Editor’s Note: People who want to study the Sandusky case, who want to understand why I and others say he is innocent, might take advantage of the following essay by Dr. Frederick Crews. While it is long for a typical news story, it is perhaps the best one-stop explanation of what happened to Jerry Sandusky and why you should care.
Sandusky: The House of Cards
By Frederick Crews
The facts cited in this text are not in dispute. My essay argues for conclusions that were left implicit, though hardly unclear, in Mark Pendergrast’s scrupulous and well-documented narrative The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment (Sunbury Press, 2017). Other developments discussed here have been expounded by John Ziegler and Ralph Cipriano. See “The Sad Story of Happy Valley” and two websites, Cipriano’s Big Trial and Ziegler’s The Framing of Joe Paterno. Graham Spanier’s In the Lions’ Den: The Penn State Scandal and a Rush to Judgment (Gryphon Eagle Press, 2022) provides essential context, especially regarding the character and fate of Joe Paterno.
Pendergrast, Ziegler, and Cipriano boldly dispensed with the court’s prejudicial designation of Sandusky’s accusers as “Victim 1,” “Victim 2,” etc. Consequently, there is no longer any anonymity to be protected here. Whether the complainants, all now thirtyish millionaires, were ever actual victims is precisely what needs to be passed in review.
1. From Saint to Demon
In its issue of December 20, 1999, Sports Illustrated honored the extraordinary achievements of a Penn State football coach, retiring after thirty-two years of service. It wasn’t Joe Paterno, the most successful and admired coach in the land, but his defensive coordinator. Top billing for an assistant? Yes, because Jerry Sandusky—“Saint Sandusky,” the magazine called him—was being hailed as a great humanitarian. He was the founder and wholly engaged leader of The Second Mile, originally a foster home and then a wide-ranging charity helping some 100,000 underprivileged children avoid trouble, stay in school, and look ahead to productive adulthood. Sandusky, a churchgoing Methodist who never took God’s name in vain, had named his charity after a gospel verse: “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain” (Matthew 5:41).
According to Sports Illustrated, Jerry and Dottie Sandusky, a devoted couple since 1966, practiced what they preached. They had welcomed innumerable at-risk boys into their home for fun and companionship and had adopted three of them, who joined three more siblings (two boys and a girl) adopted as infants. Providing a wholesome environment for other people’s neglected kids, teaching them Christian principles of behavior, and putting them through college had been a challenge accompanied by setbacks.
The most recent adoptee, whose birth name was Matt Heichel, had left the Sanduskys’ foster care as a teenager, only to get in trouble with the law. But at eighteen he had returned, recognizing the importance of the structure they had provided, and begged to be formally adopted and given the cherished name Sandusky. “My life changed when I came to live here,” Matt told Sports Illustrated. “There were rules, there was discipline, there was caring.”
Twelve and a half years later, though, on June 21, 2012, a jury in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, found Sandusky guilty of forty-five out of forty-eight charges of child molestation. On the following October 9 he heard his sentence: thirty to sixty years in state prison, effectively a life term. But even that penalty appeared scarcely commensurate with his misdeeds. In the words of prosecutor Joseph McGettigan at the sentencing, the still unrepentant Sandusky was “the most insidious and depraved of criminals.” The sham philanthropist’s transgressions with boys had ranged “from touching and washing to massaging and kissing to genital grabbing and finally to oral and anal penetration.” And the Second Mile organization, with its hundreds of well-intentioned volunteers, had proved to be nothing more than a “victim factory” and a cloak for Sandusky’s “real life of rampant degradation of children.”
If McGettigan and the jury were correct, Sandusky had been the most active predator of minors ever to be dragged into the light. At least since the founding of The Second Mile in 1977, he had been afforded thousands of opportunities to molest boys. Only ten victims were featured by the prosecution, and among them only eight actually testified; but those eight reported a dizzying number of outrages. One accuser, Aaron Fisher, affirmed that between 2006 and 2008 he had been forced into oral copulation at least fifty times. Ryan Rittmeyer also attested to many acts of unwanted oral sex. Brett Swisher-Houtz, for his part, claimed that on more than forty occasions, occurring two or three times a week, Sandusky had wrestled him into “69” positions in showers, a sauna, and hotel rooms. And most astonishingly, Sabastian Paden said he had been molested in Sandusky’s own home about 150 times. On one occasion the lustful aggressor was said to have locked Paden in his soundproofed basement for three days, starving him and raping him anally and orally while Dottie Sandusky, one floor above, was undisturbed by his screams.
