ADVERTISEMENT

With the Benefit of Hindsight - Ziegler's new documentary podcast on scandal to start in 2021

Naked. You love to leave out naked hugging. That is the transparently disingenuous part of your posts.
Sigh.

Naked =/= sexual

They were in a shower. Of course they were naked.

Not appropriate behavior. But not sexual. And not illegal.
 
Sigh.

Naked =/= sexual

They were in a shower. Of course they were naked.

Not appropriate behavior. But not sexual. And not illegal.
Ok. They were naked in a group shower together. Of course they were hugging!
Hugging does not equal sexual. Naked hugging? Yeah, most likely that’s sexual.
 
  • Like
Reactions: WHCANole
You think. You don’t know any more than I do. I side with the investigator who thought it was illegal.
Alright, I’m ducking out of this thread. Enjoy the echo chamber.
Connor, you know you'll be back. (And I don't disagree with everything you have to say, just some.)
 
A.) Check the Altoona GJ report on bishop abuse. There were several instances documented, including a letter from one DA in the 1970s stating that he was going to do exactly that. The opening scene of Spotlight is based on incidents of DAs hushing up cases in Boston in the 1970s.

B.) Check McChesney's notes. The police report on this individual contains even more detail.

C.) I have an email in front of me stating "That was Ray and my case in 1998...and unfortunately, RG's decision NOT to prosecute if he received help with the problem (with parent's blessing) backfired 10 yrs later..." He communicated similar messages to other people I've spoken to.

D.) Amendola request in discovery in February 2012...asks for Karen Arnold police interview citing " extensive disagreements" between Arnold and Gricar in regard to the 1998 case.
And other stuff of note -

Prosecuting attorney Joe McGettigan responded that “many of the alleged victims were abused several times a week, or month,” so it wasn’t possible to pin down a particular time. Besides, “They didn’t want to remember what happened and were even encouraged by Sandusky to forget,” he said. Here was another red flag that the alleged victims may have been in therapy searching for repressed memories, but no one picked up on it. When the prosecutors said they wouldn’t provide the information, Judge Cleland commented, "I think the answer is they can't." He thus declared that it was “futile” to demand such details. According to reporter Sara Ganim, “the state Attorney General's Office countered that Sandusky is accused of abusing boys who are now men, who were pressured into forgetting what happened and many times abused weekly for many years.”[7]Despite Amendola’s strenuous objections and repeated requests for a continuance, Cleland denied the requests and stuck to his promised June 5 trial date, which would take place in Centre County, where State College and Penn State were located. Incredibly, Jerry Sandusky had instructed Amendola to oppose a change in venue, assuming that his local reputation would benefit him.[8] Instead, the last place on earth that he was likely to get a fair trial was in Penn State territory, where the case had received a huge amount of horrendous publicity, and Penn State fans were bitter and angry at the impact on Coach Paterno and their beloved institution.On May 30, in a private unscheduled meeting with the judge and prosecutors, Amendola pled for a delay of the trial to allow him time to prepare for it properly.

He wanted to call a psychologist as an expert witness, but the psychologist had been unable to prepare his reports because he hasn't been given access to the grand jury testimony. His jury consultant was in Puerto Rico on vacation. One of Amendola’s investigators was having surgery. Amendola and Rominger didn’t have enough time to review all the evidence. They couldn’t call Gary Schultz or Tim Curley because they had exercised their fifth-amendment rights. Cleland again denied the requested continuance, saying "No trial date is ever perfect, but some days are better than others."[9]Later that same day, in an official pre-trial hearing, Amendola asked Cleland to throw out three of the ten alleged victims before the trial. Victim 2, the unnamed Allan Myers, should be thrown out because Mike McQueary’s version of the shower incident kept changing, including the date on which it was supposed to have occurred. Victim 8, the phantom victim supposedly witnessed by the janitor who now had dementia, should be thrown out because it was pure hearsay. And Victim 6, Zachary Konstas, should be thrown out because the district attorney had decided in 1998 that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute, so to try it again amounted to a kind of double jeopardy. Cleland denied all of Amendola’s requests. All ten alleged victims would be presented to the jury.[10]On June 5, just before the process of picking a jury commenced, Amendola tried one more tactic. He filed a motion to withdraw as Sandusky’s lawyer, “based on the lack of preparation of all the things that are going on, most notably the absence of our experts and jury consultant.” A “key witness” was unavailable. “My office is still copying materials which we cannot send out to anybody because they’re all confidential. They’re all grand jury materials. My staff is ready to quit.” He said that “some day when people talk to my staff and get a real flavor for what was going on in my office for the past 30, 60 days, they’ll have a better understanding that this is not lawyering.” The reality was that “we have been so far behind, just keeping up with the discovery materials and trying to do due diligence… but we’re at a loss.” They hadn’t even had time to serve subpoenas to potential witnesses. He concluded that “we’re not prepared to go to trial at this time.”Co-counsel Karl Rominger added that he had called the Pennsylvania Bar Ethics Hotline the day before, and they had called his attention to Rule 17.1, a lawyer’s “duty of competency,” and that Rule 1.16 called upon a judge to ask lawyers to withdraw if the judge could tell that they were completely unprepared. The lawyer who answered the hotline said that they would normally render a formal opinion in such cases, but since they knew it was the Sandusky case, they didn’t want to get involved.Amendola said that he was “fully cognizant of the fact that the Court will deny but at least there will be a record.”[11] And he was right. Cleland refused to allow him to withdraw from the case, and jury selection began.

