The Predator of Penn State
The official story everyone knows.
A pedophile in his 50s and 60s, we have been told, was running loose in a small Pennsylvania town for more than 15 years. A sexually insatiable predator with the virility of a porn star in his 20s, his predilection was boys.
He was constantly on the prowl for forced sex with teens and prepubescents. For decades, no adult knew. Not at school, not parents or friends. Not a single outcry. No boy made a disclosure during the period of rampant abuse.
Even afterward, when the boys became men, none of them contacted the police.
When police made contact, almost every one of them denied anything abusive happened. The predator seemed to have a nearly supernatural skill to sexually abuse boys from age 8 to 15, who would then forget until they became adults and underwent recovered memory therapy.
This predator coached linebackers at Penn State and won fame; his team was prominent, its head coach, Joe Paterno, was famous.
The predator, Jerry Sandusky, also founded and operated a charity called the Second Mile, which helps at-risk boys, thousands of them from economically disadvantaged homes. The pedophile, it is said, personally taught many of them to play sports, and apply themselves to schoolwork. He had a reputation as a great coach and as a man greatly beloved for helping boys.
Yes, he fooled them all.
Until a mother of a boy in Second Mile realized Sandusky was abusing her son – though the teen denied it.
Prosecutors from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office got involved, as did a civil litigation lawyer named Andrew Shubin, and a memory recovery therapist named Mike Gillum.
A timely leak of grand jury minutes, a hotline to find victims, advertising by Shubin the lawyer to let victims know he could handle their lawsuit and not take a dime until he collected from Penn State, and clients getting memory recovery therapy to recall abuse they had long forgotten – were the elements that kept the long investigation alive. Finally, when the case was about to die for lack of victims, the mother of the first boy furthered her efforts, gathered her son’s friends together, retained attorneys, got memory recovery therapy, and they became ‘survivors.’
Eight brave men, only boys when the pedophile abused them, testified at his trial. There were two others whose pathetic stories were told by others – making a total of 10 victims of the beast.
That is the official story.
Survivors Compensation
All the victims who testified and one who did not testify got awards from Penn State as follows:
- Aaron Fisher, $7.5 million
- Allan Myers, $6.9 million (did not testify)
- Jason Simcisko, $7.25 million
- Brett Swisher-Houtz, $5.5 million
- Michal Kajak, $8.1 million
- Zachary Konstas, $1.5 million
- Dustin Struble, $3.25 million
- Unknown, “victim,” (did not testify) no payment because he is still unknown
- Sabastian Paden, $20 million
- Ryan Rittmeyer, $5.5 million
Let us look at the victims and their stories of horror and torment.
Victim 1
Aaron Fisher’s mother, Dawn Fisher Daniels Hennessy, asked her son whether Sandusky molested him. He said no. But Sandusky had hugged him once to “crack his back” after wrestling; they were fully clothed.
Hennessey could spot abuse. Her husband (Aaron’s stepfather) was in prison for molesting her daughter, and her brother was the victim of sexual abuse by a doctor who drugged him.
She reported her suspicions. Social workers in Clinton County’s Children and Youth Services interviewed Aaron, who denied abuse. They sent him to psychotherapist Mike Gillum, an expert on recovered memory.
Gillum spent hours each day with the 14-year-old in therapy sessions for seven months.
Aaron Fisher later said, “It wasn’t until I was 15 and started seeing Mike that I realized the horror.”
Fisher’s recovered memories revealed Sandusky had forced oral sex on him, and he had forgotten it, tucked away behind the doorway of the mind.
Fisher was a tepid witness. In the first grand jury, he retracted his recalled memories. He fared no better with the second grand jury, which also failed to indict. He tried to back out of the third, but a compromise was reached. He would read a statement about the abuse he endured, but not answer questions.
At the criminal trial, the 19-year-old sobbed as he assented to statements made by the prosecutor. He had been an overnight guest in Sandusky’s house? Yes. About a hundred times during 2003–8? Yes. Mutual fellatio was practiced in the basement? Yes. Fisher had returned again and again for five years, then had forgotten about the abuse? Yes. No one asked Fisher, a heterosexual male, why he returned some 99 times to endure homosexual abuse at Sandusky’s hands.
After the trial, Penn State awarded Fisher $7.5 million.