In the light of his former reputation for Christian charity, Sandusky’s guilt appeared to establish him as cunning and brazen to an unprecedented degree. Through three decades and more, without arousing denunciation or even suspicion, he had raped innumerable boys, all the while openly displaying affection for them and roughhousing with them in plain view. He had even gotten later-identified victims to pose with him, somehow looking carefree and happy, for photographs included in an upbeat memoir. And for three decades he had duped an entire bureaucracy of well-meaning adult associates. As Malcolm Gladwell put it in The New Yorker in 2012, “Here was a man who built a sophisticated, multimillion dollar, fully integrated grooming operation, outsourcing to child-care professionals the task of locating vulnerable children—all the while playing the role of lovable goofball.”
Can this Jekyll-Hyde picture, which encompasses Sandusky’s domestic behavior as an evidently loving, generous, morally upright husband and father, really be believed? The public entertains no doubts, but some investigators are convinced that there is a more rational way to understand the story. Quite simply, Sandusky never molested anyone. He was railroaded into prison through a combination of misplaced suspicion, erroneous theory, and grossly unfair maneuvers.
A reflex objection will occur to anyone who remembers the media tumult of 2011-2012: Sandusky was convicted on overwhelming evidence of guilt. But that isn’t so. With two apparent exceptions that we will find to have been spurious, no one ever caught a glimpse of Sandusky abusing a child. Indeed, on the one charge that shocked and horrified the world—the sodomizing of a ten-year-old in a campus shower—the defendant was acquitted on grounds of remoteness in time, questionable recall, lack of proof, and conflicting testimony. Every other charge remained a question of the accusers’ word against Sandusky’s. And though the jury was overwhelmed by the sheer number of alleged atrocities, there are reasons to conclude that none of them had occurred.
Most people assume that if an alleged victim reports having been assaulted by a defendant on as many as a hundred occasions, the likelihood that at least one attack was genuine is thereby increased. If all hundred instances remain uncorroborated, though, doubt ought to focus on the accuser’s credibility. How was it possible for so many crimes to go unnoticed? Why, even as a child, had the victim never complained or shown reluctance to rejoin the abuser’s company? And how could their friendly relations have remained unaffected throughout and beyond a sequence of brutal molestations? These are the key questions insistently raised by the Sandusky matter. If none of them can be satisfactorily answered, the entire array of charges must have arisen through some questionable means.
2. How It Started
In 1998, the year before Sports Illustrated’s tribute appeared, Jerry Sandusky’s probity was briefly called into question. On a typical outing with a Second Mile boy, he had used Penn State facilities to play games with eleven-year-old Zachary Konstas, to introduce him to the gym’s training equipment, and then to shower with him. When Zach returned home, he casually told his mother, Debra McCord, why his hair was wet. Concerned, she quizzed him for details. Sandusky had playfully grabbed Zach from behind, saying “I’m going to squeeze your guts out,” and he had lifted the boy closer to the showerhead in order to get the soap out of his hair. Debra McCord’s concern deepened to alarm, but Zach himself was unperturbed. “I knew you’d make a big deal of it,” he cuttingly retorted on the way to his room.
The next day, on the advice of a consulted psychotherapist, McCord involved the police. Both the therapist and two officers separately questioned Zach without learning of any sexual maneuvers on Sandusky’s part. Even so, two sting operations were run in the vain hope of flushing out evidence that he was a pedophile. Later, a psychologist spent an unrevealing hour with Zach and satisfied himself that, from Sandusky’s point of view, roughhousing in the shower with a Second Mile boy was just a means of expressing comradeship. The psychologist may have already known a possibly relevant fact: Sandusky’s father, the director of a recreation center, had established a model for that very behavior, which by 1998 may have remained as unselfconscious for Jerry as it was creepy for a younger generation.
Even Debra McCord appears to have resolved her misgivings, for she allowed Zach’s association with Sandusky to resume without supervision. Much later, after Zach had moved away, he frequently returned to visit Jerry and Dottie, whom he regarded as family. His text messages to Jerry abounded in gratitude. “Happy Thanksgiving bro!” he wrote in 2009. “I’m glad God has placed U in my life. Ur an awesome friend! Love ya!” As late as July 2011 Zach joined Jerry and Dottie for a restaurant meal, and in that same summer he borrowed a car from them.
In the decade following the Konstas investigation of 1998, law enforcement took no notice of Sandusky. His slide toward indictment and conviction began with a question that crossed the mind of Aaron Fisher, a troubled fourteen-year-old with a reputation for telling lies. At that time, in full hormonal flowering, Aaron was barely tolerating Sandusky’s attempts to mentor and reform him. He began to wonder whether there might be a sexual component to the attentions he was getting. His usually neglectful mother, then named Dawn Fisher Daniels, pressed the issue with him. Had Sandusky ever touched Aaron inappropriately? The answer she received from her son was an unequivocal No. True enough, on one occasion Sandusky had hugged the boy to “crack his back” after a playful tussle; but they had both been fully clothed. In all justice, the young Fisher’s recollection ought to have laid to rest the question of Sandusky’s criminality.