· Although there was no pornography on Sandusky’s computer, his investigators were sending “graphic and raunchy” pornography by email to one another, though the Office of the Attorney General has refused to make the emails public.
 
What do you mean by documented? Investigated by the police? Two that I know of. The ‘98 man-boy shower investigated at the time and the McQueary incident investigated years later. I’m not a historian on all of this by any means so there have been others but these two are confirmed by Jerry.

So you and @WHCANole apparently think that TWO in the span of decades is equal to "repeatedly". Do you not understand the definition of the word repeatedly? Or were you simply trying to frame the facts to fit your agenda?

Speaking of @WHCANole, I'm wondering if Bowden is still stuck at 377 wins or if he has passed Paterno yet? 🤣
 
  • Haha
Reactions: WHCANole
You seem to be involved with people involved in this case. Are you aware of anybody that witnessed Jerry showering with TSM boys in group showers seeing him lathering them up and hugging them while they were present to witness it? If so, that would make some movement towards his innocence. If he really was so absolutely clueless to proper interactions between a man and a child he is working with, his practices should have been the same whether other people could see him or not. If not, it would make your typical person wonder why it would be different.

There is nothing I tell you that will convince you that Jerry might be innocent. But, it doesn’t matter because the evidence is already in the public domain that makes a clear and convincing case that Jerry never harmed anyone and was wrongly convicted. This is a complicated case, but it is all laid out in the 19 episode epic podcast “With the Benefit of Hindsight.” Nobody has been able to rebut the premise of the podcast and nobody has been able to identify a single accuser that makes even a halfway credible case that they were molested, and nobody will.

I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to rebut the content of the WTBOH podcast or provide a link that does and/or identify a single halfway credible accuser that was molested. I am not holding my breath because I don’t believe anyone will step up to the challenge.
 
yeah nobody ever is in prison who is ultimately innocent, that's a good point :rolleyes:

think of it this way, if you believe that Jerry is innocent, as francofan obviously does and has stated, why would you not argue and fight for him? because if he is innocent it is just about the worst thing in the world when you think about it....a dude who just wanted to help young kids being put in jail while some of the kids he actually helped turn on him

when this whole thing started I said to my wife and my friends that the worst thing is that there are no good endings to this story, either Jerry didn't do any of this and it won't matter because everyone will hate him and his name will be mud forever which is horrible, or the only worse thing which would be he did do it and all these poor boys were subjected to that

I am not ready to say that Jerry is innocent but it sure looks different from the story that most of America knows doesn't it?
Sort of...

"He [Freeh] sold his client Penn State down the river in anticipation of making big bucks in the form of further business from the NCAA," Nichols said. Then, after the Freeh Report issued its faulty conclusions on Penn State based on nonexistent facts, Nichols said, "the vultures . . . swooped down on this sad case to make political hay out of this case, or to make big bucks out of the case."

The vultures were preying on "a board of trustees that had an open checkbook," Nichols said. "I think that's despicable."

"Careers were ruined, people were fired, peoples' reputations were destroyed," Nichols said. And it was all "based on a series of accusations that Freeh did not have evidence for, and knew that he did not have evidence for."

When the scandal hit, the trustees, many of whom were corporate leaders, adopted a "standard corporate model" for dealing with scandal, Nichols said.

The plan was to "fire a lot of people, scapegoat a lot of people, to express maximum contrition regardless of not having the facts to support that," Nichols said. And to "pay huge sums of money so the problem goes away."

As disclosed previously on Big Trial, Penn State paid out $118 million to 36 alleged victims of abuse. They gave away the cash without checking to see whether the alleged victims had criminal records [a third of them did]. The trustees also didn't do anything to vet any of the outlandish and often contradictory tales by the claimants. None of the alleged victims were interviewed by detectives, deposed by lawyers, examined by psychiatrists, or subjected to polygraph tests.

