With the Benefit of Hindsight - Ziegler's new documentary podcast on scandal to start in 2021
- Thread starter francofan
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Ryan Bagwell collected donations for his FOIA requests but to my knowledge, never released them. Who knows what they contain?
Roy Blehar has copies of Rodney Erickson's notebook from the time the scandal broke. What little he's released was heavily redacted by him. Who knows what they contain?
@francofan these are the real enemies of truth.
Roy Blehar has copies of Rodney Erickson's notebook from the time the scandal broke. What little he's released was heavily redacted by him. Who knows what they contain?
@francofan these are the real enemies of truth.
"It offers one possibilty"
Yes it does. Just as your explanation offers one possibility. You seem to contend (other overtly or through implication) that your explanation (sexual intent) is the ONLY explanation with any merit. Clearly, it is not. I believe that given everything else we know, your explanation is not very likely, but you are certainly allowed to believe otherwise.
"Is Sandusky a trusted source?"
Are the police a trusted source? We have irrefutable evidence that the police and OAG lied, broke laws and were unethical during this entire process. We don't actually have any concrete proof that Sandusky lied about anything (perhaps he has, but we don't have any confirmation of that).
WRT your last paragraph, you are looking at this entirely through a lens of your own experience and opinion. I understand that in the same way I cannot understand thinking showering with a boy is acceptable. But you have no idea what Sandusky's state of mind/reasoning was. I have explained how one might arrive at his conclusion (miscommunication with police/true belief he did nothing wrong). You cannot know if his intent was sexual or not.
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Sometimes a shower is just a shower.
Are you intentionally trying to steer the discussion away from what actually matters?
Sandusky’s state of mind when he is showering with boys, holding them up to the shower head so that their behinds are in his face of hugging them in the shower so that his genitals are making contact with the boys? I cannot know for a fact whether it was sexual or not, that is true. I can reasonably surmise that it was most likely sexual because anybody that was not there for sexual gratification or to be sexually titillated by it would absolutely never find themselves in that situation.
Go on a search across the nation and ask every single man you see if they would ever take a shower with a boy, hug him while doing so or hold him up to the shower head so that the boy’s behind was in his face. Then, take count of how many say “yes”. Outside of pedophiles, I feel confident that the answers will be 100% “no”. There is no reasonable explanation for it, no matter how many times people want to say they were just washing up, provide definitions of horseplay that don’t explain what he was doing, whatever.
I look at this through the lens of my experience because I have an idea about this stuff. 100% of pedophiles that predate upon boys would put themselves in the exact situation Jerry put himself in with these boys in the shower. And from my experience, 100% of men who are not pedophiles would never even consider putting themselves in the situations Jerry put himself in with the boys in the shower. That goes beyond trainings received or anything like that because grown men know they should not be hugging boys in the shower. It doesn’t take a psychology degree, a social work degree, a certification of any sort, or a background in behavioral sciences. A grown man and a boy alone in a group shower together have absolutely no reason to have any physical contact whatsoever. None.
A shower stops being just a shower when there is genital contact involved. Your response in disingenuous.
Is there any evidence that JS became aroused in these shower incidents?
"100% of men who are not pedophiles would never even consider putting themselves in the situations Jerry put himself in with the boys in the shower."
It is impossible to know this. This is a supposition on your part.
Let me ask this another way: if you ask the question 20 years ago this way "would you (EveryMan) every engage in horseplay in a group shower with your son", I suspect the number is above zero. Sandusky viewed these kids as his sons (not saying that was OK, which goes back to my earlier boundary issue comments, which you somehow tried to make about doctor/patient relationships).
And again, in a vacuum (if this was the only evidence we had) I would agree with you. But it isn't in a vacuum. We have lots of other information at our disposal that suggests this isn't likely the case.
If someone's genitals get grabbed during a water polo match (it happens all the time, sometimes accidentally, sometimes as gamesmanship), does it cease to become a water polo match?
Your logic is weak. Horseplay is horseplay. Sex is sex. Without sexual intent, horseplay isn't sex.
Find another non-pedophile that would do what Jerry did.
Hugging is not horseplay. Hugging is a show of affection. I believe you have said you are married (my apologies if I have that wrong). Have you ever been naked with your wife in the shower, embrace her so that your genitals were making contact with her and said, “Now, this some fun horseplay! Let me scrub your hair up and dry off!” I’m going to guess not and that if you were in the shower with your wife and embracing her it was not horseplay. Your were there for a purpose and because you enjoyed being in that situation.