Dawn Daniels, however, wasn’t about to give up. A neighbor quoted her as having said to him, “I’m going to get a lawyer and make a million dollars off Jerry Sandusky” and “I’m going to own that motherfucker’s house.” She placed Aaron in the hands of local social workers who urged him to tell the truth about Sandusky’s diddling. When he still drew a blank, they deduced that his memory needed further prodding. Consequently, they forwarded him to a psychotherapist, Mike Gillum, who, wielding empathy, enthusiasm, and a theory of recovered memory, proved to be the right man for the job.
In Gillum’s erroneous view, the way to acquire knowledge of a long-past trauma is to “peel an onion”—that is, to gradually strip away the defenses erected against the sufferer’s original memory. As for the question of whether Aaron Fisher had been traumatized, Gillum took the answer to be self-evident. Telling Aaron that he would help and protect him until the memory of abuse could be safely expressed, he began spending many hours each day with the boy and making himself constantly available by phone. As Aaron would later avow, “It wasn’t until I was fifteen and started seeing Mike that I realized the horror.” Nor was it necessary for him to tell Gillum what he thought had happened. The therapist prided himself on guessing the truth and stating it to the boy, who would simply nod his head or say “Yes” or “No”—and “No” would call for further probing.
Once Aaron had begun to fantasize repugnant scenes and to entertain their reality, he was ready to be interviewed by the police. But Gillum tagged along, sitting in on every session and, by his very presence, reminding Aaron of what he was expected to say. Even so, Aaron’s compliance was always hesitant and partial. Gillum would later tell an independent inquirer that it had taken him six months (it was actually seven) to get his patient to state in so many words that Sandusky had forced oral sex upon him—a charge he retracted when quizzed about it in the first of three grand jury appearances.
The jurors in that instance, possessing no solid evidence against Sandusky, refused to hand down an indictment. In Aaron’s appearance before a second grand jury, he was so distraught and confused that, once again, no action was taken. And he tried to back out altogether from addressing a third panel. The newly constituted jury had to settle for his reading a text that may have been written by others. Even at the trial in 2012, he could do no better than weep through rehearsed assent to statements by a prosecuting attorney.
Those statements included an assertion that Fisher had been an overnight guest in Sandusky’s house about a hundred times during the period of abuse, 2003-2008. Coerced mutual fellatio had supposedly been practiced in the basement on many of those visits. But this contention made absolutely no sense. Fisher had been a boastful, actively heterosexual teenager. It is unimaginable that he (or anyone else, really) could have returned again and again to be brutally raped, meanwhile staying on cordial terms with the rapist and his wife. Such radical incongruity is a telltale sign of induced false memory. Nonetheless, Fisher’s sobs on the witness stand would produce the effect intended by the prosecutors. By that point, as we will see, the idea that Sandusky might be innocent had been rendered literally unthinkable.
3. Through a Glass, Darkly
By November 2010, with only the frazzled and volatile Aaron Fisher to work with, the investigators into Sandusky’s doings were spinning their wheels. Was it time to give up? But just then a tip arrived from a Penn State football fan. Years before, it was rumored, a former quarterback and later a graduate assistant to the team, Mike McQueary, had come across a naked Sandusky and a boy of about ten engaged in shocking activity while showering. This, then, was the one occasion on which someone had allegedly witnessed a sex act between a child and a man who could be indisputably identified as Sandusky.
After McQueary was interviewed on November 23, 2010, the Sandusky case picked up momentum. Among other developments, an old file on the Zach Konstas inquiry, which was supposed to have been deleted after Sandusky was cleared in 1998, would turn up and, when reinterpreted in the light of McQueary’s narrative, promote Konstas to the status of a third victim, joining Aaron Fisher and the anonymous new ten-year-old.
The shower in question had occurred where Zach’s had, in Penn State’s Lasch Football Building, but apparently some four years later. According to the grand jury presentment of November 2011 that was coordinated with Sandusky’s arrest, McQueary had arrived at the Lasch Building at about 9:30 on the evening of March 1, 2002. Upon approaching his locker, he had heard “rhythmic slapping sounds” from the neighboring shower room—sounds that were suggestive, to his ear, of sexual intercourse. Sure enough, when he had glanced obliquely into the communal shower area through a mirror and a glass door, he had momentarily glimpsed Sandusky’s body locked against the back of a boy with his hands against the wall. In the words of the grand jury presentment that summarized McQueary’s testimony, he had witnessed that boy “being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.”
