Professor Crews's essay is indeed fascinating. I would encourage everyone who is interested in developing an informed opinion of whether or not the OAG fed the public false narratives to read the essay. The following excerpt is Crews's response to the I believe the accusers who testified at trial, they couldn't all be lying. Crews concluded that they are all not credible!
---------------
“I grant you all this,” some readers will say, “but what about the eight accusers who swore that Sandusky had molested them on multiple occasions? Their testimony, after all, is what put him in prison, and no amount of horseplay in the shower can gainsay it.”
Agreed. But that testimony would have looked unbelievable without the poison cloud of revulsion that enveloped it. Not one of Sandusky’s accusers, to begin with, had ever told anyone about misconduct on his part. More tellingly, most of them had remained on cordial terms with him, and some had even volunteered expressions of gratitude for his help in steering them away from trouble. They could hardly have said that about their serial rapist. And even after alleging subjection to brutal assaults, no former Second Miler could bring himself to claim that Sandusky’s many exhortations to clean living had been hypocritical. It was as if, absurdly, the young men needed to charge him with awful crimes but persisted even now in remembering him as their kindly protector.
The testimony that sealed Sandusky’s fate had been carefully shaped by attorneys who wished to remove anomalies and contradictions from their clients’ initial reports. Courtroom embarrassment was further minimized by having each young man concisely assent to propositions that would be read aloud to him. Even so, jurors who hadn’t already made up their minds (but there weren’t any!) would have been taken aback by stark implausibilities among the charges.
One accuser, Aaron Fisher, affirmed the claim that Sandusky had forced oral copulation on him more than twenty-five times. Another, Brett Houtz, attested to over forty violent assaults, occurring two or three times weekly. A third, Sabastian Paden, was supposedly molested in Sandusky’s home about 150 times. On one occasion Sandusky was said to have locked Paden in the basement for three days, starving him and raping him anally and orally while Dottie Sandusky, one floor above, ignored his screams. But all of those contentions were ludicrous on their face. What could have motivated rape victims to keep rejoining their tormentor and undergoing more of the same?
Even the most gullible jurors, one might think, would have wanted to know why several hostile witnesses had at first denied that Sandusky had done anything improper with them. Shouldn’t the timely denials, proffered without external pressure, count more heavily than later avowals scripted for judicial victory? To this objection, however, the prosecutors and their witnesses had a ready answer. The boys, it was said, had repressed their memories of abuse, and just recently they had retrieved those same memories.
It is this aspect of the case that drew the interest of the psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Richard Leo, who understand that the theory of repression lacks any scientific credit. To them, belated “recollections” such as Sabastian Paden’s tale of a three-day sadistic kidnapping bore every mark of the dreamlike pseudomemories typically conjured by patients of recovered memory therapists. Paden may simply have been lying, of course. But the authorities who targeted Sandusky were indeed working in tandem with memory enhancers. One of them subjected his patient, Aaron Fisher, to months of daily brainwashing until Fisher more or less “recalled,” or pretended to recall, scenes of violation. “It wasn’t until I was fifteen and started seeing [therapist] Mike [Gillum],” wrote Fisher, “that I realized the horror.”
Other memories were refreshed as it became apparent that any new claims against Sandusky were likely to be believed. “I tried to block this out of my brain for years,” one turncoat declared. Another reflected, “That doorway that I had closed has since been reopening more.” A third stated, ”I have spent, you know, so many years burying this in the back of my head forever.” And after Sandusky was remanded to prison, Pennsylvania’s attorney general at the time, Linda Kelly, congratulated the ex-Second Milers for having dredged their damning scenes from the unconscious. “It was incredibly difficult,” she pronounced, “for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”
The one major question that remains is what induced beneficiaries of Sandusky’s kindness to betray him so cruelly. Ziegler and Pendergrast know the answer — but so does Gladwell. “According to Ziegler’s reporting,” he remarks in the middle of a long endnote, where it will escape most readers’ attention, “at least some of Sandusky’s victims are not credible. They appear to have been attracted by the large cash settlements that Penn State was offering and the relatively lax criteria the university used for deciding who would get paid.”
“Some of Sandusky’s victims”? No, all of them. In a paroxysm of needless remorse,the Penn State trustees had broadcast the availability of a vast compensation fund that would eventually approach $140 million. An incentive was thus created for any young man who had once been helped by Sandusky, and even for some who had never met him, to spin a preposterous yarn and become an overnight multi-millionaire. And that is exactly what happened — for example, with the lawyered-up shower boy, Allan Myers. At last count, some thirty-five applicants, feigning PTSD at Sandusky’s hands, had availed themselves of Penn State’s princely largesse.
Ironically, the hounding of Jerry Sandusky could have perfectly illustrated the second half of Gladwell’s argument: once someone has been demonized, his whole record will be held against him. Sandusky had titled his autobiography Touched — surely a mark of pedophilia. What devilish impudence he had shown, furthermore, in publishing photographs of himself surrounded by happy eleven-year-olds! All of his assistance to at-risk children, such as adopting six of them (of both sexes) and raising them to be studious, self-disciplined, and drug free, was now reconfigured as grooming.