Instead, the university's board of trustees just wrote out lottery checks that averaged more than $3 million each.

"This is someone body else's money," Nichols said, so it's "easy for them [the trustees] to pay off settlements without substantive backup because its not their money and they don't have to worry about it."

As far as the board of trustees is concerned, "it's been radio silence since then," Nichols said. "The board has taken the position to look the other way, to let sleeping dogs lie. To keep it buried, to keep it quiet and to hope that the whole unfortunate mess goes away."

Nichols has his own first-hand experiences with Louie Fresh's team of investigators, who interviewed Nichols four times. The tenor of the interviews still rankles Nichols.

"A lot of their questions were accusatory," he said; "It was not looking for the truth." Instead, Fresh's investigators were looking for "evidence or information that might support a predetermined conclusion that would scapegoat certain individuals," he said. Or support the "highly inflammatory and highly accusatory" claims that Freeh made at his press conference announcing the findings of his report.

For example, Nichols said, Fresh's investigators asked him, since he was a campus insider, at what point did he know about Sandusky's sex crimes. Nichols insisted that he didn't know anything about the subject.

But Freeh's guys weren't buying it. Their attitude was, "Obviously you knew as well, everybody knew," Nichols said. "It led me to believe . . . that they had already reached the conclusion that everybody knew that Sandusky was doing this but they were looking the other way to protect football. They had already reached the conclusion," he said, and they "wanted me to verify that."

But when Nichols read the Freeh Report, "the evidence [for a cover up] wasn't there," Nichols said. "I was taken back, I was shocked."

"It became clear to me," he said, that "the executive summary and Freeh's oral comments [at his press conference] were wild accusations that had no basis in factual support in the main report."

"His goal was not to find the truth and help Penn State, the people who paid him to $8 million to do this, but to build a case like a prosecutor, but without evidence or with flimsy evidence."

John Snedden, the former NCIS special agent who hosted the podcast, said it was clear from email exchanges and a copy of Freeh's preliminary report that Freeh didn't care that he was making unfounded accusations. In the emails, and in handwritten notes on a preliminary draft of the report, Fresh's own investigators pointed out that Freeh's accusations had no basis in facts or evidence.

But Freeh made his unfounded accusations anyway, because, according to Freeh's own emails, the "media was clamoring for what he intended to say," Snedden said.

Nichols recalled that Freeh's investigators were also "pretty intimidating" when they interviewed him.

"It was made clear to all that were interviewed [that] we must cooperate fully and freely with the Freeh investigators at the cost of our employment," Nichols said.

Snedden described the interviews conducted by Fresh's team of investigators as an "exercise in support of their predetermined conclusions."

Nichols said when he talked it over with his senior colleagues, "Every faculty senate chair came to the same conclusion that the Freeh report in our view was at odds with the truth." But that didn't stop the NCAA with issuing "huge, massive, unprecedented sanctions based on the Freeh Report," Nichols said.

When a group of former faculty Senate chairs put out a joint statement attacking the conclusions of the Freeh Report, "the board of trustees, they didn't care," Nichols said. "They didn't want to be knocked off their story line." Ditto for the media, Nichols said.

Nichols said it was "outrageous" for the NCAA to hire Freeh and his investigators as employees.
But he added, "I think the NCAA lost its moral compass long before they hired Louie Freeh."

About Graham Spanier, Nichols said, "they destroyed a great university president's career based on a hyperbolic, mean spirited, sell interested fact-void report."

And that's just the first episode of the podcast, which concludes that the Freeh Report found no smoking gun at Penn State, nor any evidence to backup their claims that it was Penn State's football-mad culture that inspired university officials to cover up and look the other way when it came to Sandusky's alleged crimes against children.

In the Smoking Gun? Part 2, Snedden and Nichols continued the discussion. Nichols said the unfounded charges in the Freeh Report, such as that Penn State "had a culture of supporting football over the well being of their own children."

"That's what Freeh alleged and that's what the NCAA parroted," Nichols said. It led to a "media feeding frenzy," the idea that the Penn State community "was so corrupt as to throw their children to the lions to protect football."

POSTED BY BIGTRIAL.NET AT 4:38 PM
 
John Ziegler has secured interviews with 2 major figures (from the good side) before the 10th anniversary of the firing of Joe Paterno. I am guessing that Graham Spanier might be one of them based on what Ziegler said in his last podcast regarding Gary Schultz's conversation with Graham. I would be pleasantly surprised if the second interview was with Tim Curley, but that is probably not the case.