Victim 2
Police received an anonymous tip that Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary had witnessed something. When interviewed, McQueary told them that in 2002 a decade earlier, he entered the Penn State locker room and heard loud slapping sounds from the adjacent shower room. He glanced and saw a boy about 10. He saw an arm reach out and pull the lad back. Shortly after, he saw Sandusky walk out of the shower.
McQueary did not call police, but met with Penn State Head Coach Joe Paterno and told him.
When McQueary went before the grand jury, prosecutors knew how to beef up testimony. They wrote down that McQueary said he had seen a young boy “being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky” in the shower.
Prosecutors made a strategic decision. Normally the testimony in a grand jury is secret, but they chose to leak the information to reporter Sara Ganim, of the Harrisburg Patriot-News, who would later win a Pulitzer prize for her coverage of the Sandusky case. She published a torrent of salacious stories that helped the public understand Sandusky was guilty.
McQueary questioned Senior Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach, who was responsible for what might be called “prosecutorial embellishment” of his testimony. After it hit the media, he emailed her, writing “I feel my words are slightly twisted and not totally portrayed correctly… I cannot say 1,000 percent sure that it was sodomy.”
In reply, Eshbach wrote, “I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect, and that it is hard not to respond. But you can’t.”
Ganim entertained no doubts: it was rape, of a 10-year-old, and the major media followed up. It became a national news story.
After the sodomy tale went public, Allan Myers, then 24, realized he had been the shower boy. He hadn’t been 10 at the time, he was almost 14 and he wrote a letter to two newspapers and the Pennsylvania attorney general, and gave a sworn statement to Sandusky’s lawyer, saying Sandusky had never abused him. They had engaged in innocent horseplay in the players’ shower room after a workout.
Myers stated, “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.”
This came as a blow to the prosecution. But then justice blew in a favorable direction. Myers contacted a lawyer advertising his services to prospective Sandusky victims. His name was Andrew Shubin.
Though Myers stuck with the story that he had not been abused in the shower. Shubin decided that Myers, the author of a deposition declaring Sandusky’s total innocence, could not testify at the trial. The prosecution depended on an anonymous 10-year-old boy having been abused in the shower, based on McQueary’s grand jury testimony leaked to the world.
During the trial, Shubin made Myers unavailable by hiding him at an undisclosed rural location. The prosecution played along by pretending that the shower boy’s identity was known “only to God.” The jury, deprived of crucial knowledge that Myers had been a steadfast admirer of Sandusky until Shubin had “persuaded” him, declared Sandusky guilty of having raped somebody or other.
Shubin’s strategy paid off handsomely. Myers was awarded a $6.9 million settlement from Penn State.
Victim 3
During the years of trying to build a case, state troopers interviewed hundreds of ex-Second Milers, telling them Sandusky was a pedophile, and seeking to learn if they were abused too. They were unable to discover any victims. Indeed, they heard nothing but praise for an extraordinarily selfless mentor, a troublesome fact that left police frustrated and prosecutors baffled.
The case was in danger of collapse.
Aaron Fisher’s mother, Dawn Hennessey, identified several young men who knew her son as candidates for Sandusky abuse.
Most of these hailed from Lock Haven, where she and Aaron lived. She urged the attorney general’s office to interview these men.
With the guidance of foresight, these clever men acquired contingency-fee lawyers. Two wisely chose Andrew Shubin, who in turn referred them to therapists who helped them “remember” abuses long forgotten.
When first questioned, Jason Simcisko told police Sandusky never abused him, adding, “I don’t believe any of this stuff is true and hope that he’s found not guilty.”
Within a month, Simcisko retained Shubin. With memory recovery therapy, Simcisko “recalled” 50 overnight stays in Sandusky’s home, and at every one, Sandusky touched his penis.
When challenged about earlier statements of no abuse, Simcisko responded, “I tried to block this out of my brain for years.”
Victim 4
Reading about the charges against Sandusky, Brett Swisher-Houtz’s father told his 27-year-old son to retain a lawyer. Swisher-Houtz wanted nothing to do with the case.
But he could not ignore paternal advice. He retained Benjamin Andreozzi, another sexual-abuse lawyer, and came under the guidance of recovered memory expert Mike Gillum, the same therapist who aided Aaron Fisher.
After tireless therapy, Swisher-Houtz recalled he was molested 50 times – when he was 12 or 13. He “recalled” Sandusky forcibly jamming his penis into his mouth or wrestling him into “69” positions in showers, a sauna, and hotel rooms.