On the following morning, the story continued, McQueary had gone to see coach Paterno and told him what he had witnessed. But a distracted Paterno had expressed little concern. He had simply passed along McQueary’s news to the Penn State athletic director, Tim Curley, who in turn had told vice president Gary Schultz, who had then notified President Graham Spanier. Inexcusably, none of the four had wished to involve the off-campus police. A conference among Spanier, Curley, and Schultz had resulted in nothing more than a mild rebuke; Sandusky would no longer be permitted to bring Second Mile boys onto the campus. The retired coach but active predator, it seemed, would be put to the inconvenience of molesting boys elsewhere.
After this feature of the grand jury presentment was made known, it took only a few days for Penn State’s trustees to fire Paterno and to compel Spanier to resign as president—and this despite the fact that Sandusky was still six months away from being tried. A devastated Paterno, already suffering from advanced lung cancer, would be dead three months later, but the other three officials faced charges of child endangerment for their failure to take action. From the standpoint of Penn State’s students and alumni, the eventual conviction (Spanier’s) and plea bargains (Curley’s and Schultz’s) were of only peripheral interest. Even the universally condemned Sandusky was now a minor player. The heartbreak in State College, Pennsylvania, was all about Paterno. After a pro-Joe riot by disbelieving students, the whole community had to reckon, agonizingly, with the dawning thought that the legendary coach had cared more about football than about bringing a rampaging pedophile to justice.
But had he? In their paroxysm of recrimination, the locals were in no mood to reflect that McQueary’s 2011 account of events from 2002 might be unreliable. If Paterno, as everyone knew, held his players to the highest standard of decency, he couldn’t have regarded the sodomy of a child as a trivial matter. Likewise, it is hard to believe that Curley, Schultz, and Spanier, all with spotless records, considered rape in a campus facility to be nothing more than a risk to public relations. Today, in a calmer frame of mind, we can count the four men’s mild response as likely evidence that, as they insisted, they hadn’t been told about a sexual incident at all.
An email exchange that later came to light considerably advances this likelihood. When Mike McQueary saw how Senior Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach had characterized his grand jury testimony in the presentment, he complained, “I feel my words are slightly twisted and not totally portrayed correctly. . . . I cannot say 1,000 percent sure that it was sodomy.” In replying, Eshbach didn’t dispute McQueary’s point. Rather, she told him to keep his objections to himself. “I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect,” she wrote, “and that it is hard not to respond. But you can’t.”
Knowledge of that exculpatory exchange, which pointed to subornation of perjury by the AG office, was illegally withheld from Sandusky’s attorneys at his trial. The truth came out only in an appeal hearing, during which Eshbach, quizzed about her instruction to McQueary, brazenly stated that she had acted for the “saving of my case.” That meant the case had been held together by a lie—one that doomed both Sandusky and Paterno to their respective fates.
If McQueary was reluctant to accuse Sandusky of rape in 2011, after having had his recollection massaged for a whole year by prosecutors bent upon victory, what had he originally reported to Paterno? The dating of the incident bears on that question. By the time of Sandusky’s trial in June 2012, McQueary no longer thought he had caught sight of Sandusky and the boy in March 2002. No, he and the prosecutors decided, it must have happened more than a year earlier, on February 9, 2001. That date was chosen because McQueary was definitely known to have met with Paterno at the latter’s home on February 10. For McQueary to have visited Paterno on the day following the infamous event, the shower would have had to occur on the ninth. But independent investigation has shown, and Sandusky, too, has always believed, that the incident almost certainly occurred on December 29, 2000.
If so, McQueary had found the scene in the Lasch Building so unmemorable that he misdated it by fifteen months. More tellingly, he had waited more than five weeks to drop in on Paterno at home. And according to the recollection of Paterno’s widow, the meeting had lasted no more than three minutes and hadn’t been primarily about Sandusky at all. The shower was mentioned, but the main reason for McQueary’s visit was that he had learned about a vacancy on the coaching staff and was angling for a promotion. Paterno had brusquely dismissed the idea and had hastened off to a scheduled event.
McQueary was never a particularly credible witness. He was suspected of having gambled on Penn State football games when he himself was the quarterback, and he was known to have courted women, even before his divorce, by texting them snapshots of his imposing penis. Those embarrassments must have made him an easy target for manipulation by the authorities. But he could never feel comfortable with any version of the shower story that included overt sexual conduct by Sandusky. In 2001 McQueary had been twenty-six years old, six feet five inches tall, and weighing 220 pounds. If he had seen the fifty-seven-year-old Sandusky sodomizing a little boy, why had he done nothing to stop it?
