, such as in:

-- Boston, where the church in 2003 paid $85 million to 552 alleged victims, an average settlement of $153,985.

-- Los Angeles, where the church in 2006 paid $60 million to 45 alleged victims, an average of $1.3 million.

-- Los Angeles, where the church in 2007 paid $660 million to 508 alleged victims, an average of $1.3 million.

-- San Diego, where the church in 2007 paid $198 million to 144 alleged victims, an average of $1.4 million.

Throwing Gasoline on a Fire
Another factor that may have led to higher settlements at Penn State was the publication of the Freeh Report of 2012, which blamed the university's football culture for the scandal, and accused Penn State's top administrators of engaging in a cover up.

Gary Langsdale, the university’s risk officer, was deposed in the insurance case on May 30, 2014. At the deposition, Engelmyer, the insurance carrier’s lawyer, asked Langsdale if he had any concerns about the impact the Freeh Report would have on claims of abuse.

“The report seemed to throw gasoline on a fire,” Langsdale replied.
Engelmyer turned to the university's efforts to vet the claims.

"Tell me what steps Penn State took to confirm that the claimants that they were paying are, in fact credible and were telling true stories," the lawyer asked.

"I read through the material that was provided by the victim's attorney, considered it in context with what we were told by Dr. [Barbara] Ziv was Mr. Sandusky's pattern of abuse, listened to Feinberg and Rozen on the subject, listened to Dr. Ziv on the subject," Langsdale testified.

The lawyer asked Langsdale if he had any concerns that Dr. Ziv, the psychologist hired by the university as an expert to evaluate claims, “did not interview any of the first 26 or so victims who received payments from Penn State?”
“Not particularly,” Langsdale said.

"Why not," Engelmyer asked.

"Because I thought the process is robust enough to give us a good picture of the claims," Langsdale said.


Dr. Ziv could not be reached for comment. She was a prominent witness at the Bill Cosby rape trial, where she testified about common "rape myths" regarding the behavior of victims of sex abuse. One of those myths, Dr. Ziv told the jury, was that victims lie.

No more than seven percent of sex abuse claims are false, Dr. Ziv told the jury. She added that the actual percentage of false claims could be as low as two percent.

Dr. Ziv was clearly a believer in the overall veracity of alleged victims of sexual abuse, so it makes sense why she wouldn't have to personally interview alleged victims to certify their accounts as true. University officials, however, subsequently decided to change their hands-off approach to claimants, when it came to having a psychiatrist review those claims.

In 2015, the university began hiring psychiatrists to examine the claimants, beginning with Skyler Coover, No. 29 on the list, who was paid $7 million. The exams didn't seem to lower the price of settlements. Besides Coover, six more claimants were examined by university psychiatrists, and all seven of those victims collected a total of $27.8 million, or $3.97 million each.

In contrast to Dr. Ziv's faith in the veracity of alleged victims of abuse, a judge recently questioned the credibility of Glenn Neff, an alleged victim of Sandusky's who was attempting to gain immediate access to the confidential settlement of $7 million that he received last year from Penn State.

According to the Chester County
Daily Local News, on July 17th, Chester County Judge William P. Mahon "angrily dismissed" a request to transfer assets from Neff's multimillion-dollar settlement that was sought by a Delaware-based financial firm. The newspaper did not name Neff as a victim, because of a typical media policy of self-censorship when it comes to alleged victims of sex abuse, but Neff's name was printed on legal documents in the case.

According to the newspaper, the Delaware firm sought court approval of a plan to convert $2.99 million from Neff's 2017 settlement into $850,000 in cash. In court, Neff testified that he needed the money to bolster his tree-trimming business and his wife wanted to expand a beauty salon.

But Judge Mahon said the proposed settlement, the third in the case, was "riddled with sketchy assertions about [Neff's] financial well-being that were contradicted by statements" Neff made in court.

"I am beginning to wonder what the heck is going on," the judge said, adding "these petitions are completely unreliable."

"This is abysmal," the judge said, before declaring, "Petition dismissed." The judge compared the behavior of the many firms seeking to gain access to Neff's settlement by offering immediate cash to "sharks with blood in the water."

In his claim, Neff alleged that he was sexually abused by Sandusky "on multiple dates between January 2004 and May 2005," including oral and anal rapes, but didn't tell anybody about it until 2016.

As he left the hearing, according to the story filed by reporter Michael Rellahan, Neff refused to answer a reporter's questions, and Neff's wife "shouted before making an obscene gesture while boarding an elevator."
Rolling Over

As part of their concerted effort to turn the page on the Sandusky scandal, Penn State's board of trustees decided not to publicly contest any of the findings of the Freeh Report. Even though behind closed doors, some trustees were highly critical of the work done by the former FBI director.

On Jan. 14, 2015, Karen Peetz, former president of the board of trustees during the Sandusky scandal, was deposed by lawyer Engelmyer in the insurance case.

In response to questions from Engelmeyer, Peetz criticized Freeh for an "overreach" when he accused Penn State officials of concealing Sandusky's conduct, and having a "striking lack of empathy" for victims.

"His spin on the situation," was how Peetz characterized Freeh's criticisms. When the university hired Freeh, Peetz testified, she expected "nothing but the facts."
"I expected facts," she repeated, but stated that instead of facts, the university got "editorializing" from Freeh. As well as a "kind of dramatization," Peetz said, when Freeh faulted the university's football culture for the sex abuse scandal.

Peetz also stated that she had no idea until she read the Freeh Report that the NCAA was relying on it to punish the university.

"Were you aware that they [the NCAA] were using the Freeh Report as a factual basis for the imposition . . . of sanctions?" Engelmyer asked.

"No," Peetz said.

"When did you first find out?" the lawyer asked. "Was it when you read it?"

"Yes," she said.

But, according to Peetz, rather than take issue with Freeh, a majority of trustees decided to roll over.

"We made a decision not to pick apart the Freeh Report, thinking that that wasn't going to be that helpful to moving forward," Peetz testified.

She added, "There's a group of trustees who would like to do that."
"It just doesn't make sense."

While Penn State took a hands-off approach to investigating claims of abuse, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had a practice of hiring private detectives to investigate claims.

Jack Rossiter, a former FBI agent of 30 years, investigated more than 150 cases of alleged sex abuse as a private detective employed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia between 2003 and 2007.


In a situation involving national publicity, like the Jerry Sandusky case, Rossiter said, you'd have to be on guard for criminals and drug addicts coming forward to seek a pay day.


"With national headlines and all these people lining up, you'd have to be more skeptical" of the claims, Rossiter said.

"Obviously, you have to do a detailed interview" with each alleged victim, he said, asking questions such as, "Who did you tell, when did you tell them? And who can corroborate your story?"

"That's what you do, you investigate," Rossiter said. "The key," he said, is to find corroboration for the victim's story, to see if their stories hold up.

"A good interviewer could have broken somebody who was fabricating something," Rossiter said. Especially if you drag them through all the details of what the Penn State locker room looked like, to determine "whether they were really in the shower."

The surest way to spot a fake, Rossiter said, is to come at their story from the opposite point of view.

In investigating cases for the archdiocese, Rossiter said, "I have to go into it believing the victim is telling the truth." If the detective merely tried to help the church cover up abuse, "I'm of no value to anyone," Rossiter said.

So he always gave the victim "a clean slate," the benefit of the doubt, Rossiter said. Then, the former FBI agent set out to try and corroborate the victims' stories. In seeking proof, Rossiter went as far as to polygraph priests accused of abuse.

As far as the Penn State case was concerned, Rossiter was surprised to hear that apparently not one of the 36 alleged victims supposedly told anyone about the attacks when they allegedly occurred -- a period that spanned nearly four decades.

If a pedophile was running loose for that long, "You would think someone would pick it up," Rossiter said. "Either at school or the parents or a close friend."

Rossiter was also troubled by the use of recovered memories by many alleged victims of Sandusky.

"I always have my doubts about that," he said. The radically changing stories of many of the victims was another source of concern for an investigator playing defense on claims. Rossiter said he couldn't understand why the university didn't do more to investigate claims of abuse.

It sounds like "they just got a pool of money together and said let's buy everybody off and get this damn thing behind us," Rossiter said. "It just doesn't make sense."


Swisher-Houtz's Claim

When the father of Brett Swisher-Houtz read the story by Sara Ganim in the Patriot-News about how a grand jury was investigating Jerry Sandusky for sex abuse, he advised his son, a former Second Mile alum, to hire lawyer Benjamin Andreozzi, who specialized in taking sex assault cases on contingency.

But when Andreozzi first came to see him on April 5, 2011, Swisher-Houtz wasn’t cooperative, and didn’t say anything had happened to him. Two days later, when a state police corporal knocked on his door, Swisher-Houtz said he wanted to talk to his lawyer before he talked to police.
On April 21, 2011, Pennsylvania State Troopers Joseph Leiter and Scott Rossman interviewed Swisher-Houtz at the police barracks, with his attorney present, and a tape recorder running. This time, Swisher-Houtz was more cooperative.

During the first 50 minutes of questioning, as recounted in trial transcripts, Swisher-Houtz told the troopers about wrestling matches with Sandusky, and how Sandusky would pin him to the floor with his genitals allegedly stuck in the boy’s face. Then, Sandusky would allegedly kiss and lick the inside of the boy’s legs, Swisher-Houtz claimed. That prompted Trooper Rossman to ask if Sandusky would kiss or lick his testicles.
“Kind of,” he replied, but the state troopers suspected the witness was holding back graphic details of more serious abuse.

Cops Caught Lying
While Swisher-Houtz smoked a cigarette outside, the two state troopers talked with Houtz’s lawyer, unaware that the tape-recorder was still running. On tape, the troopers talked about how it had taken months to coax rape details out of Aaron Fisher, "Victim No. 1" in the Sandusky case.

“First, it was, 'Yeah, he would rub my shoulders;' then it took repetition and repetition and finally, we got to the point where he [Fisher] would tell us what happened,” Leiter said. The troopers talked about how they were sure Swisher-Houtz was another rape victim, and they discussed how to get more details out of him.
Andreozzi had a helpful suggestion: “Can we at some point say to him, ‘Listen, we have interviewed other kids and other kids have told us that there was intercourse and that they have admitted this, you know. Is there anything else you want to tell us?’”
“Yep, we do that with all the other kids,” Leiter said.
When Swisher-Houtz returned, Leiter told him, “I just want to let you know you are not the first victim we have spoken to.” The trooper told him about nine adults the police had already interviewed, and said, “It is amazing. If this was a book, you would have been repeating, word for word, pretty much what a lot of people have already told us.”
At that point, the troopers had only interviewed three alleged victims who claimed they’d been abused, and only one – Aaron Fisher – had alleged prolonged abuse.
“I don’t want you to feel ashamed because you are a victim in this whole thing,” Trooper Leiter told Swisher-Houtz. “[Sandusky] took advantage of you . . . We need you to tell us as graphically as you can what took place... I just want you to understand that you are not alone in this. By no means are you alone in this.”
At their request, Swisher-Houtz became more graphic, asserting that Sandusky used to pin him face down in the shower, then hump the boy’s buttocks until he ejaculated. Sandusky, he claimed, would also push his penis into the boy’s face until he had an orgasm.