Anybody have any idea who the second major figure is? I doubt that it is Jay Paterno. It is probably not Anthony Lubrano. Any other candidates?

 
  • Like
Reactions: PSU2UNC
John Ziegler has secured interviews with 2 major figures (from the good side) before the 10th anniversary of the firing of Joe Paterno. I am guessing that Graham Spanier might be one of them based on what Ziegler said in his last podcast regarding Gary Schultz's conversation with Graham. I would be pleasantly surprised if the second interview was with Tim Curley, but that is probably not the case.

Anybody have any idea who the second major figure is? I doubt that it is Jay Paterno. It is probably not Anthony Lubrano. Any other candidates?

I listened to this entire podcast.
JZ made some EXCELLENT points, however:
It will NOT change the views of the “court of public opinion” even remotely in the slightest.
 
  • Like
Reactions: WHCANole
I listened to this entire podcast.
JZ made some EXCELLENT points, however:
It will NOT change the views of the “court of public opinion” even remotely in the slightest.

I don't think WTBOH has made a major dent in the court of public opinion; however I think that it has at least made a slight change. In the set of people who have followed the case closely, I think it has made a major dent. If WTBOH was able to team up with a national outlet who can produce something similar to the Making of a Murderer or Outcry then I believe that public opinion would change. The story is out there and it is credible. What it will take imo it for a major media outlet to have the guts to tell the story of what actually happened in spite of the toxic nature of the subject matter.
 
Last edited:
I don't think WTBOH has made a major dent in the court of public opinion; however I think that it has at least made a slight change. In the set of people who have followed the case closely, I think it has made a major dent. If WTBOH was able to team up with a national outlet who can produce something similar to the Making of a Murderer or Outcry then I believe that public opinion would change. The story is out there and it is credible. What is will take imo it for a major media outlet to have the guts to tell the story of what actually happened in spite of the toxic nature of the subject matter.
WTBOH is incredibly important for this reason. If you are truly curious as to what really happened, John lays it all out in fine detail. We now know definitively that the entire case against Sandusky is complete and utter BS. But we’ll keep pretending otherwise as this is Penn State’s version of “the big lie”.
 
I don't think WTBOH has made a major dent in the court of public opinion; however I think that it has at least made a slight change. In the set of people who have followed the case closely, I think it has made a major dent. If WTBOH was able to team up with a national outlet who can produce something similar to the Making of a Murderer or Outcry then I believe that public opinion would change. The story is out there and it is credible. What it will take imo it for a major media outlet to have the guts to tell the story of what actually happened in spite of the toxic nature of the subject matter.
I agree with everything you said!
But to quote JZ: because of the “toxicity” of this case, NO ONE pertinent will touch it with a 10’ pole(sadly)!
 
John Ziegler has secured interviews with 2 major figures (from the good side) before the 10th anniversary of the firing of Joe Paterno. I am guessing that Graham Spanier might be one of them based on what Ziegler said in his last podcast regarding Gary Schultz's conversation with Graham. I would be pleasantly surprised if the second interview was with Tim Curley, but that is probably not the case.

Anybody have any idea who the second major figure is? I doubt that it is Jay Paterno. It is probably not Anthony Lubrano. Any other candidates?

Gary Schultz?
 
John Ziegler has secured interviews with 2 major figures (from the good side) before the 10th anniversary of the firing of Joe Paterno. I am guessing that Graham Spanier might be one of them based on what Ziegler said in his last podcast regarding Gary Schultz's conversation with Graham. I would be pleasantly surprised if the second interview was with Tim Curley, but that is probably not the case.

Anybody have any idea who the second major figure is? I doubt that it is Jay Paterno. It is probably not Anthony Lubrano. Any other candidates?

Ziegler tweeted that he interviewed 2 major figures in the scandal today: Graham Spanier and Sandusky's adopted son EJ and his wife Heather.

 
Ziegler tweeted that he interviewed 2 major figures in the scandal today: Graham Spanier and Sandusky's adopted son EJ and his wife Heather.

The final 2 episodes of WTBOH will drop next week.

On Tuesday, the exclusive interview of Jerry and Dottie's son EJ Sandusky and his wife Heather will drop.

On Thurday, the interview with former Penn State President Graham Spanier will drop.

 
The final 2 episodes of WTBOH will drop next week.

On Tuesday, the exclusive interview of Jerry and Dottie's son EJ Sandusky and his wife Heather will drop.

On Thurday, the interview with former Penn State President Graham Spanier will drop.

Ain’t gonna change the narrative 1 iota.
 
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT