Gary Schultz has given 2 extensive interviews that are now available.
The first one is an one hour 36 minute interview with John Ziegler from 2018:
The second one is a two hour seven minute interview with John Ziegler and Liz Habib in 2020
Here is what Ziegler says about the interviews on his framingpaterno web pages.
As part of the production of this podcast, John and Liz conducted numerous extremely extensive interviews (including with many people very close to "Victim #1" Aaron Fisher, including his soon to be ex-wfe, Mallory Fisher), most of which are being made available right here, for free, with only light editing to elimiate pauses and production gaps.
Foremost among them are two rather long, news-making, interviews with former Penn State administrator Gary Schultz, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in order to avoid a kangaroo court on more serious charges of covering up for Sandusky. These are the only two media interviews which Schultz has ever done about the case.
The first interview, which was conducted with John back in 2018, deals with many of the key details of the McQueary date issue, a topic on which Schultz is perhaps THE most important witness, since it was emails which he turned over to the prosecution that caused them to suddenly change the date from 2002 to 2001. Here, for the first time, Schultz expresses his stated belief that December 29th, 2000 was indeed the real date, and that, amazingly, Jerry Sandusky is very likely INNOCENT of being a child sexual abuser.
The second, even more extensive, interview with Schultz, conducted by both John and Liz in 2020, covers some of the same ground as the first interview, but also provides remarkable context for just how blindsided everyone from Penn State was when brought in to testify at Sandusky’s grand jury. It ends with Schultz once again proclaiming that he has no reason to believe that Sandusky is guilty, and expressing strong emotion at the enormous toll that the false narrative has taken on everyone involved.
In a rational world, this interview would have been conducted on national television in primetime, but the news media is no longer remotely credible on this story, so Schultz has trusted only this podcast, exclusively, to tell his mind-blowing version of events, which is backed up by voluminous amounts of evidence, including the testimony of two key prosecution witnesses.
If only one interview could be used to prove that the entire media narrative of this case is a fraud, it would be this one.
Or Ganim.
Ganim's ethical conflict was laid out in a legal brief filed by Sandusky's lawyers in their arguments for a new trial. In the brief, Sandusky's lawyers wrote that Ganim "approached the mother of accuser 6," Deb McCord, according to the testimony of State Police Corporal Joseph Leiter, and gave the mother the name and phone number for an investigator assigned to the attorney general's office.
Ganim, according to the brief, left this message for McCord:
"Debra, it's Sara from the Patriot. I just want to pass along this agent's name and number. The Attorney General has expressed interest in helping you."
So when Sara Ganim writes another story about Joe Paterno and the Penn State sex scandal, it's not exactly like Bob Woodward opining about Richard Nixon and Watergate. But that didn't prevent Ganim from making a splash with her bogus scoop in gullible mainstream media outlets, such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, by generating a fresh round of headlines asking What did Joe Know and When Did He Know It?
Let's get to Ganim's new evidence and lay out why the source of it is tainted, as well as the product of an investigation marked by blatant police and prosecutorial misconduct.
The one page Pennsylvania state police report from 2011, supposedly obtained from a source, Ganim wrote, is "described here for the first time." The report "lays out an account from whistleblower Mike McQueary," who was telling Paterno about the infamous shower incident from 2001 starring a naked Jerry Sandusky and a 10-year-old boy.
"Paterno allegedly told McQueary in 2001 that the claim against Sandusky 'was the second complaint of this nature he had received," according to the police report, which was written after Sandusky's arrest 10 years later," Ganim wrote.
"Paterno, upon hearing the news, sat back in his chair with a dejected look on his face," the report states, adding that McQueary "said Paterno's eyes appeared to well up with tears."
Nice dramatic touches for a police report. Next, Ganim writes:
"Then he [Paterno] made the comment to McQueary this was the second complaint of this nature he had received about Sandusky," the report states, citing McQueary's recollection."
The police report also noted, Ganim wrote, that Paterno allegedly told McQueary that Dottie Sandusky, Jerry's wife, had told Sue Paterno, Joe's wife, that "Jerry doesn't like girls."
Let's start with McQueary, who, according to Ganim, is now writing a book about his exploits as the alleged Penn State whistleblower.