You’re calling out weak logic and using water polo as some kind of a correlation to naked shower hugging? Are they playing water polo one on one, naked between one grown man and one boy in a pool with nobody else around? Then I would say probably yes, the man probably manipulated the situation to be playing naked water polo with the boy with an opportunity to grab his genitals and say it was just part of the game but with other intentions entirely.
Is there any evidence that JS became aroused in these shower incidents? Is a show of affection necessarily sexual? Your fixation on this is borderline creepy. At the least, I believe your intent is to distract this discussion away from what this is really all about.
How many shows of affection have you taken part in while naked that weren’t sexual? Just use some common sense. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that any time you have taken part in shows of affection while naked you were there purposefully and excited to be taking part.
How the first part of the post you quoted? Have you ever encountered another non-pedophilic, grown man that would ever engage in that behavior?
Your problem is that you are expecting reasonable arguments from people that have abandoned reasonable thought processes. They have resorted to totally ridiculous rationalizations to claim Jerry's behavior is absolutely acceptable. Invalidate one and they will move to another. None of them can provide an excusable explanation for naked one-on-one contact.
I am not married but have been with my girlfriend/life partner for 13 years.
I've never said those words. But we have certainly showered together when it hasn't resulted in sex.
Have you ever seen any of the Jackass movies or tv show? When they are doing all of their naked hijinks (aka horseplay) you allege that this is all sexual, correct? That they are all attracted to each other? And that it isn't guy being (really, exceptionally stupid) guys? Just checking.
I've never said Jerry's behavior was acceptable.
But unacceptable and illegal are two different things.
Are all the Jackass guys of legal age? Is there a power imbalance amongst them? Are they all of age to consensually engage in their activities?
Here’s a question I honestly don’t know the answer to that I’ve meant to ask for a long time. I know others have said they saw Jerry Sandusky showering with boys in the locker room. Didn’t Dick Anderson testify to this at trial? Did any of them say that they saw Jerry physically contacting the boys while doing so?
You haven’t said it’s acceptable but you are fighting like crazy to defend and excuse it.
Great interview of John Ziegler by lawyer Chris Reid. Interview will replay on https://scottbeason.com tonight at 8pm cdt/9pm edt. 60 minute interview covered how the fiasco started; the perfect storm of circumstances that created the story; the v2 incident involving Mike McQueary and how the OAG got the day, month and the year wrong twice; why there were so many accusers; the media's role and why this story would never happen in Alabama.
Your logic is: this shower behavior is unacceptable and therefore Jerry is a pedophile and is guilty.
I argue that equally acceptable logic is:
Jerry's shower behavior is unacceptable, but that alone does not make him a pedophile, nor does it (alone) make him guilty of anything.
I'm not sure why the second statement causes you so much distress. It is logically much more consistent with the known facts and a statement that allows for multiple outcomes (i.e my statement allows for the possibility that he is guilty) is always more likely to be true than one of absolutes.
My partners and I are of age too. My example was playing off of your example, which has nothing to do with age (you asked if genital contact ever occurred without sex and during horseplay, and I gave you a well known example)
I don't know if you are hypersexualized (all nudity = sex) or prudish (all nudity = bad) or just don't want to admit that it is possible you are wrong (I will admit; it is possible that I am wrong. But I believe the facts suggest I am correct) but you being so hung up on the 1998 shower incident (which didn't result in charges at the time and is really a MINOR component in all of this) is puzzling to me.
You are making up things that you think I think. I have never said what you state my logic is. I have never said i know Jerry is guilty. Ever.
What I have said is that Jerry Sandusky engaged in situations that a non-pedophilic man would never place himself in. Likewise, he placed himself in a situations that a pedophilic man would love to be in. Does that make him a pedophile? Not necessarily but it certainly does need a hell of a lot more of an explanation than cleaning off after a workout, horseplay, boundary issues, etc…..
If that is the way you think, it does not come across that way in 99% of your posts on this topic.
Regarding the second part of your statement, I strongly disagree and have repeatedly explained why.
Nope, not hypersexualized or prudish at all. Another disingenuous argument. You don’t have to be hypersexualized or prudish to believe that a grown man working (or running, I suppose) a charity for disadvantaged youth who engages in one-on-one showers including hugging and holding up to the shower head the boys with whom he is working is not doing so with pure intentions.