Suspect Therapy
Swisher-Houtz subsequently began therapy sessions with psychotherapist Mike Gillum, the same therapist who counseled Aaron Fisher, Victim No. 1 in the Penn State case.

By the time Sandusky went on trial on June 11, 2012, Swisher-Houtz was the prosecution’s leadoff witness. He testified that for years Sandusky had inserted his penis into the boy’s mouth two or three times a week while they showered, sometimes with Sandusky ejaculating. It happened “40 times at least,” Swisher-Houtz told the jury.

Sandusky also attempted to anally rape him in the shower, the witness claimed, but that he pushed Sandusky off “with all my might” and got away.
When asked by Sandusky’s attorney why he hadn’t initially said he was abused, the witness testified, “I have spent, you know, so many years burying this in the back of my mind forever.”

Author Mark Pendergrast wrote a book about the Sandusky case. He's skeptical about Swisher-Houtz’s claims of repressed memories of abuse, as well as similar claims from three of the eight other alleged victims who testified against Sandusky at trial.

“All of the recovered memories in the Sandusky case are most certainly false,” said Pendergrast, who wrote The Most Hated Man In America; Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, a book that's been excerpted on
Big Trial.

“They shouldn’t even be called memories," Pendergrast said about so-called repressed memories of abuse; "they’re confabulations.”

“This entire case started because therapist Mike Gillum saw Aaron Fisher as a patient,” Pendergrast said. Gillum “used incredibly leading methodology and got over-involved” with his patient, Pendergrast said, to the point where “Aaron Fisher became convinced that he remembered traumatic abuse that probably didn’t happen.”

In the Aaron Fisher case, Fisher, then 15, told school officials about his physical contact with Sandusky, but didn’t describe it as overtly sexual. A youth services counselor advised Fisher's mother to bring her son to psychotherapist Gillum.
Starting at the first session, and continuing during weekly and sometimes daily sessions, Gillum asked leading questions, and Fisher began to recall multiple instances of Sandusky fondling him and forcing him to participate in oral sex.

In Silent No More, a 2012 book Gillum co-authored with Fisher and his mother, Gillum wrote that he saw his job as “peeling back the layers of the onion” in Fisher’s mind to uncover hidden memories of abuse.

“Look, I know that something terrible happened to you,” Gillum told Fisher at the first session. And then Gillum would guess how Sandusky had abused Fisher. The patient simply had to say “yes,” or just nod his head to confirm the allegation that Sandusky had committed a sex crime.
After three years of such therapy, Fisher, became convinced that Sandusky had abused him more than 100 times between 2005 and 2008. Those crimes allegedly included oral sex and touching the boy’s genitals. The abuse allegedly took place at various locations, including Sandusky’s home and car, in hotel rooms, at Fisher’s school and on the Penn State campus.

“Mike just kept saying that Jerry was the exact profile of a predator,” Fisher wrote in Silent No More. “When it finally sank in, I felt angry.”
The psychotherapist accompanied Fisher to police interviews, and when he testified before two grand juries. During those two years, Fisher, then the only alleged victim the authorities had in the case, repeatedly broke down crying in front of the first grand jury, and could not elaborate on details of his alleged abuse.

When asked if Sandusky had forced him to engage in oral sex, Fisher denied it. Gillum then volunteered to testify on his client’s behalf, on the grounds that the teenager was too emotionally fragile to continue. But that didn't happen. When a second grand jury convened to investigate Sandusky, Fisher testified by reading a written statement about his alleged abuse.
In 2013, the university paid Fisher, whose lawyer, Andrew Shubin, did not respond to requests for comment, a confidential settlement of $7.5 million.

In 2016, Gillum also began counseling Glenn Neff, another alleged victim, who, according to Neff's claim of abuse, "will be seen in psychotherapy with Michael Gillum, M.A., for the foreseeable future."
Pendergrast says there’s nothing scientific about the claim that people can repress memories of traumatic events.

“Everything we know about the science of memory shows that the things that we remember the best are the most traumatic events that happen to us." The problem people have with traumatic memories, Pendergrast said, is they can’t forget them.

“That’s what PTSD is,” Pendergrast said, referring to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. “There’s no convincing evidence whatsoever that people can forget years of traumatic events.”
But at the Sandusky trial, the prosecution presented repressed memory theory as fact. Before calling his witnesses, the prosecutor, Joseph McGettigan, told the jury that he would have to “press these young men for the details of their victimization,” because “they don’t want to remember.” That’s why the investigation was slow,” McGettigan said, because “the doors of people’s minds” were closed.
After a jury found Sandusky guilty, then Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly held a press conference outside the courthouse.

About the alleged victims, Kelly said, “It was incredibly difficult for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”
No Credible Scientific Support

Another critic of recovered memory therapy is Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, one of the world’s foremost experts on the malleability of human memory. Loftus, who testified at a hearing on behalf of Sandusky’s unsuccessful bid for a new trial, has given lectures to the Secret Service and FBI; she also has a contract to work for the CIA
On May 11, 2017, testifying by phone, Loftus told Judge John Foradora, “There is no credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression." Nor is there any credible support, she added, for the idea that “you need psychotherapy to dig it out, and you can reliably recover these memories . . . in order to heal yourself.” In many jurisdictions, she told the judge, cases involving repressed memories have been thrown out of court.
She wasn’t alone in her critique; another expert witness cited in Sandusky’s appeal, Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, described repressed memory theory as “psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.”

Human memory “doesn’t work like a recording device” that can simply be played back at a later date, Loftus told the judge. Memories evolve over time and can be distorted or contaminated with suggestive and leading questioning. Her experiments have also shown that people can be talked into believing things that aren’t true.

“You can plant entirely false memories in the minds of people for events that never happened,” she explained. And once those false memories are planted, she told the judge, people will relate those memories as if they were true, “complete with high levels of detail and emotion.”
In her experiments, Loftus said, “We have successfully convinced ordinary, otherwise healthy people, that they were lost in the shopping mall” when they were five- or six-years-old, “that they were frightened, cried and had to be rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family.” Other researchers have planted false memories about being “nearly drowned” as a child, and “rescued by a lifeguard,” she testified. People have been convinced that they were “attacked by a vicious animal,” Loftus added, or that they committed a serious crime as a teenager.
During the appeal hearing, Loftus said, “It seems pretty evident that there were drastic changes in the testimony of some of the [Sandusky] accusers.” One reason for those changes, she testified, was the “highly suggestive” way police and psychotherapists interviewed them.

Rap Sheets
While Penn State was paying out claims, the university didn't run background checks on the alleged victims. If they had, university officials would have discovered that 12 of the 36 claimants had criminal records, which experts such as former FBI Agent Rossiter say should have only increased suspicions about credibility.
At Penn State, the alleged victim with the most extensive criminal record is Ryan Rittmeyer, represented by Joel J. Feller, who did not respond to a request for comment.

On November 29, 2011, Rittmeyer called the Pennsylvania state attorney general’s sex abuse hotline; he subsequently became Victim “No. 10” in the Sandusky case.

Rittmeyer’s rap sheet features 17 arrests from 2005 to 2016. They include arrests for reckless endangerment [he pled guilty and was sent to prison for 60 days], theft by deception and false impression [he pled guilty and got six months in jail and two years probation], receiving stolen property, a second count of theft by deception and false impression [he pled guilty and was put on probation for a year], criminal solicitation and robbery to inflict or threaten immediate bodily harm [he pled guilty and went to jail for 21 months] simple assault, and possession of a firearm [he pled guilty, went to jail for six months, and was put on probation for one year].
After he called the sex abuse hotline, Rittmeyer told the cops that Sandusky had groped him at a swimming pool and then attempted to have oral sex while driving him around in a silver convertible. Sandusky supposedly told Rittmeyer that if he didn’t submit, he would never see his family again.
On December 5, 2011, Rittmeyer testified before the grand jury, and changed his story to claim he saw Sandusky once or twice a month during 1997, 1998, and part of 1999, and that something sexual occurred almost every time. He claimed that he and Sandusky usually engaged in oral sex.
The problems with Rittmeyer’s story start with the car.

“Jerry Sandusky never owned a silver convertible,” said Dick Anderson, a retired coach who was a colleague of Sandusky’s for decades on the Penn State coaching staff, and has known Sandusky since 1962, when they were Nittany Lions teammates. “He drove Fords or Hondas.”
Another retired assistant coach who was a colleague of Sandusky’s, Booker Brooks, said that when he first heard about the convertible, “I laughed out loud.” Because nobody on the coaching staff drove a convertible, Brooks says.

Assistant coaches drove cars donated by local dealers, Brooks said. That’s because they had to pick up star high school recruits at airports, as well as their families. The cars the assistant coaches drove, Brooks said, needed to have four doors and a big trunk for luggage.
In spite of his lengthy criminal record and his questionable claim, Penn State didn’t subject Rittmeyer to a deposition with a lawyer, or an evaluation from a psychiatrist. Instead, after reviewing the paperwork for his claim, the university in 2013 paid Rittmeyer, 26, of Ellicott City, MD, $5.5 million.

The Grooming Process

According to records of the claims, Zachary Konstas, the 11 year-old boy who took a shower with Sandusky back in 1998, was of the few claimants who was actually deposed. On June 18, 2015, Konstas was videotaped during a deposition he gave in a civil case, John Doe 6 v. Penn State, The Second Mile and Gerald Sandusky.

It was Konstas's mother who was the first person to complain to authorities after she found out that her son had taken a shower with Sandusky. When questioned by police, Sandusky admitted that he had given the boy a bear-hug in the shower, and lifted him up to the shower head so he could wash shampoo out of his hair, but he denied any sexual abuse, as did Konstas.

Various authorities came to the same conclusion. After an investigation by the Penn State police, the Centre County District Attorney and a psychologist and investigator on behalf of the county’s Children and Youth Services, no evidence of sex abuse was found.

The psychologist who interviewed the boy for an hour wrote, “The behavior exhibited by Mr. Sandusky is directly consistent with what can be seen as an expected daily routine of being a football coach.” The psychologist, who interviewed several high school and college football coaches, wrote that it was “not uncommon for them to shower with their players.”
Konstas subsequently hired a lawyer and entered psychotherapy. He then contended that although Sandusky had never abused him, he was “grooming” him for future abuse. At Sandusky’s 2012 trial, Konstas testified that in addition to lifting him up to the showerhead to wash the shampoo out of his hair, Sandusky had slowly lathered him up with soap; Konstas also claimed that when Sandusky lifted him up he had “blacked out,” and could not remember whatever else might have happened.
After Sandusky was convicted, Konstas, 29, of Colorado Springs, CO sued Penn State in the civil courts claiming he had been abused.
In his civil claim, Konstas alleged that Sandusky used Penn State's showers to create "his own personal peep show" starring the 11-year-old boy as the victim. And that during the shower, Sandusky, playing "The Tickle Monster," used the tickling "as a pretense to put his hands over [Konstas's] adolescent body."
In 2015, Konstas collected a confidential settlement of $1.5 million.
But the university didn't say yes to all the claimants. Three claims were rejected, for unspecified reasons.

One of those rejected claims was filed by by an inmate. Shamont Sapp, 49, acting as his own lawyer claimed that from 1978 to 1984, Sandusky took him along on trips where he met with the commissioner of the Big 8 conference in St. Louis, attended Celtics games in Boston, and visited the home of the late former PSU President John Oswald.

Sapp also claimed that Sandusky frequently paid him for sex with Sandusky and other men, including former Centre County D.A. Ray Gricar, who disappeared in 2005 and was subsequently declared dead.

Sapp, who in his claim explained that he didn't testify at Sandusky's trial because he "was in prison in Oklahoma at the time," pled guilty to assault in 1999, and pled guilty to theft by deception in 2015.

In a letter to a judge, Sapp made some more allegations, claiming that he spoke to PSU President Spanier on the phone in 2011 and told him he had been sexually assaulted by Sandusky, and that Spanier called him a liar. In the same letter, Sapp claimed that "Joe Paterno caught us once in Sandusky's office naked from the waist down."

But not even Penn State was willing to grant a settlement from a guy who was filing his claim from jail, because they rejected Sapp's claim.

"It Just Doesn't Make Common Sense"
Some of the newer civil claims filed against Sandusky and Penn State reached the furthest back in time; they are also among the most improbable.

Michael Quinn, “John Doe 150,” was represented by Slade McLaughlin, who represented “Billy Doe” in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia sex abuse scandal, as well as 11 other alleged victims at Penn State.
In the Philadelphia case, “Billy Doe,” whose real name is Danny Gallagher, claimed to have been repeatedly raped when he was a 10 and 11-year-old altar boy by two priests and a Catholic school teacher. He collected $5 million in a civil settlement with the Philadelphia archdiocese, but his story has since been shredded by a retired Philadelphia
police detective who was the lead investigator on the case.

Retired Detective Joe Walsh testified and wrote in a 12-page affidavit that he repeatedly caught Gallagher in one lie after another, and that Gallagher even admitted to the detective that he “just made up stuff and told them anything.”

But at least Gallagher had to work for his money. In his civil case against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Gallagher was examined extensively by two forensic psychiatrists, who found him non-credible. Gallagher also had to submit to two full days of depositions, where he handled all the factual contradictions in his many changing stories of abuse by claiming he didn't remember more than 130 times.

Gallagher's lawyer also claims that Gallagher passed a polygraph test. But when asked for proof, the lawyer has repeatedly declined to share the results of the test, which is not admissible in court.

In the Penn State case, Quinn -- "John Doe 150" -- claimed that when he was in ninth grade, he attended a summer camp on the Penn State campus sponsored by The Second Mile. At that camp, Sandusky, whom Quinn had never met, supposedly came up to him in the shower and without even saying hello, soaped him up, and stuck his finger in the boy’s anus.

Here, the story takes a couple of incredulous turns.
In his claim against Penn State, Quinn asserted that as a ninth grader, he had the gumption to immediately tell several Penn State football players about what Sandusky had supposedly done to him.

Even more incredibly, Quinn claimed that the next day, he tracked down legendary Coach Paterno in a hallway outside the coach’s office and supposedly confronted Paterno about what Sandusky had allegedly done to him.

According to Quinn's claim, Paterno allegedly replied, “I don’t want to hear about any of that kind of stuff, I have a football season to worry about.”

The coach, of course, was dead and couldn't defend himself. But some Paterno loyalists bristle at Quinn's claim.

When he first heard the details of Quinn’s allegations, Franco Harris, a Penn State star from the 1970s, and an NFL Hall-of-Famer, told reporter John Ziegler that Quinn’s story about allegedly tracking down and confronting Paterno was “unbelievable . . . It just doesn’t make common sense.”
It didn’t matter. Even though his claim was decades past the statute of limitations, which in Pennsylvania, for victims of sex abuse, is age 30, on Sept. 12, 2013, Quinn, 56, of Plains, PA, was paid a confidential settlement by Penn State of $300,000.

Quinn's lawyer, Slade McLaughlin, who also represented Glenn Neff, continues to defend his clients.

"All of my Penn State clients were solid people, and told the truth as far I know," McLaughlin wrote in an email. "If I had reason to disbelieve a client's story, I either rejected the case or had the client undergo a lie detector test. Not that facts like that matter to a so-called journalist like you. . . . You are a low life, bottom of the pit scumbag . . ."
A year after Quinn got paid, he was called as a witness to testify on Oct 13, 2014, in the civil case where Penn State’s insurance carrier sued the university.
“Have you ever been interviewed by anybody from Penn State regarding your claim,” asked lawyer Steven J. Engelmyer, on behalf of the university's insurance carrier.
 
So hyperbole is stupid and used by fools. If you think it isn't the truth and the jury did wrong, simple, prove it. You haven't and I think can't so maybe YOU need to do better?
Well, no one can actually prove any of it on either side, but there certainly has been enough evidence of inconsistency and story changing by the prosecution and the Freeh report to cause anyone even using a minimum of independent thought to have doubts. And I have no interest or reason to prove any of it wrong or right….unlike you, I don’t care enough to do that. I have other things to do in my life, but apparently you don’t.
 
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Well, no one can actually prove any of it on either side,
Yes you can and that has been done already in two trials
but there certainly has been enough evidence of inconsistency and story changing by the prosecution and the Freeh report to cause anyone even using a minimum of independent thought to have doubts.
Not really, just JoeBots who are dead enders.
And I have no interest or reason to prove any of it wrong or right….unlike you,
Why are you here trying to debate me and failing so?
I don’t care enough to do that. I have other things to do in my life, but apparently you don’t.
Lol, yeah you all say but here you are, getting intellectually whipped but hopefully educated too. It really doesn’t take too much out of my day to swat JoeBots.
 
Highly unlikely. The Freeh report wasn't even issued until the following summer.

The correct action would have been for the board to express it's concerns for what was alleged in the GJ presentment and to suspend involved parties with pay pending a thorough investigation. By firing Joe without even talking to him they told the world that he and other PSU officials were guilty. That's what opened the doors for the NCAA and BiG to cover their rear ends by imposing heavy sanctions.

Compare this to Michigan State. Many actual victims reported abuse to university officials. Zero Sandusky victims reported anything to PSU officials. Much different results when you defend the university instead of throwing people under the bus in order to cover your own rear ends.
If you recall anything else about the case, it is probably the wrenching story of the ten-year-old “little boy in the shower,” who, on February 9, 2001, was seen being raped by Sandusky in a Penn State athletic facility. For some reason the witness, a hulking former quarterback named Mike McQueary, didn’t intervene, but on the next morning he did go straight to the legendary football coach Joe Paterno and tell him about the sodomy.

Paterno conferred with the university’s athletic director, Tim Curley, who then involved a vice president, Gary Schultz, and the president, Graham Spanier. Instead of reporting the crime to the police, however, the three officials conspired to cover it up, thus sparing scandal to their all-important football program. As for the rape victim, he couldn’t appear in person at Sandusky’s trial, because nobody knew who he was.

But there’s a problem with what you remember. It’s sheer folklore. True, Sandusky took a shower with a boy. That’s what he often did, quite openly, after a workout together, and the showers typically included innocent horseplay. That behavior had been commonplace in the recreation center where Sandusky was raised.


As for the incident in question, Mike McQueary initially misremembered its date by more than a year, and then probably misdated it again; he wasn’t at all sure he had glimpsed a sex act, and that’s why he had done nothing to stop it; he evidently didn’t mention it to Paterno until weeks later, and then only in passing; and his subsequent inaction and cordiality toward Sandusky indicated that he had reconsidered his initial concern.

Most crucially, when a grand jury indictment mentioned sodomy, McQueary protested that his testimony, which prosecutors had been nudging him to make more graphic, had been misconstrued. The email he received in response from Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach said in part, “I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect and that it is hard not to respond. But you can’t.” In other words, Eshbach and her team had suborned perjury and were still intending to nail Sandusky with it.

As it happened, they failed in that instance. The jury, reasoning that too much time had elapsed since an event that had no identified victim, and taking note of conflicting versions narrated by McQueary, acquitted Sandusky on the charge. This would be the single greatest irony of the many-sided Sandusky case. When the grand jury presentment became known in November 2011, an accusation that would fail to be sustained in July 2012 completed Sandusky’s demonization in the media.

And within four days that same dubious story, automatically presumed to be true, brought about the firing of Curley and Schultz, the forced resignation of Spanier, the subsequent jailing of all three, and the removal from service of the eighty-five-year-old, mortally ill Joe Paterno––the longest-serving, “winningest,” and most revered football coach in America, whose reputation would now be soiled forever. All that to atone for an abomination that was never ascertained to have occurred.

A verdict of not guilty, of course, doesn’t exclude the possibility that a crime was committed. But in this instance, definitive proof of innocence lay at hand. Sandusky remembered the shower and the name of his companion, Allan Myers, who had been nearly fourteen, not ten, at the time; and Myers’s ongoing relation to Sandusky wasn’t that of a rape victim to a perpetrator. On the contrary, he was a virtual member of the Sandusky household both before and after the infamous shower.

Jerry and his wife Dottie had taken Myers with them on two trips to California, and he had lived with them for months in 2005. At Myers’s request, Jerry had delivered the commencement address at his high school graduation; and they had been photographed arm in arm at Myers’s wedding.

But what if Allan Myers simply wasn’t “the little boy in the shower”? Not possible. At age twenty-four he, too, still remembered the incident, and when he learned that it figured in the criminal case, he gave a sworn statement to Sandusky’s lawyers:

I would usually work out one or two days a week, but this particular night is very clear in my mind. We were in the shower and Jerry and I were slapping towels at each other to sting each other. I would slap the walls and slide on the shower floor, which I am sure you could have heard from the wooden locker area.

While we were engaged in fun as I have described, I heard the sound of a wooden locker door close. . . . I never saw who closed the locker. The grand jury report says that Coach McQueary said he observed Jerry and I engaged in sexual activity. That is not the truth and McQueary is not telling the truth. Nothing occurred that night in the shower.


Later we will see why Myers, who had previously been grilled by the police and had resisted their attempt to recruit him as a victim, didn’t testify for Sandusky or even identify himself at the trial. The answer will lead to a perspective on the whole Sandusky matter that challenges received opinion to its core.

2.

But first, we have an important book to consider: Graham Spanier’s In the Lions’ Den: The Penn State Scandal and a Rush to Judgment. The author served as Penn State’s president from 1995 to 2011. As the first extended statement by a principal figure in the events of 2011-12, and as a recital that rings true throughout, his book is a precious contribution to our understanding. And though the subtitle’s “rush to judgment” pertains chiefly to Spanier’s own ordeal, his revelations about mischief caused by other players shows how little confidence we can have in the authorities who took Sandusky down.

It may strike you as egotistical on Spanier’s part to be placing himself at the vortex of the Sandusky hurricane. To be sure, his two months in jail and the hatred directed at him year after year were unmerited, and they took a heavy toll.

But they hardly compare to what Sandusky himself has endured: ten years in prison, the first five of which were passed in solitary confinement, and universal vilification that has never let up. But Spanier has a point. If he wasn’t the most abused party in the Penn State scandal, he was the most important target of a plot that I will set forth. And his removal as president, forestalling a due-process approach to the grand jury’s sensational charges, initiated a cascade of bad decisions and real cover-ups from whose consequences the university has by no means recovered.