As former NCIS Special Agent John Snedden has said, McQueary is not a credible witness. As a special agent for the Federal Investigative Service, Snedden investigated former Penn State President Graham Spanier in 2012, to determine whether his top secret security clearance should be renewed by the federal government. Snedden wrote a recently declassified 110-page report that concluded there was no sex crime at Penn State and no coverup.
Snedden didn't believe McQueary was credible because he told five different versions of what he saw and heard in the Penn State showers, featuring slapping sounds and fleeting glimpses of naked people in the shower. The day he witnessed the shower event, McQueary was repeatedly questioned by his father, a doctor, and a friend of his father's, another doctor, about what happened. McQueary could not definitely say whether he had witnessed a sexual attack or horseplay. And that's why neither of the two doctors, both mandated reporters, ever told the police.
McQueary was also questioned by two Penn State administrators, who came to the same conclusion as the two doctors, that McQueary wasn't sure what he saw or heard in the showers. So they didn't report it to the police either.
"I've never had a rape victim or a witness to a rape tell multiple stories about how it happened," Snedden said in a previous interview with
Big Trial, to describe why McQueary wasn't a credible witness. "If it's real it's always been the same thing," Snedden said.
"In my view, the evolution of what we saw as a result of Mike McQueary's interview with the AG's office" was the transformation of a story about rough horseplay into something sexual, Snedden said.
"I think it would be orchestrated by them," Snedden said about the AG's office, which has never responded to multiple requests for comment.
That didn't stop the attorney general's office from running with their exaggerated version of McQueary's story.
The 2011 grand jury report was built around a lie. It claimed that McQueary witnessed a 10-yar-old boy in the showers being subjected to “anal intercourse” by a “naked Jerry Sandusky.” McQueary supposedly told Joe Paterno about it, and two other university officials, but Penn State covered it up, the grand jury report says.
But McQueary himself was shocked when he read the grand jury report. He emailed the prosecutors, saying they had “twisted” his words. ”I cannot say 1,000 percent sure that it was sodomy,” McQueary wrote. “I did not see insertion.”
The investigation conducted by the state police in the Sandusky case also included stone-cold proof of police misconduct on tape. On April 21, 2011, the state police made the mistake of leaving a tape recorder on, and the machine caught the police deliberately lying to one alleged victim to get him to tell the story they wanted him to tell.
State Troopers Joseph Leiter and Scott Rossman were interviewing alleged victim Brett Houtz at the police barracks, with Houtz’s attorney Benjamin Andreozzi present. While Houtz took a cigarette break the two troopers continued talking with Houtz’s lawyer. They assumed the tape-recorder was turned off but it wasn't.
In their conversation captured for eternity, the troopers talked about how it took them months to get details of sex attacks out of Aaron Fisher, Victim No. 1 in the Penn State case, and how they’re sure that Houtz was a rape victim too. The troopers then discussed how to get more details of sex abuse out of Houtz.
Attorney 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,” Trooper Leiter said. Sure enough, when Houtz returned, Trooper Leiter told him, “I just want to let you know you are not the first victim we have spoken to.”
The trooper told Houtz about nine adults that they had already talked to 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.”
The troopers, however, had only interviewed three alleged victims at that point, and only one – Aaron Fisher – had alleged prolonged abuse. But Houtz didn't know that.
“I don’t want you to feel ashamed because you are a victim in this whole thing,” Trooper Leiter told Houtz. “He [Sandusky] took advantage of you . . . [but] We need you to tell us as graphically as you can what took place as we get through this procedure. I just want you to understand that you are not alone in this. By no means are you alone in this.”
That's what you call coaching a witness, to manufacture testimony.
The condemnation of Ganim's most recent story came from many quarters.
"Well CNN published a lie from Sara Ganim," tweeted Scott Paterno, a lawyer who defended his father during the Sandusky scandal. "Sue [Paterno] never said that Dottie [Sandusky] told her anything and this was categorically denied before publication."
"To be clear Sara Ganim and @CNN is using triple hearsay to get clicks and it's false. And enough is enough."