For years after the abuse, Simcisko told the jury he kept returning to the house and abuse. Why had he informed no one about his torture? Why did he continue his friendship with Sandusky for more than a decade after his abuse, even bringing his son to meet Sandusky?
As he told the jury, “I have spent, you know, so many years burying this in the back of my mind forever.”
Houtz got $5.5 million from Penn State.
Victim 5
Michal Kajak was in his mid-20s when he realized his friends Dustin Struble (victim 7) and Zachary Konstas (victim 6) stood to make a fortune. He changed his original story that nothing had happened to a recollection of a time when Sandusky had seized his tiny hand and placed it on Sandusky’s erect penis in a locker room shower. Sandusky never touched him again, he said.
It made sense to Kajak that this occurred in the fall of 1998 when he was 10. But the timeline did not work, since it could be proven he had not yet met Sandusky. With the help of his lawyer, he remembered it was August 2001, when he was 12.
But that recollection hurt the timeline prosecutors needed with the McQueary testimony. The best-case scenario was if Kajak had become a victim after McQueary, the whistleblower, and told Paterno what he saw in the shower.
Kajak, a precocious 24-year-old, then changed his testimony to say that the single incident of Sandusky’s abuse had occurred in 2002. The revised date happened to comport with the consideration of civil liability, since the venue he it was at Penn State’s Lasch Football building.
Kajak was magnificent in his righteous indignation when he spoke to Sandusky from the witness stand, “I have been left with deep, painful wounds that you caused, and that had been buried in the garden of my heart for many years.”
Penn State awarded Kajak $8.1 million – a singularly rewarding amount for a man who had allegedly experienced for 30 seconds one hand on his penis either 14, 11 or 10 years earlier. Other victims, such as Aaron Fisher with his 50 forced fellated events, or Brett Swisher-Houtz forced dozens of times, got millions less for far more abuse.
Victim 6
Zachary Konstas did not say Sandusky sexually abused him. But back in 1998, Sandusky bear-hugged him from behind during a post-workout shower.
Kontas never thought he was abused by the bear hug in the shower, which he dismissed in the doorways of the mind as harmless pranking. Even as a 23-year-old, Konstas stayed in touch with Sandusky, as evidenced by this message: “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!”
But then Konstas retained an attorney and got psychotherapy. He was brought to realize that a bear hug in the shower was a grooming maneuver.
Penn State awarded Konstas $1.5 million, the smallest award to anyone.
Victim 7
Dustin Struble was in his late 20s when he realized Sandusky had abused him as a child. He hadn’t known it when he was 20 and had written on a scholarship application, “Jerry Sandusky, he has helped me understand so much about myself. He is such a kind and caring gentleman, and I will never forget him.”
Struble went to football games with Sandusky and tailgate parties for 14 years. Several months before Sandusky’s indictment – on April 11, 2011 – Struble told the grand jury that Sandusky had never once touched him inappropriately.
But fortune came Struble’s way. He signed a contingency fee agreement with attorney Andrew Shubin and entered into therapy with a colleague of Mike Gillum’s, Cindy McNab, to find hidden memories of abuse.
Unsurprisingly, Struble found them. He remembered Sandusky touching his penis in a car and nestling against him erotically in a shower.
Asked in cross-examination why he hadn’t disclosed this earlier, he replied: “That doorway that I had closed has since been reopening more.”
Penn State awarded Struble $3.25 million.
Victim 8
Victim 8 was the only victim featured in the trial who did not receive money from Penn State.
Victim 8 was in the showers at Penn State, a story not dissimilar to McQueary’s shower boy story except it was two years earlier.
Victim 8 became known to the jury because of the work of Pennsylvania State Troopers. When they did not have enough victims, troopers interviewed janitors at Penn State.
One janitor, Ronald Petrosky, told them about a fellow janitor who saw Sandusky fellating a boy in the showers. Police interviewed the witness, James Calhoun, and recorded the interview. Calhoun said he had indeed come across such an event, but he insisted that the perpetrator had not been Sandusky.
Prosecutors chose to use what is normally impermissible hearsay testimony from Petrosky, who said it was Sandusky – even though he hadn’t seen Sandusky in the shower with a boy.