As president of Penn State, Spanier compiled a superb record of upgrading both research and instruction. He can hardly be blamed for now emphasizing his accomplishments. More pertinently for the trustworthiness of his narrative, no one ever questioned his integrity. Nor, for that matter, had there been any prior complaints against Messrs. Curley, Schultz, and Paterno.

Despite the crude popular belief that Penn State exists only for football, those who knew Paterno understood that he regarded himself as a teacher of ethics and that he characteristically put the university’s interests ahead of his team’s.

Who, then, unless in an atmosphere of general panic, could believe that those four men would jeopardize their honor by hiding the rape of a child by a man who hadn’t even been a university employee at the time? Spanier in particular is offended by the suggestion, for he underwent sadistic childhood whipping, and he reserves a special disgust for perpetrators.

All four of the accused testified that no one had informed them of a sex crime. Their conduct is consistent with no other supposition. They deemed it inappropriate on Sandusky’s part to be showering with kids on campus, and they admonished him never to do it again. And they notified the current head of The Second Mile that its founder had behaved imprudently. Those mild actions were proportionate to the information the four were given. Spanier is strictly correct in asserting that he, Curley, Schultz, and Paterno did nothing wrong.

When the grand jury’s indictment of Sandusky was made public in November 2011, however, it contained an explosive surprise: Curley and Schultz had been indicted, too, for “failure to report,” and an inference could be drawn that they had protected Joe Paterno’s football program.

One of the anachronisms in Pennsylvania’s judicial system is that a grand jury charged with investigating one suspect can scoop up others as well. Curley, Schultz, and Paterno, all of whom had told the grand jury about their handling of the McQueary matter, had been given no inkling that they were targets. Thus the presentment, written by the prosecutors, not the jury, must have been intended to throw the Penn State community into the chaos that ensued.

Now, what could have caused the Pennsylvania attorney general’s team, which had assumed responsibility for the Sandusky case, to harbor a special animus against Penn State? By now the answer to that question, which Spanier lays out with admirable clarity and detail, is known to many people. The attorney general, Linda Kelly, had been hand picked by the Republican governor, Tom Corbett, who had himself been the attorney general preceding Kelly. Corbett had a contentious relation to Penn State in general and to Graham Spanier in particular, and a motive for getting Kelly to do his bidding.

It was common knowledge that Corbett disliked public higher education and was resentful toward Penn State. One of his early moves after assuming office in January 2011 was to announce a devastating cut of 52.4% in the university’s budget. Spanier immediately and dramatically protested, and the legislature took his side.

In Corbett’s eyes, that was an unforgivable humiliation. But he had already contracted negative feelings toward Spanier. In October 2010, when running for office, he had gained the mistaken impression that Spanier was publicly favoring the Democratic candidate, Dan Onorato. Corbett was heard to say that after his election, he would have Spanier’s head.

The leading prosecutor of Sandusky was Frank Fina, chief of the criminal division in the attorney general’s office. The grand jury presentment was his and Jonelle Eshbach’s creation, and both of them were serving Corbett’s wishes as mediated by Attorney General Kelly. As Spanier now explains, the indictment of Curley and Schultz seems to have been motivated by two considerations.

First, their status as accused criminals would prevent them from testifying in Sandusky’s favor with regard to the shower incident. And second, Fina, who was known for tactics of bullying and intimidation, expected that Curley and Schultz would save themselves from jail by turning on Spanier, whose indictment was already foreseen. The big fish to be hauled in wasn’t the ancient Joe Paterno, and it certainly wasn’t the insignificant retiree Jerry Sandusky; it was Spanier.

When the media began depicting Paterno as a co-conspirator with Curley and Schultz, Spanier knew that a voice of leadership was needed. He announced his personal faith in his accused subordinates, whom he knew to be innocent, and he prepared to call for calm and patience. But Penn State’s trustees were egged on by Governor Corbett, who told them by speakerphone, “Remember that little boy in the shower!”

They forbade Spanier to say another word in public. And the new de facto chairman of the trustees, John Surma, a former CEO of U.S. Steel, saw an opportunity to settle a personal grudge against Paterno. (His troubled nephew had been dropped from the football team.) As State College erupted in riots after Paterno’s dismissal, Spanier grasped that his own fate had been decided as well. He quickly resigned, thus temporarily safeguarding some privileges and his pension.

The subsequent behavior of the leading trustees, from November 2011 until right now, offers a textbook example of how to make a bad situation worse. Rather than combat the fiction that Penn State had sacrificed children to the great god Football, they embraced it.

They welcomed draconian sanctions from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, heaped disgrace on the dead Paterno, left Spanier, Curley, and Schultz to twist in the wind, and established a huge fund for the compensation of Sandusky’s as yet unproven victims, as if every one of them had been molested with an assist from Penn State.

The idea was to make a show of remorse and penitence so as to turn a new page with alumni, parents, and donors––and, not incidentally, to keep the 2012 football season from being canceled. That last goal was met, but the stench of hypocrisy has remained in the air.

The trustees’ most craven action was to appoint an “investigative” body whose actual task was to justify their other measures by scapegoating Paterno, Spanier, Curley, and Schultz. The supposedly independent commission, formed at the joint urging of Governor Corbett and Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who was now seeking private employment, worked hand in glove with Corbett, the trustees, Linda Kelly’s point man Frank Fina, and the NCAA, all of whom shared an interest in presuming Sandusky’s guilt and the four sacked officials’ complicity in it.

The Freeh commission didn’t bother to interview principal figures in the case. Although the Federal Investigative Service reaffirmed Spanier’s top-level security clearance after its intensive study determined that the sodomy-in-the-shower tale was bogus, the Freeh commission stonewalled that finding.

And it sketched a vulgar caricature of Spanier’s Penn State as a football-crazy institution whose actual boss had been the dictatorial Joe Paterno. The Freeh report is no longer taken seriously, but its uncritical acceptance in 2012 locked into place America’s media-fed misperception of the entire Sandusky matter.

Understandably, large portions of In the Lions’ Den are taken up with Spanier’s legal vicissitudes, from his indictment in 2012 through his nightmarish jail term in 2021. The saga is beyond Kafkaesque. Spanier was betrayed, in amazing fashion, by Penn State’s legal counsel Cynthia Baldwin, who pretended to act as his personal attorney.

In reality, she was controlled by Frank Fina, who held over her a constant threat of prosecution for having ignored subpoenas to Penn State. Baldwin knew that Spanier was a grand jury target but convinced him otherwise, and at Fina’s insistence she later gave carefully rehearsed false testimony about his alleged orchestration of a cover-up.

For their misconduct, Fina would be suspended from the practice of law and Baldwin would be formally censured and then ostracized by the entire legal community. But a new attorney general, Kathleen Kane, and then yet another one, the Josh Shapiro who is now a lesser-evil candidate for governor, kept the pressure on Spanier, eventually hounding him into jail despite the ruling of a federal appeals panel that the charges against him lacked any merit.

One reward for reading about Spanier’s eight years of legal torment is that one gets an up-close look at Pennsylvania’s judicial system in action. It’s a farce in which political ambition and personal rivalry can determine a defendant’s fate; in which collusion between prosecutors and judges is commonplace; in which some courtroom rulings are determined not by law but by a presumption of guilt; and in which incompetent judges summarily deny appeals in order to support their friends, other incompetent judges.

A fitting symbol of the whole circus is an email network that came to light, consisting of racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic pornography that was shared between Deputy Attorney General Fina and various judges, including two justices of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court.

3.

As we have seen, the only part of the Sandusky case that bears on Graham Spanier’s tribulations is the legendary shower and its aftermath. But it’s impossible to read In the Lions’ Den without realizing that it brings into question the fairness of Sandusky’s own prosecution and trial. Spanier and Sandusky were both implacably pursued by Linda Kelly, Jonelle Eshbach, and Frank Fina, who was not above threatening witnesses, making shifty deals with judges, and leaking grand jury testimony in order to pollute a jury pool.

Although Spanier avoids the question of Sandusky’s guilt or innocence, he points out that the alleged pedophile’s trial was rushed; that the prosecution used an old trick in dumping possibly exculpatory documents on the defense when insufficient time remained to read them; and that the judge wouldn’t even allow Sandusky’s lead attorney to resign on grounds that he was unprepared to proceed.

But as you could learn from chapters 14-17 of Mark Pendergrast’s indispensable book The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment (Sunbury Press, 2017), that’s just a sampling of the travesty that ended in a foreordained conviction.

A knowledgeable student of the Sandusky case who reads In the Lions’ Den would be able to infer some previously unnoted linkage between Spanier’s fate and Sandusky’s. For example, in March 2011 the attorney general’s case against Sandusky was on life support. Kelly, Fina, and Eshbach had only two witnesses, Mike McQueary and Sandusky’s main accuser, Aaron Fisher, neither of whom could keep his story straight. But that was the month when Tom Corbett and Graham Spanier waged their battle royal over Penn State’s budget––a battle that ended by putting a target on the victorious Spanier’s back.

Suddenly, new momentum was imparted to the campaign against Sandusky, which was taken into the public sphere. On March 31, feloniously leaked grand jury material found its way into the first of cub reporter Sara Ganim’s lurid articles, which would bear such inflammatory titles as “Former Coach Jerry Sandusky Used Charity to Molest Kids.”

And in the following weeks, twelve employees of the attorney general’s office and many state troopers set out to interview hundreds of ex-Second Milers, some of whom might be willing to declare that Sandusky had molested them. Each interrogated boy or man was told, falsely, that many others had already admitted to having been abused.

The dragnet, however, yielded only a file of tributes to Sandusky’s generosity and sterling character. As one officer grumbled in frustration, his interviewees “believe Sandusky is a great role model for them to emulate.”

Here was precious evidence that Sandusky was no child molester. But Kelly and her team, apparently fired up by Corbett, were now playing hardball. Instead of supplying the police files to Sandusky’s attorneys as required by law, they withheld them and wrote insinuatingly, in their grand jury presentment, “through the Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of boys.”

By means of their Freeh commission and their lavish, no-questions-asked compensation fund, the Penn State trustees played a significant role in destroying Sandusky. The fund, established before his trial, attracted scammers who reinforced the impression that many more victims of the monster’s abuse were awaiting discovery.

But that wasn’t all. Two local “sex abuse” lawyers, Andrew Shubin and Benjamin Andreozzi, sensed what was coming from Penn State and advertised their services to anyone who looked forward to making a claim.

All of the young men (not boys) who were being prepped to testify against Sandusky answered the call. And someone else did, too: Allan Myers. Just weeks after he had exculpated Sandusky in straightforward terms, he became Shubin’s client and was persuaded to affirm, in a statement evidently written by Shubin, that Sandusky had frequently molested him over a period of years.

Then, as Spanier recounts, Shubin physically hid Myers for the duration of Sandusky’s trial, forestalling a catastrophic cross-examination. And prosecutor Joseph McGettigan, in full awareness of the truth, told Sandusky’s jury that only God knew the shower boy’s identity. When Sandusky was acquitted on the relevant charge, it didn’t matter to Myers and Shubin. They picked up a cool $6.9 million from Penn State.

The other accusers didn’t fare badly, either, sharing with their attorneys sums ranging from $1.5 to $20 million, depending on the extremity of their reported suffering. The highest settlement went to an accuser, a good friend of the Sanduskys through at least October 2011, who now said Jerry had assaulted him about 150 times and on one occasion had locked him in his basement, starved him, and raped him anally and orally over a three-day period while Dottie Sandusky, one floor above, ignored his screams.

This was at a time when Jerry, already in his sixties, was suffering from prostatitis, dizzy spells, kidney cysts, a braIn aneurism, a hernia, bleeding hemorrhoids, chest pains, headaches, hypothyroidism, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea, to say nothing of his lifelong testosterone deficiency and of his shrunken testicles, unremarked by any accuser.

But there was another important outcome of the trustees’ munificence (with insurance money). Even after the attorney general’s office, partly with the help of a telephone hotline, had rounded up a handful of previously unconcerned “victims” to supplement the wavering McQueary and Fisher, those who actually knew Sandusky remembered him as a kindly mentor and hesitated to say anything against him.

Worse, not one of them, in boyhood or thereafter, had ever disclosed abuse by Sandusky to anyone. And still worse, none of them, including Aaron Fisher, had gone to the police without being prodded or enticed. Most inconveniently of all, the pre-hotline “victims” harbored no memory of their molestation. They had to have their minds massaged by already convinced therapists, social workers, and cops. But once the prospect of multimillion-dollar payouts hove into view, “memories” began to flow in earnest. Penn State’s trustees deserve the credit for that.

Fisher had been brought around to “recalling” Sandusky’s depredations after many months of treatment by a recovered-memory therapist, Mike Gillum. As Fisher wrote in the book they later coauthored, “It wasn’t until I was fifteen and started seeing Mike that I realized the horror.” Now Shubin and Andreozzi decided to send their Sandusky-case clients to memory spelunkers, with Gillum as their principal resource.

The result was spectacular: an outpouring of “refreshed memories” so grotesque and ridiculous that they needed to be severely winnowed by Linda Kelly’s team. Then Kelly could exult, at a rally on the courthouse steps after Sandusky’s conviction, “it was incredibly difficult for some [victims] to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse” Sandusky had inflicted on them.

Whether the hostile witnesses were driven more by greed or by therapeutic suggestion is impossible to say. We can assert with confidence, though, that Penn State’s pot of gold, descried at the end of the rainbow by Messrs. Shubin and Andreozzi, helped to turn alleged misdemeanors into horrific felonies that would overawe an ingenuous jury.

4.

When no firm evidence can be found to adjudicate between clashing allegations, plausibility can serve as a deciding factor. If, for example, you say you were raped a previously unrecalled 150 times by the same person, you’ll be hard pressed to explain why, after the first devastating trauma, you put yourself in harm’s way on 149 further occasions.

Did repression or dissociation cause each event to be immediately forgotten? But now you’re trafficking in pseudoscience, and your claim can’t be believed, much less allowed in court. (Except in Pennsylvania, that is.)

In the case of the little boy in the shower, sufficient evidence does exist to prove that Graham Spanier, not Frank Fina, was telling the truth about it. There can be no doubt that Allan Myers’s first statements on the matter were the authentic ones. But suppose Myers hadn’t presented himself in support of his benefactor. Then we would have had to choose whom to believe. Everything that is known about Spanier speaks to his credibility; the opposite must be said of Fina.

By the same token, it’s no contest between Fina and the Jerry Sandusky who was known to friends, associates, and the public before Sara Ganim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism began smearing him in 2011. As Spanier puts it, Sandusky “was perhaps the second most admired figure in central Pennsylvania, and maybe the entire state, through the 1980s and 1990s.”

The coaching of linebackers was subordinate to the help he provided, in person and through his foundation, to some 100,000 at-risk boys, whom he taught to play sports, shun alcohol, drugs, and early sex, and apply themselves to schoolwork. On his retirement from coaching, Sports Illustrated’s cover story named him “Saint Sandusky.”

In order to have molested children with impunity for decades, Sandusky would have had to deploy superhuman powers of stealth, guile, and intimidation. But if you watch interviews with him on YouTube, you will see an earnest, unsubtle man who has trouble even fathoming the questions posed to him. That picture is consistent with the Jerry known to his family, friends, and associates: a grown-up Boy Scout who eschewed alcohol and tobacco, and a Bible-reading Methodist who practiced the Golden Rule.

No one can say whether there was an erotic component to the affection Jerry showed to the relatively small number of boys he personally supervised. The point to bear in mind is that we don’t customarily send people to prison for their thoughts and feelings. And if it’s sexual abuse to hug an abandoned or neglected twelve-year-old, we’re all in trouble.

Sandusky, Paterno, Spanier, Curley, Schultz. They represent diverse levels of sophistication, but they all devoted themselves to Penn State and were betrayed by it. The university’s clumsy and then stupidly cruel trustees have tried to restore trust at those men’s expense.
 
The one that sent CSS to jail
The one that had to drop each of the 15 felonies with which CSS were originally charged. The one that had to settle on one bogus misdemeanor for each, for a law that didn’t exist until 2005.
IOW, they didn’t even get convicted for what they did or didn’t do in 2001. It wasn’t a crime then.
Your slavish devotion to the false narrative is psychotic!
 
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having your day in court doesn't mean you get to tell all. in fact, most times in court only about 1/3 of what you could say actually comes out. People are under false impression based on TV shows and on Hollywood stuff like the Depp-Heard trial that everything comes out. And I remember correctly, Spanier's attorney made a strange decision to not call up any witnesses and basically not do anything after the defense went as there was some thought in his mind that the defense didn't do enough to convict based on the law not applying due to statue of limitations or something. And in reality Spanier's attorney was correct but the there was one juror who refused to budge and said somebody has to pay for this regardless of the law and the other jury members gave in, gave Spaniers a guilty verdict on the lowest crime he was being charged for in order not to have to stay the weekend and ultimately have a hung jury. This all from the interview that the head juror gave after the case.

So I actually suspect you will find out a lot in this book which was not known through the court cases.
Remember, Samuel W. Silver, the lawyer for former Penn State President Graham Spanier, stood up in a Harrisburg courtroom and without calling a witness, told the judge that the defense was resting its case.

Five minutes later, Silver began his closing argument to the jury by declaring, "There was no evidence of a crime by Graham Spanier."

"This case involves judgment calls," Silver told the jury. "They made judgment calls," Silver said about Spanier and his two alleged co-conspirators -- Tim Curley and Gary Schultz -- before they pleaded guilty and became government witnesses.

"They made judgment calls," Silver repeated about Spanier, Curley and Schultz. "They did not engage in crimes; they did not engage in a conspiracy."

"They took the matter seriously," Silver said about the now familiar plot line of the Jerry Sandusky
sex scandal. "They did not stand by and do nothing."

Silver's announcement to the judge came as somewhat of a surprise. The day before, when the government rested its case, there was talk among Penn State loyalists that the defense was planning to call up to four witnesses. The defense case was supposedly built around expected testimony from John Snedden, a Federal Investigative Services special agent who had done a background check of Spanier for a top-security government clearance in 2012, and had found no evidence of wrongdoing by Spanier at Penn State.

But Silver made his own judgment call that the prosecution didn't prove its case. So he went right to his closing argument.

The defense lawyer began by going through the law regarding the crimes that Spanier is charged with: two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, and one count of conspiring to endanger the welfare of a child.

To find Spanier guilty of endangering the welfare of a child, Silver said, the jury would have to find that Spanier interfered with or prevented someone from making a report of suspected child sex abuse.

The problem with that, Silver said, was that the government did not present any evidence that Spanier was ever told that Jerry Sandusky "was engaging in sexual crimes with minors."


"Nobody told Graham Spanier," Silver said. The defense lawyer went through every one of the fifteen witnesses called by the government, who turned out to be the only witnesses in the case.

"Her witnesses," Silver said, referring to his courtroom rival, Deputy Attorney General Laura Ditka. "Her witnesses made the defense case."

Silver returned to the language of the child endangerment statute. To find Spanier guilty, Silver said, the jury would have to conclude that the government had presented evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Spanier had "knowingly violated" his alleged duty of care to protect the welfare of children that he was supposedly supervising.

"Graham Spanier was not aware that children's welfare would be endangered," Silver said. To find Spanier guilty, the jury would also have to conclude that Spanier was supervising the welfare of Second Mile child victims abused by Sandusky, many of whom were visitors to the Penn State campus.

The jury would also have to find that Spanier had acted "knowingly, intentionally and recklessly" when he allegedly interfered with or prevented anyone from reporting a suspected crime of child sex abuse.

Another element to the crime of child endangerment, Silver said, was the jury would have to find that in the course of performing his official duties Spanier "came into contact" with the child that he had allegedly endangered, the boy in the showers. Because the child endangerment statute required that Spanier would have had to knowingly endangered the welfare of the child he was supervising.

But the government presented no evidence of that.

To find Spanier guilty of conspiracy, Silver said, the jury would have to believe that Spanier "agreed to enter into a conspiracy to commit endangering the welfare of a child." And that Spanier and his co-conspirators had "agreed to put children in danger," and took actions toward that goal.

To anybody who sat through the two days of fact-free testimony that constituted the government's case, any of those findings would be a stretch. But this is sex abuse we're talking about, Penn State style, starring naked good old boy Jerry Sandusky bumping and grinding in the shower with little boys. It's like dousing a house made of straw with a couple cans of gasoline and waiting for a spark to fly.

Silver talked about the government's cooperating witnesses, former Penn State Athletic Director Curley, and former Penn State Vice-President Gary Schultz.

"These were the stars of their show," Silver said about the government's cae. But going by their testimony, Silver said, neither Curley nor Schultz ever told Spanier that what Mike McQueary witnessed in the showers was sex abuse.

Silver repeated what Schultz told the jury: "Jerry was always horsing around," Silver quoted Schultz as saying. "Schultz told Spanier it was horseplay."

Of all the government's fifteen witnesses, Silver said, only two, Curley and Schultz, testified that they spoke directly to Spanier about what McQueary told them.

McQueary, Silver reminded the jury, never spoke directly to Spanier about what he witnessed in the showers.

There was no conspiracy at Penn State, Silver said, summing up. Nobody told McQueary, or anybody else, to "keep things quiet, to keep their mouths shut." On the witness stand, both of the government's star witnesses, Curley and Schultz, testified that took the matter seriously. They were trying to do the right thing, Silver said. And they also testified that they did not participate in any conspiracy to cover up, and not report the infamous shower incident.

"There is no evidence that Graham Spanier knowingly endangered the welfare of children," Silver said. He concluded by asking the jury to find his client not guilty.

When Deputy Attorney General Laura Ditka stood up to give her closing, she wanted to clear up one thing right away.

"Gary Schultz and Tim Curley are not our star witnesses," she said, "They're criminals." And you can't count on criminals to tell you that they knowingly committed crimes.

With a paucity of facts to draw on, Ditka, Iron Mike's niece, turned to fireworks. Spanier, Curley and Schultz, she said, were all guilty of turning their backs on the welfare of children, in favor of protecting themselves and Penn State from scandal.

"Jerry Sandusky was left to run wild," she said.


She talked about the plan that Spanier, Curley and Schultz had agreed on. To confront Jerry Sandusky with the shower incident. And to inform Sandusky that he was no longer allowed to bring children onto Penn State property.

The PSU officials were hoping that Sandusky would admit to a problem and agree to seek help. If not, the PSU officials planned to report the shower incident to the child psychiatrist who led the Second Mile charity that employed Sandusky as a counselor. And also report the shower incident to the Department of Public Welfare, so they could investigate whether Sandusky's conduct amounted to sex abuse.

But there was a "downside" to that approach, as Ditka reminded the jury while she quoted from an email sent by Spanier. The downside was "if the message wasn't heard" by Sandusky, Spanier wrote to Curley and Schultz, then Spanier, Curley and Schultz "become vulnerable for not having reported it."

When you're conspiring to cover up sex abuse, it's not too smart to lay out the plot in an email chain that subsequently become a government exhibit. That's not usually how coverups work. But Ditka skipped over all that to blast the usual villains in the Penn State sex scandal narrative, starring that naked Jerry Sandusky cavorting in the showers with little boys.


"All they cared about was their own self interest," Ditka told the jury about Penn State's top officials. "Instead of putting him [Sandusky] on a leash," she said, "they let him run wild."

Ditka recounted to the jury the first incident Sandusky was ever accused of. Back in 1998, a mother went to the cops because Sandusky had allegedly given her 11-year-old son a naked bear hug in the shower. And he allegedly picked the boy up and stuck him under a shower head to allegedly wash the soap out of his ears.

The boy, a member of the Second Mile charity, had been lured into the showers by the promise of a pair of "Joe Paterno sox," Ditka reminded the jury. "The lure of Penn State football is strong."

Ditka spoke about what she described as the cover-up mode employed by those at the "top of the totem pole" at Penn State, namely Spanier, Curley and Schultz. And then she vividly contrasted it with the whistle blowing of Mike McQueary, whom she described as "the low man on the totem pole."

Ditka dove once more into all the salacious details of the McQueary shower story -- Sandusky's naked "body moving slowly," "slapping sounds," and "skin against skin."

"What do you think?" she asked the jury. "That's horseplay?"

If it's horseplay, she said, why was the Penn State president and two of his top officials meeting about it on the weekend? Why are Schultz and Curley sitting around Joe Paterno's kitchen table on a Sunday morning if it's just horseplay they're talking about, Ditka argued.

"Skin to skin, hips moving against a boy is not horsing around," she repeated. This is Penn State, she said, where they have ten thousand kids.

"Every time a towel is snapped," Ditka asked, do university officials gather at Graham Spanier's house?


They knew what they were doing, Ditka said about Spanier, Curley and Schultz. "They come up with
a plan," she said. "You have to keep it a secret."

That's why they waited ten days to interview whistle-blowing eyewitness McQueary, Ditka said. Because they didn't want to know the truth. They just wanted to keep the truth under wraps.

"They had a problem and they didn't want to deal with it," Ditka said. The result was, "They own it."

"They prevented a report of sex abuse," Ditka said. "They knew what they were dealing with."

Instead of tackling the problem head on, Ditka said, by hauling McQueary in and finding out exactly what had happened in the shower, PSU's top officials tried "to soft-shoe it."

And when time dragged by, Ditka said, Spanier assured a worried Gary Schultz that "It's taken care of."

Here, Ditka was taking some liberties with trial testimony. When asked on the witness stand who had told him that the shower incident had been investigated and "taken care of," Schultz couldn't remember.

"I can't say for sure that it was Graham Spanier," Schultz told the jury.

It was a quote that Silver had read to the jury. Then he warned that if Ditka tried to use that quote to prove Spanier was guilty, it fell far short of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

But that wasn't going to stop Ditka.

It was like the scene in Animal House when Bluto gave the speech to his frat brothers about the Germans bombing Pearl Habor. Otter wondered whether he should correct Bluto, but Boon told him, "Forget it, he's rolling."

Like Bluto, Ditka was rolling.

"Graham Spanier told him [Schultz] 'Its taken care of," Ditka yelled. Before she was done, Ditka would not only declare that it was Spanier who had told Schultz "It was taken care of." She would also ccuse Spanier of deliberately "lying to Schultz."

Next, Ditka reminded the jury that when the Penn State sex abuse scandal exploded, Spanier insisted on running on the university's website two letters of support for Curley and Schultz.

"I support Gary and Tim," Ditka recounted the statements as basically saying. "Not a thought about the kids," she lamented. "They didn't care about kids."

The most entertaining part of Ditka's closing argument was when she trashed both of her star witnesses.

"Tim Curley," she declared, was "untruthful 90 percent of the time."

"Gary Schultz, I would suggest to you was more truthful," Ditka told the jury. That's because he cried on the witness stand.

You can't stage a courtroom tragedy without tears.

"He was crying for a whole lot of reasons," Ditka told the jury. Such as having to appear in court to testify against his old friend, Graham Spanier. But to counter those tears in her courtroom soap opera, Ditka brought up the tears of Victim No. 5.

Victim No. 5 was another government witness brought into the courtroom with much fanfare and extra security. Victim No. 5 had testified about being abused by Jerry Sandusky in the same showers where McQueary had previously seen Sandusky frolicking with another naked boy.

Victim No. 5, Ditka told the jury, wakes up crying on "a lot of mornings."

Ditka's weakest moment came when she left her emotional appeals behind to delve briefly into the law in the case, which for her sake, was probably best left undisturbed.

"There's more than enough proof," she concluded. "They knew the animal they were letting loose on the world," she said. Then she asked the jury to "find him [Spanier] guilty."

By the time she sat down, it was quite a performance. If the jury goes strictly by the law, Spanier walks. But if the jury is swayed by emotion, Spanier is toast.

It's as simple as that.

And God help the defendant if the jury ignores the judge's instructions and tunes in to the media coverage of the case, where they're playing all the old familiar tunes in the Penn State scandal, as sung by the attorney general's office, Sara Ganim and Louie Freeh.

There's a reason why Curley and Schultz pleaded guilty. It's an uphill battle when you're fighting a story line that everyone thinks they know.

There are problems with defending Graham Spanier. The former PSU president comes off as an intellectual who's aloof. He also didn't take the stand in his own defense. Even though the judge told the jury that they should consider Spanier "an innocent man," some jurors may believe he's hiding something.

Spanier is also on trial before a Dauphin County represented by a button-down Philadelphia lawyer. That might be another problem.

Meanwhile, the prosecution has Iron Mike Ditka's folksy niece tossing red meat at the jury. And the problem of his two former co-defendants having already pleaded guilty.

Incited by Iron Mike's niece, a Dauphin County jury might just decide to teach Graham Spanier a lesson with some frontier justice.

Or they could see through all the hype and emotion, glimpse the law, and send Spanier on his merry way, so he can proceed with lawsuits against Penn State and Louie Freeh.

Today, after Judge John Boccabella went over the legalities of the charges in the case, the jury began deliberating. Within 15 minutes, they had a question for the judge. They subsequently had two more questions.

The jury asked the judge to give them the definition of a conspiracy. They wanted to know the definition of acting recklessly. They also asked in order to have a conspiracy, does a crime necessarily have to have been committed?

Absolutely, the judge said.

Ditka had to be seething over this. If only she could have gotten in front of the jury one more time for a rebuttal. She could have talked about the tears of Victim No. 5. And that animal named Sandusky that the guys at the top of the totem pole at Penn State had knowingly turned loose on helpless children that they didn't care about.

By 7 p.m., after dinner was brought in, the jury was still deliberating. One of the jurors asked the judge if they could take a vote on whether to retire for the night.

No, the judge said. He alone would decide when they were going home.
 
The one that had to drop each of the 15 felonies with which CSS were originally charged.
The Court didn't drop any of those. The OAG did and still all three went to jail.
The one that had to settle on one bogus misdemeanor for each,
Your (wrong) opinion that they are bogus but yet convicted they are and to jail they went.
for a law that didn’t exist until 2005.
Not true says the Supreme Court
IOW, they didn’t even get convicted for what they did or didn’t do in 2001. It wasn’t a crime then.
Yes they did and yes it was
Your slavish devotion to the false narrative is psychotic!
You describe yourself you deluded JoeBot. Yours is the false narrative and yours is the Psychotic Conspiracy Theories that all these institutions were out to get your gods. You and Spanier live in Crazy Town.
 
No one was convicted of any such thing (coverup) LOL
The Paterno 3 did indeed coverup for Sandusky. A coverup is not a crime, in and of itself. The jury found there was not a conspiracy. A coverup and a conspiracy are two different things.

§ 903. Criminal conspiracy.

(a) Definition of conspiracy.--A person is guilty of conspiracy with another person or persons to commit a crime if with the intent of promoting or facilitating its commission he:

(1) agrees with such other person or persons that they or one or more of them will engage in conduct which constitutes such crime or an attempt or solicitation to commit such crime; or

(2) agrees to aid such other person or persons in the planning or commission of such crime or of an attempt or solicitation to commit such crime."

Coverup, which is not a legal term, is:

"1. an attempt to prevent people's discovering the truth about a serious mistake or crime."

Spanier, not telling the BOT fully about the 2001 incident, covered up the Paterno 3 lack of action regarding Sandusky. It was not a crime to do so.

“It didn’t feel like they were conspiring to endanger children,” Ms. Navazio said. “They were conspiring to protect Penn State.”- Spanier Juror
 
Here is an extensive crow list for JoeBots. Enjoy!

The Crow List:



03/11 Sandusky will never be charged

11/11 Sandusky will never be convicted.

06/12 The Freeh Report will exonerate everyone at Penn State.

07/12 The NCAA will never sanction Penn State.

07/12 Spanier will never be indicted.

01/13 Kane will drop the charges against the Paterno 3

07/13 The charges will be dismissed at the preliminary hearing.

03/14 Moulton will show a massive conspiracy

07/14 PSU will fight the sanctions.

09/14 Corbett, Emmert, Erickson, and the BoT will be arrested.

10/14 PSU/NCAA do not want to be deposed; they will fold

12/14 The Paterno 3 want the trial, but the state is delaying it.

01/15 Corman's going to get everything back. It is a big victory.

03/15 Kane isn't in any trouble.

12/15 Kane will drop some bombs on Williams, Fina, etc.

12/15 Kane will not be removed from office by the Senate

12/15 Kane will win the federal lawsuits

03/16 Reese will not serve jail time.

06/16 Kane will never be convicted

10/16 Kane will never serve a day in jail.

10/16 McQueary will not win his Whistleblower lawsuit.

10/16 The conspiracy charge against the Paterno 3 will not be reinstated

10/16 The Paterno 3 case will never go to trial

02/17 The Paterno 3 will be found not guilty.

02/17 All the e-mails are faked.

03/17 Spanier will win on appeal

03/17 Spanier won’t serve any jail time
Great list, thanks for posting it. Kinda points out that they have 0 wins for the decade.

As if Dennis Drywaller has more insight into the case. Can't get one over on these BWI legal eagles, they know that blogger posts always trump official government documents.

10 more years!
 
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I am actually confused about who this person is. Obviously a troll, but a troll that has done some small level of research. It appears that in every thread over the past decade whenever this topic comes up, there is always a poster that just goes crazy in blaming everything on PSU and JoePa and refuses to acknowledge facts and twists things to fit their agenda. I cannot figure out why anybody would take that amount of time to troll like that on this topic.
Yep.