"To my knowledge we were not contacted by Sara Ganim for a response," Dottie Sandusky wrote. "If we had been, I would have told her that this is old news which actually exonerates both Joe and Jerry. The incident in question is the 1998 episode which, according to [Former Penn State Athletic Director] Tim Curley's testimony, Joe knew was fully investigated by the D.A. and determined to be unfounded. I never said that Jerry doesn't like girls and the factual record, including at trial, makes that extremely obvious to anyone not invested in this entire fairy tale."
"On the brighter side, I'm glad to see that Sara and the rest of the news media has seemingly dropped the absurd notion that Joe Paterno was told in the 1970s about abuse that never happened by accusers who made up stories for Penn State money," Dottie Sandusky wrote.
Former Special Agent Snedden called Ganim's scoop "revisionist history."
"The whole thing is absurd," Snedden said about the supposedly new police report from 2011. "It was written ten years after the fact," Snedden said about the 2001 shower incident supposedly witnessed by McQueary, and described to the state police in 2011.
"Police reports are supposed to be contemporaneous," Snedden said. About the 2011 police report concerning the 2001 shower incident, Snedden asked, "How is that contemporaneous?"
The CNN story, Snedden said, is the product of either "trying to either cover your ass or bolster your position. It appears to me that she [Ganim] doesn't even go through the motions of asking if it's accurate."
John Ziegler, a reporter who has covered the Penn State story for years, was even harsher in his assessment of Ganim's work.
"This one [Ganim's new story] is the biggest piece of crap yet," Ziegler said. "Ganim is pretending that we don't know" about the 1998 shower incident, Ziegler said. "If she was at the [Sandusky] trial she would know that what she's reporting is ancient news. It's got cobwebs on it."
Ziegler went at Ganim's work from another angle -- logic.
"This is actually exculpatory," Ziegler said about Ganim's latest scoop.
When McQueary is telling Joe about the 1998 shower incident, which is almost identical to the 2001 shower incident, Ziegler said, "Joe is immediately flashing back to 1998."
"That tells us that McQueary never said anything [to Paterno] about a sexual assault because Joe already knows that 1998 [the first alleged shower incident] is a nothing burger," Ziegler said. "Had McQueary actually said something about a sexual assault Joe would have never connected it to 1998, because the [Centre County] D.A. had already cleared Sandusky."
Ziegler said he has come to the conclusion that Ganim "was a very ambitious and also very naive or stupid person who got used" by the prosecutors in the Sandusky case to basically "put out a Craig's list ad" for more victims of sexual abuse.
Ziegler said that Ganim's story goes beyond any claims of the prosecutors. Former Chief Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina, the lead prosecutor in the Sandusky case, went on 60 Minutes Sports in 2013 and declared that there was no evidence that Joe Paterno had ever participated in a cover up.
"I did not find that evidence," Fina said on 60 Minutes
Sports.
"It does reek of deception," Ziegler said about Ganim's latest effort to prop up the official Penn State story line. "They have to be worried about something," Ziegler said, who devoted a
podcast to it. "This story makes me think that even she doubts it."
Mark Pendergrast, an author who has written a book about Jerry Sandusky,
The Most Hated Man In America; Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, said that McQueary "
revised his memory a decade after the Feb. 2001 shower incident, in which he heard slapping sounds but did not see Sandusky and a boy in the shower -- he only fleetingly saw a boy, in the
mirror."
McQueary's "memory of his meeting with Paterno in 2001was also subject to revisions and this appears to be more evidence of that," Pendergrast wrote in an email. "In other words, this is Sara Ganim once more raising a non-issue based on Mike McQueary's revised memory, and referring as well to highly questionable anonymous allegations dating back to the 1970s."
The 1970s alleged victims
In May 2016, Ganim reported on CNN that a man who claimed to have been sexually abused by Sandusky at a rest stop after he was picked up as a hitchhiker. The alleged victim also claimed that he was personally ordered by Joe Paterno to keep quiet about the abuse.
"Stop it right now" or "we'll call the authorities," the alleged victim claimed that Paterno had told him on the phone.
The alleged victim told Ganim that he had no doubt it was Paterno on the other end of the line ordering him to keep quiet.