By the time of the trial, Calhoun was suffering from dementia and could not testify. Prosecutors made sure not to confuse the jury by mentioning they had a recording of Calhoun, denying it was Sandusky.
Happily for prosecutors, Judge John Cleland, who always showed the most discreet respect and loyal support for the prosecution, made an exception to the hearsay exclusion rules. The sympathetic judge who wanted what everyone wanted – the conviction of the pedophile – allowed into evidence the testimony of one janitor who falsely described what another janitor saw and thought 12 years ago.
Penn State was not required to pay anything to Victim #8 for he never appeared, and some have suggested he never existed.
Victim 9
Now we come to the wildest, most egregious yarn of all. Sabastian Paden was a senior in high school when, on November 5, 2011, his mother saw the televised news of Sandusky’s arrest and learned that Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly established a hotline soliciting more victims.
She got someone to call the hotline, but when police came to Paden, he informed them that Sandusky had done nothing sexual to him.
Soon after, Paden got therapy. He “remembered” that a few years back he had been going to Sandusky’s home –about 150 times. Every weekend, he related, Sandusky would lock him in the basement. While testifying, Paden told how Sandusky lured him home after school, locked him in the basement and kept him there for three days while depriving him of food and repeatedly assaulting him orally and anally. According to Paden, he screamed for help, but no one would unlock him from the basement.
For three years, Paden told the jury he would go again and again to the scene of torture on where he screamed for help. Like the other victims, he neglected to mention his ordeals to anyone.
What did not come out at trial, which was fortunate for the cause of convicting a monster, was that the basement could not be used to lock someone in. There were two doors and both of them could be locked only from the inside. But Paden had told the most gothic story, and it earned him the most generous “compensation” of any– $20 million from Penn State.
Afterward, he posted on Facebook, “Shit I’m balling like a mother fuck yea $.”
Victim 10
The last victim, then only one not to be personally invited to testify, came to the prosecution from the hotline.
Prosecutors made no secret that their case against Sandusky rested on recovered memories. The traumatized witnesses, prosecutor Joseph McGettigan asserted in court, “had tried to bury” their experiences, and they still “don’t want to remember” them.
But victim 10 needed no therapy to remember the horrors he reported.
Ryan Rittmeyer was in his 20s. He had attended a Second Mile camp as a boy. As a young man, he had troubles with the law. He was incarcerated for burglary in 2004 and again in 2007 for having robbed, beaten, and permanently injured an elderly man. All told, he had 17 arrests and served nearly three years in jail for offenses that included reckless endangerment, theft by deception and false impression, robbery, assault, and illegal possession of a firearm.
Rittmeyer was streetwise enough to retain Andrew Shubin. He testified that he saw Sandusky monthly from 1997 to 1999, and on nearly every occasion Sandusky had made sexual contact with him. Finally, taking turns at fellatio.
Penn State awarded him $5.5 million.
Wrap Up
On June 21, 2012, a jury in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, found Sandusky guilty of forty-five counts of child molestation of 10 boys, two of whom were unknown to the jury.
Attorney General 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.”
Although every witness at the trial was an adult with no claim against Sandusky when they were children, Attorney General Linda Kelly nicely summed up the Sandusky case as “a referendum on the court’s willingness to believe children.”
On October 9, 2012, Sandusky was sentenced to 30-60 years. Sandusky has spent the last 11 years in a Pennsylvania state prison.
He continues to maintain his innocence to a world that long ago believed the voices of the little children who testified at his trial.
“I am an innocent person, wrongly convicted by sinister ways of deception, dishonesty and disregard,” Sandusky cries out to no one listening.
“I did not commit the heinous crimes I was accused of…. I didn’t hurt those kids… My focus was on helping them.”
Shubin Does OK
Attorney Shubin, who racked up more than $32 million in civil settlements for his six clients, says otherwise. At even a third of the settlements, he collected more than $10 million. He has every reason to argue Sandusky is guilty.
Thanks to these …
Some people believe Sandusky: Dr. Frederick Crews former chair of English at UC Berkeley, filmmaker/podcaster, John Ziegler, investigative reporter Ralph Cirpriano, John and Patti Galluppi, of Justice for Jerry, NCIS, Special Agent John Snedden, Rev. Joseph Stains and author Mark Pendergrast.
Most of what I reported above was gleaned from their hard work. My special thanks to them. Click on the links to see more of their work.
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