On Friday, Nov 11, 2011, Sara Ganim, who had publicly identified Mike McQueary as the “graduate assistant” in the grand jury presentment who had supposedly witnessed Sandusky sodomizing a boy in the shower, wrote that McQueary was “getting blasted by the public for doing too little.”



He had received several death threats. The same day, newly appointed Penn State President Rodney Erickson announced that McQueary was being placed on administrative leave “after it became clear he could not continue coaching.” Erickson pointedly continued: "Never again should anyone at Penn State feel scared to do the right thing.”
McQueary was hard to miss around town. He stood six feet five inches, topped by short bristles of bright orange-red hair, which gave him the nickname Big Red. Now people were asking one another, “Why didn’t Big Red stop it?”
On Tuesday, McQueary had called an emotional meeting with his Penn State players. He looked pale and his hands were shaking.
“I’m not sure what is going to happen to me,” he said. He cried as he talked about the Sandusky shower incident. According to one of the players, “He said he had some regret that he didn’t stop it.”
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.




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.
 
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Great list, thanks for posting it. Kinda points out that they have 0 wins for the decade.

As if Dennis Drywaller has more insight into the case. Can't get one over on these BWI legal eagles, they know that blogger posts always trump official government documents.

10 more years!
Every time someone new learns the truth, that's a win.

It was also a win when the NCAA returned Paterno's wins and ended the sanctions early (because they realized they made a mistake).

But keep saying there haven't been any wins...
 
I came up with a good analogy for these simpletons who keep jumping into threads to to shout down any new information that comes to light in this case.

These people are the Catholic Inquisition of the early 1600s denying heliocentrism.

Even as more and more evidence arose that the Earth was NOT the center of universe, these “scholars” continued to insist that “nope, this has already been decided, nothing to see here” and refuse to consider any new information. Any new science was considered “blasphemy” and dismissed out of hand.

That is exactly what these posters are doing. No new information is actually considered or debated. It is only shouted down as “conspiracy theories” and the people shared the new information as “pedo enablers”.
 
Every time someone new learns the truth, that's a win.

It was also a win when the NCAA returned Paterno's wins and ended the sanctions early (because they realized they made a mistake).

But keep saying there haven't been any wins...
There haven't been any wins. Sandusky is still in prison and will die there. CSS are still convicted criminals and Joe has proper shame on his reputation for his complicity. But yeah keep saying you're winning.
 
I came up with a good analogy for these simpletons who keep jumping into threads to to shout down any new information that comes to light in this case.

These people are the Catholic Inquisition of the early 1600s denying heliocentrism.

Even as more and more evidence arose that the Earth was NOT the center of universe, these “scholars” continued to insist that “nope, this has already been decided, nothing to see here” and refuse to consider any new information. Any new science was considered “blasphemy” and dismissed out of hand.

That is exactly what these posters are doing. No new information is actually considered or debated. It is only shouted down as “conspiracy theories” and the people shared the new information as “pedo enablers”.
People like you are like the religious fanatics that we've seen throughout the history of the world. Sad dead enders who worship flawed people. Nothing "new" has come out and even though the conspiracy theories (like Area 51 and JFK conspiracies) gain new disciples (idiots) each year the truth remains. And it won't change. Ever
 
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About 12 people will read this. Spanier has been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. That is not changing. People also love seeing someone who ascended to a prestigious position then be knocked all the way down. Same thing with JoePa. Ain't no one changing their mind about Spanier or the scandal and magically now be pro Spanier or PSU because of this book so hopefully at least he realizes that.
So now after me there will only be 11?
 
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Why do they have different names and different websites then, you cretin?

You think the "owner" of a blog writes all content? You are clueless.

I have no idea who Alex Jones is. I'm guessing he's some right wing hack that you worship.

There is a tremendous amount of data to support the fact that I am not a moron. You refuse to acknowledge any of this evidence.

Worse, you have nothing to add here so all you do it resort to hurling insults and personal attacks.
Read up on the facts.

What if everything you thought you knew about the so-called Penn State sex abuse scandal wasn't true?

What if that infamous locker room incident that Mike McQueary supposedly witnessed 16 years ago -- featuring a naked Jerry Sandusky cavorting in the showers with an underage boy -- had nothing to do with sex? And what if the only two officials at PSU who ever spoke directly to former PSU President Graham Spanier about that incident really did describe it as just "horseplay" and not sex?

And what if the guy advancing this contrarian story line was not some crackpot conspiracy theorist, but a decorated U.S. special agent? A guy who had already done a top-secret federal investigation five years ago into the so-called Penn State scandal but nobody knew about it until now?

There would be no pedophilia scandal at Penn State to cover up. And no trio of top PSU officials to convict of child endangerment. The whole lurid saga starring a naked Jerry Sandusky sexually abusing little boys in the shower would be fake news. A hoax foisted on the public by an unholy trio of overzealous prosecutors, lazy and gullible reporters, and greedy plaintiff's lawyers.


Yesterday, on veteran TV reporter John Ziegler's podcast, John Snedden, a former NCIS agent who is a special agent for the Federal Investigative Services, talked about his six-month top secret investigation of Graham Spanier and PSU.

Back in 2012, at a time when nobody at Penn State was talking, Snedden showed up in Happy Valley and interviewed everybody that mattered.

Because Snedden was on a mission of the highest importance on behalf of the federal government. Special Agent Snedden had to decide whether Graham Spanier's high-level security clearance should be renewed amid widespread public accusations of a coverup.

And what did Snedden find?

"There was no coverup," Snedden flatly declared on Ziegler's podcast. "There was no conspiracy. There was nothing to cover up."

The whole world could have already known by now about John Snedden's top secret investigation of Spanier and PSU. That's because Snedden was scheduled to be the star witness at the trial last week of former Penn State President Graham Spanier.

But at the last minute, Spanier's legal team decided that the government's case was so lame that they didn't even have to put on a defense. Spanier's defense team didn't call one witness before resting their case.

On Ziegler's podcast, "The World According To Zig," the reporter raged about that decision, calling Spanier's lawyers "a bunch of wussies" who set their client up for a fall.

Indeed, the defenseless Spanier was convicted by a Dauphin County jury on just one misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child. But the jury also found Spanier not guilty on two felony counts. Yesterday, I asked Samuel W. Silver, the Philadelphia lawyer who was Spanier's lead defender, why they decided not to put Snedden on the stand.

"No, cannot share that," he responded in an email. "Sorry."

On Ziegler's podcast, Snedden, who was on the witness list for the Spanier trial, expressed his disappointment about not getting a chance to testify.

"I tried to contact the legal team the night before," Snedden said. "They were going to call me back. I subsequently got an email [saying] that they chose not to use my testimony that day."


When Snedden called Spanier's lawyers back, Snedden said on the podcast, the lawyers told him he
wasn't going to be called as a witness "not today or not ever. They indicated that they had chosen to go a minimalistic route," Snedden said.

What may have been behind the lawyers' decision, Snedden said, was some legal "intel" -- namely that jurors in the Mike McQueary libel case against Penn State, which resulted in a disasterous $12 million verdict against the university, supposedly "didn't like Spanier at all."

"The sad part is that if I were to have testified all the interviews I did would have gone in" as evidence, Snedden said. "And I certainly think the jury should have heard all of that."

So what happened with Spanier's high-level clearance which was above top-secret -- [SCI -- Sensitive Compartmented Information] -- Ziegler asked Snedden.

"It was renewed," Snedden said, after he put Spanier under oath and questioned him for eight hours.

In his analysis of what actually happened at Penn State, Snedden said, there was "some degree of political maneuvering there."

"The governor took an active role," Snedden said, referring to former Gov. Tom Corbett. "He had not previously done so," Snedden said, "until this occurred."

As the special agent wrote in his 110-page report:

"In March 2011 [Gov.] Corbett proposed a 52 percent cut in PSU funding," Snedden wrote. "Spanier fought back," publicly declaring the governor's proposed cutback "the largest ever proposed and that it would be devastating" to Penn State.

At his trial last week, Graham Spanier didn't take the witness stand. But under oath while talking to Snedden back in 2012, Spanier had plenty to say.

"[Spanier] feels that his departure from the position as PSU president was retribution by Gov. Corbett against [Spanier] for having spoken out about the proposed PSU budget cuts," Snedden wrote.

"[Spanier] believes that the governor pressured the PSU BOT [Board of Trustees] to have [Spanier] leave. And the governor's motivation was the governor's displeasure that [Spanier] and [former Penn State football coach Joe] Paterno were more popular with the people of Pennylvania than was the governor."

As far as Snedden was concerned, a political battle between Spanier and Gov. Corbett, and unfounded accusations of a coverup, did not warrant revoking Spanier's high-level security clearance. The special agent concluded his six-month investigation of the PSU scandal by renewing the clearance and giving Spanier a ringing endorsement.

"The circumstances surrounding subject's departure from his position as PSU president do not cast doubt on subject's current reliability, trustworthiness or good judgment and do not cast doubt on his ability to properly safeguard national security information," Snedden wrote about Spanier.


At the time Snedden interviewed the key people at Penn State, former athletic director Tim Curley and former PSU VP Gary Schultz were already under indictment.

Spanier was next in the sights of prosecutors from the attorney general's office. And former FBI Director Louie Freeh was about to release his report that said there was a coverup at Penn State masterminded by Spanier, Curley and Schultz, with an assist from Joe Paterno.

Snedden, however, wasn't buying into Freeh's conspiracy theory that reigns today in the mainstream media, the court of public opinion, and in the minds of jurors in the Spanier case.

"I did not find any indication of any coverup," Snedden told Ziegler on the podcast. He added that he did not find "any indication of any conspiracy, or anything to cover up."

Snedden also said that Cynthia Baldwin, Penn State's former general counsel, "provided information to me inconsistent to what she provided to the state." Baldwin told Snedden that "Gov. Corbett was very unhappy" with Spanier because he "took the lead in fighting the governor's proposed budget cuts to PSU."

That, of course, was before the prosecutors turned Baldwin into a cooperating witness. The attorney-client privilege went out the window. And Baldwin began testifying against Spanier, Curley and Schultz.

But as far as Snedden was concerned, "Dr. Spanier was very forthcoming, he wanted to get everything out," Snedden said.

"Isn't possible that he just duped you," Ziegler asked.

"No," Snedden deadpanned. "I can pretty well determine which way we're going on an interview." Even though he was a Penn State alumni, Snedden said, his mission was to find the truth.

"I am a Navy veteran," Snedden said. "You're talking about a potential risk to national security" if Spanier was deemed untrustworthy. Instead, "He was very forthcoming," Snedden said of Spanier. "He answered every question."

On the podcast, Ziegler asked Snedden if he turned up any evidence during his investigation that Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile.

"It was not sexual," Snedden said about what Mike McQueary allegedly heard and saw in the Penn State showers, before the prosecutors got through hyping the story, with the full cooperation of the media. "It was not sexual," Snedden insisted. "Nothing at all relative to a sexual circumstance. Nothing."

About PSU's top administrators, Snedden said, "They had no information that would make a person believe" that Sandusky was a pedophile.


"Gary Schultz was pretty clear as to what he was told and what he wasn't told," Snedden said. "What he was told was nothing was of a sexual nature."