Let me put it to you this way: Your come home from work and you son tells you that you good friend and neighbor Mr. Anderson from next was at the YMCA when he was there. When your son went in to take a shower, it was just he and Mr. Anderson in there. Mr. Anderson then came over to him, gave him a big hug and said he was going to squeeze his guts out (wasn’t that a line from Jerry?) then lifted him up to the shower head to rinse his hair out and while doing so Mr. Anderson’s face was in his behind. What are you going to do? Muss his hair and say, “Golly, that Mr. Anderson sure is a swell fellow! He sure loves some horseplay!”?
So you think non-pedophilic men (particularly ones working in charities focused on at-risk youths but doesn’t even have to be them exclusively) would shower one-on-one with unrelated children they are working with and hug them? You think pedophiles would love to have that kind of opportunity and access to children that Jerry did? Im not sure what to say about that.
This is a disingenuous comparison.
Did Mr. Anderson already have a close/father-like relationship with my fictional son? Was there relationship in the context of an established charity in which boys were mentored by adults?
If the answer to those question in your hypothetical is "yes" than I will further answer your questions. Otherwise, you are just making shite up to futilely fortify this weird and unimportant hill you've decided to die on.
I'm pretty confident I've already explained this at length above. If you have new/relevant questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
If you didn't read anything I wrote above there is the TL/DR summary:
The 1998 shower incident does not make Sandusky a pedophile (it does not preclude it either).
The 1998 shower incident is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of the case when you consider all of the other information we have.
Sure, Mr. Anderson takes your son out and does things with him. Coaches his little league team, takes him out for ice cream.
As for the hill I’m dying on, that is incorrect. It is the hill Jerry decided to stake his freedom upon by continuing the engage in the behavior, even after being investigated for it by police. And he lost.
I read what you wrote. You wrote that you disagreed with my post about showering activities of pedophilic and non-pedophilic men.
I asked you before. Is there any evidence that JS was aroused during these activities?
AM went on the record....with no money on the line....to say that MM lied about what he saw. He said he was horsing around. His subsequent relationship with JS and family, including Jerry's mother, is well documented.
V6 told authorities that nothing sexual was involved in 1998, and years following his shower incident, texted JS on Father's Day to tell him how blessed he was to have him in his life. He got less money than all the other accusers because he never said JS actually abused him sexually.
As I said, this is minutia and can't even be corroborated by the presence of child porn. It's a waste of time to continue this train of thought.
What does matter is why Tom Corbett manipulated this entire hose job and to what end. He accepted over $500,000 in campaign contributions from individuals and entities with close ties to TSM from, I believe, 2003 until his election as governor. He slow played the Aaron Fisher accusation while he was AG. As soon as he was elected governor and while JS was under indictment, he tried to sneak through a $3 million state grant to TSM. How could he have believed in Sandusky's guilt and still have done this?
Everyone from Corbett on down knew that C/S/S didn't do anything wrong, and yet these three men have now spent time in prison for a crime they didn't commit and for breaking a law that didn't exist at the time. The prosecution knew. The judges knew. The BOT knew. Louis Freeh knew. The minute all of them became aware that Tim went to JR with what had happened, PSU should have been out of the discussion.
PSU shelled out roughly $100 million on claims and has had its reputation destroyed over this. The claims were basically rubber stamped. Why didn't PSU put up a fight?
So your answer is no, you’ve never shown affection while you were naked that wasn’t sexual? That makes sense.
It's not scary, unless you are scared by logic.
In the same way that not every pedophile has behaved inappropriately in a shower, not everyone who has behaved inappropriately in a shower is a pedophile.
That's pretty basic.
Enjoy the rest of your day.
Gotta remember what MM was saying -
“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 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.
So your logic says a grown man hugging boys with his genitals on them in a shower or holding them up to shower head with his face in their behinds is just everyday horseplay and hijinx? Yes, that is scary and certainly opens up the possibility for children in your care to be predated upon. I would rethink that very seriously if you are being serious. It’s also a little scary that you couldn’t think of an answer to my scenario earlier of your neighbor re-enacting the Sandusky behaviors with your own son.
I did respond to your ridiculous scenario. Please re-read.
It isn't scary at all. You are using emotion rather than logic.
Nope, just looking at it logically and with common sense.
You responded to the scenario with this, then didn’t respond again after I answered you:
“If the answer to those question in your hypothetical is "yes" than I will further answer your questions. Otherwise, you are just making shite up to futilely fortify this weird and unimportant hill you've decided to die on.”
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