As for Joe Paterno, Snedden said, "His involvement was very minimal in passing it [McQueary's account of the shower incident] to the people he reported to," meaning Schultz and Curley.

Spanier, 68, who was born in Cape Town, South Africa, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1955. When Snedden interviewed Spanier, he couldn't recall the exact date that he was approached by Curley and Schultz with the news about the shower incident supposedly witnessed by McQueary.

It was "approximately in the early 2000 decade," Snedden wrote, when Spanier recalled being approached by Schultz and Curley in between university meetings. The two PSU administrators told Spanier they wanted to give him a "head's up" about a report they had received from Joe Paterno.

"A staff member," Snedden wrote, "had seen Jerry Sandusky in the locker room after a work out showering with one of his Second Mile kids. [Spanier] knew at the time that Jerry Sandusky was very involved with the Second Mile charity," Snedden wrote. "And, at that time, [Spanier] believed that it only involved high school kids. [Spanier] has since learned that the charity involves younger disadvantaged children."

Because it was Spanier's "understanding at that time that the charity only involved high school kids it did not send off any alarms," Snedden wrote. Then the prosecutors and their friends in the media went to work.

"Curley and Schultz said that the person who had given the report was not sure what he had seen but that they were concerned about the situation with the kid in the shower," Snedden wrote.

Curley and Schultz told Spanier that the person who had given the report "was not sure what he saw because it was around the corner and that what he has reported was described as "horse play" or "horsing around." In his report, Snedden said that Spanier "assumed the terminology of horse play or horsing around came from Joe Paterno."

"They all agreed that Curley would talk to Jerry Sandusky, tell him not to bring kids into the locker room facilities," Snedden wrote. "And Curley was to tell the Second Mile management that it was not good for any of the Second Mile kids to come to the athletic locker room facilities, and that they should suspend that practice."

Spanier, Snedden wrote, never was told "who the person was who made the report. But "nothing was described as a sexual or criminal in any way," Snedden wrote.

The initial conversation between Spanier, Curley and Schultz about the Sandusky shower incident lasted 10 minutes, Snedden wrote. A few days later, Curley told Spanier "in person that the discussion had taken place and that everything went well."

"The issue never came up again with Curley, Schultz, Paterno, Sandusky, or anyone," Snedden wrote. "It did not appear very significant to anyone at the time."


Gary Schultz corroborated Spanier's account. Schultz told Snedden that back in February 2001, Tim Curley told him "something to the effect that Jerry Sandusky had been in the shower with a kid horsing around and wrestling. And Mike McQueary or a graduate assistant walked in and observed it. And McQueary or the graduate assistant was concerned."

Schultz believed the source of Curley's information was Joe Paterno, and that the conduct involved was horseplay.

"McQueary did not say anything of a sexual nature took place," Snedden wrote after interviewing Schultz. "McQueary did not say anything indicative of an incident of a serious sexual nature."

While Snedden was investigating Spanier, Louie Freeh was writing his overpriced $8.3 million report where he came to the opposite conclusion that Snedden did, that there was a coverup at Penn State. Only Louie Freeh didn't talk to Curley, Schultz, Paterno, McQueary or Sandusky. Freeh only talked to Spanier relatively briefly, at the end of his investigation, when he had presumably already come to his conclusions.

Ironically, one of the things Spanier told Freeh was that Snedden was also investigating what happened at Penn State. But that didn't seem to effect the conclusions of the Louie Freeh report, Snedden said. He wondered why.

He also wondered why his report had no effect on the attorney general's office, which had already indicted Curley and Schultz, and was planning to indict Spanier.

"I certainly think that if the powers that be . . . knew what was in his report, Snedden said, "They would certainly have to take a hard look at what they were doing."

Freeh and the AG, Snedden said, should have wanted to know "who was interviewed [by Sneddedn] and what did they say. I mean this is kind of pertinent to what we're doing," Snedden said of the investigations conducted by Freeh and the AG.

"If your goal in any investigation is to determine the facts of the case period, the circumstance should have been hey, we'll be happy to obtain any and all facts," Snedden said.

Snedden said he understood, however, why Freeh was uninterested in his report.

"It doesn't fit the narrative that he's [Louie Freeh] going for," Snedden said.

Freeh was on a tight deadline, Ziegler reminded Snedden. Freeh had to get his report out at a highly-anticipated press conference. And the Freeh report had to come out before the start of the football season. So the NCAA could drop the hammer on Penn State.

"He [Freeh] doesn't have time to read a hundred page report," Snedden said. He agreed with Ziegler that the whole disclosure of the Freeh report was "orchestrated" to come out right before the football season started.

It may have been good timing for the news media and the NCAA, Snedden said about the release of the Louie Freeh report. But it didn't make much sense from an investigator's point of view.


"I just don't understand why," Snedden told Ziegler, "why would you ignore more evidence. Either side that it lands on, why would you ignore it?"

Good question.

Snedden was aghast about the cost of the Louie Freeh report. His six-month federal investigation, Snedden said, "probably cost the federal government and the taxpayers $50,000 at the most. And he [Freeh] spent $8.3 million," Snedden said. "Unbelievable."

In a statement released March 24th, Freeh hailed the conviction of Spanier as having confirmed and verified "all the findings and facts" of the Freeh report. On Ziegler's podcast, however, Snedden was dismissive of Freeh's statement.

"It's like a preemptive strike to divert people's attention from the actual conviction for a misdemeanor," Snedden said about Freeh. Along with the fact that he jury found "no cover up no conspiracy," Snedden said.

"In a rational world Louie Freeh is completely discredited," Ziegler said. "The Freeh report is a joke." On the podcast, Ziegler ripped the "mainstream media morons" who said that the jury verdict vindicated Freeh.

"Which is horrendous," Snedden added.

Ziegler asked Snedden if he had any doubt that an innocent man was convicted last week.

"That's what I believe, one hundred percent," Snedden said about the "insane jury verdict."

About the Penn State scandal, Snedden said, "I've got to say it needs to be examined thoroughly and it needs to be examined by a competent law enforcement authority." And that's a law enforcement authority that "doesn't have any political connections with anybody on the boards of trustees when this thing hit the fan."

As for Snedden, he left the Penn State campus thinking, "Where is the crime?"

"This case has been all about emotion," Ziegler said. "It was never about facts."

"Exactly," Snedden said.

As someone who has spent the past five years investigating the "Billy Doe" case, I can testify that when the subject is sex abuse, and the media is involved, the next stop is the Twilight Zone. Where hysteria reigns, and logic and common sense go out the window.

Earlier in the podcast, Ziegler talked about the "dog and pony show" put on by the prosecution at the Spanier trial. It's a good example of what happens once you've entered the Twilight Zone.


At the Spanier trial, the 28-year-old known as Victim No. 5 was sworn in as a witness in the judge's chambers. When the jury came out, they were surprised to see Victim No. 5 already seated on the witness stand.

As extra sheriff's deputies patrolled the courtroom, the judge announced to the jury that the next witness would be referred to as "John Doe."

I was in the courtroom that day, and I thought the hoopla over Victim No. 5's appearance was bizarre and prejudicial to the case. In several sex abuse trials that I have covered in Philadelphia, the victim's real name was always used in court, starting from the moment when he or she was sworn in in the courtroom as a witness.

The judges and the prosecutors could always count on the media to censor itself, by not printing the real names of alleged victims out of some misguided social justice policy that borders on lunacy. At the exact same time they're hanging the defendants out to dry.

Talk about rigging a contest by what's supposed to be an impartial media.

At the Spanier trial, the prosecutor proceeded to place a box of Kleenex next to the witness stand. John Doe seemed composed until the prosecutor asked if he had ever been sexually abused. Right on cue, the witness started whimpering.

"Yes," he said.

By whom, the prosecutor asked.

By Jerry Sandusky, John Doe said, continuing to whimper.

The actual details of the alleged sex abuse were never explained. The jury could have left the courtroom believing that Victim No. 5 had been sexually assaulted or raped.

But the sexual abuse Victim No. 5 was allegedly subjected to was that Sandusky allegedly soaped the boy up in the shower and may have touched his penis.

For that alleged abuse, Victim No. 5 collected $8 million.


I kid you not.

There was also much confusion over the date of the abuse.

First, John Doe said that the abuse took place when he was 10 years old, back in 1998. Then, the victim changed his story to say he was abused the first time he met Sandusky, back when he was 12 or 13 years old, in 2000 or 2001, but definitely before 9/11, because he could never forget 9/11. Next, the victim said that he was abused after 9/11, when he would have been 14.

At the Spanier trial, the prosecution used "John Doe" or Victim No. 5 for one main purpose: to prove to the jury that he had been abused after the infamous Mike McQueary shower incident of February, 2001. To show the jury that more victims were abused after Spanier, Curley and Schultz had decided to initiate their alleged coverup following the February 2001 shower incident.

But there was only one problem. To prove John Doe had a relationship with Sandusky, the prosecution introduced as an exhibit a photo taken of the victim with Sandusky.

Keep in mind it was John Doe/Victim No. 5's previous testimony that Sandusky abused him at their first meeting. The only problem, as Ziegler disclosed on his podcast, was the photo of Victim No. 5 was taken from a book, "Touched, The Jerry Sandusky Story," by Jerry Sandusky. And according to Amazon, that book was published on Nov. 17, 2000.

Three months before the alleged shower incident witnessed by Mike McQueary. Meaning that in a real world where facts matter, John Doe/Victim No. 5 was totally irrelevant to the case.

It was the kind of thing that a defense lawyer would typically jump on during cross-examination, confusion over the date of the abuse. Excuse me, Mr. Doe, we all know you have suffered terribly, but when did the abuse happen? Was it in 1998, or was it 2000, or 2001 or even 2002? And hey, what's the deal with that photo?

But the Spanier trial was conducted in the Twilight Zone. Spanier's lawyers chose not to ask a single question of John Doe. As Samuel W. Silver explained why to the jury in his closing statement: he did not want to add to the suffering of a sainted victim of sex abuse by subjecting him to cross-examination. Like you would have done with any normal human being when the freedom of your client was at stake.

That left Spanier in the Twilight Zone, where he was convicted by a jury on one count of endangering the welfare of a child.

To add to the curious nature of the conviction, the statute of limitations for endangering the welfare of a child is two years. But the incident that Spanier, Schultz and Curley were accused of covering up, the infamous Mike McQueary shower incident, happened back in 2001.

At the Spanier trial, the prosecution was only able to try the defendant on a charge that had long ago expired by throwing in a conspiracy charge. In theory, that meant that the defendant and his co-conspirators could still be prosecuted, because they'd allegedly been engaging in a pattern of illegal conduct over sixteen years -- the coverup that never happened --- which kept the original child endangerment charge on artificial respiration until the jury could decide the issue.


But the jury found Spanier not guilty on the conspiracy charge. And they also found Spanier not guilty of engaging in a continuing course of [criminal] conduct.

That means that Spanier was convicted on a single misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child, dating back to 2001. A crime that the statute of limitations had long ago expired on.

On this issue, Silver was willing to express an opinion.

"We certainly will be pursuing the statute of limitations as one of our post-trial issues," he wrote in an email.

Meanwhile, Graham Spanier remains a prisoner in the Twilight Zone. And until there's a credible investigation of what really happened, all of Penn State nation remains trapped in there with him.
 
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