Whatever McQueary told investigators who were pressing him to inculpate Sandusky, it ought to bear less forensic weight than what he is reported to have said to two other people on the very night of the shower. Here, based on the recollection of those men, is a somewhat more trustworthy reconstruction of what must have happened. From outside the locker room before he entered it, McQueary did hear slapping noises that he interpreted as sexual. In the few seconds it took him to get to his locker, the noises had stopped. Curious, he looked obliquely into the shower room through a mirror and a glass door and caught momentary sight of a boy. Then an arm reached out and pulled the boy back. Horrified, McQueary assumed he had narrowly missed watching a rape—but his assumption could well have been wrong.
Instead of doing anything to interrupt an inferred sexual assault, a rattled McQueary had gone upstairs and phoned his father, a medical office manager, telling him what he had heard and noticed. John McQueary asked him to come right over, and he also summoned his friend and business associate, the nephrologist Jonathan Dranov. As staff members in a medical facility, both men were aware of their legal obligation to report known or suspected instances of child abuse. Dranov pressed Mike, asking him three times whether he had witnessed a sex act. No, he hadn’t. Had the boy appeared frightened or upset? No. Considering the unlikelihood that the respected Jerry Sandusky had been living a double existence, John McQueary and Dr. Dranov decided that no abuse had probably occurred.
So, apparently, did Mike McQueary, who may have finally reflected that a rapist seeking privacy, even during Christmas break, wouldn’t have lured his prey into a giant sports facility on a university campus of 45,000 students. What we do know is that McQueary’s cordial if sparse relations with Sandusky were unaffected by the shower incident. Several months later, he agreed to participate in a celebrity golf tournament that bore Sandusky’s name. Another such event followed. And soon thereafter McQueary was seen joking around with Sandusky at an Easter Seals charity event. He could hardly have done so knowing that a pedophile’s assaults were going unpunished and unreported to the police.
But the best evidence of all for Sandusky’s blamelessness was provided by the “shower boy” himself, who had been not ten but almost fourteen at the time. This was Allan Myers, who, importantly, had remained on excellent terms with Jerry in all the years since 2001. Jerry and Dottie had even taken him with them on two trips to California, and he had shared their household in the summer of 2005. At Myers’s request, Jerry had also given the commencement address at the boy’s high school graduation. And later, the two had been photographed arm in arm at Myers’s wedding.
In 2011 Myers was a twenty-four-year-old ex-Marine. Until the McQueary tale went public, he had no idea he would figure in Sandusky’s case. He knew, though, that Jerry was suspected of terrible misdeeds. Grilled by the state police on September 20, 2011, he volunteered that as a boy he had often showered with Jerry after workouts and that, in the words of the police report, “at no time did Sandusky do anything that made him uncomfortable.” He also remarked that Aaron Fisher, whom he knew, “is only out to get some money.”
Two months later, having realized that he himself had been the boy in the shower, Myers gave a sworn statement to Sandusky’s legal representatives. Sandusky, he said, had consistently behaved as a father to him. As for the night at issue,
I would usually work out one or two days a week, but this particular night is very clear in my mind. We were in the shower and Jerry and I were slapping towels at each other to sting each other. I would slap the walls and slide on the shower floor, which I am sure you could have heard from the wooden locker area. While we were engaged in fun as I have described, I heard the sound of a wooden locker door close. . . . I never saw who closed the locker. 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. Nothing occurred that night in the shower.
When Sandusky was first interviewed about the incident, he had calmly suggested that the questioner get in touch with “the boy.” That wasn’t done, but Jerry’s reference indicated that he still recalled the Lasch Building occurrence and the name of his companion. Later he affirmed that, indeed, Myers had been that person. The goings-on, Jerry recalled, must have been friendly slap boxing and/or towel snapping, along with Myers’s sliding along the soapy floor. Except for the absence of clothes, it was the kind of horseplay that Sandusky had often indulged in plain view with other kids. So much, objectively, for the little boy sodomized in the shower!
4. Remembering What Hadn’t Happened
If the case against Sandusky rested on the believability of Aaron Fisher and Mike McQueary, it was never going to succeed. Even before the unwelcome emergence of Allan Myers, officials in the Attorney General’s office decided that they would need to play by different rules. They began by illegally leaking to an eager cub journalist, Sara Ganim of the Harrisburg Patriot News, a false rumor from the grand jury proceedings: that McQueary had definitely happened upon a crime in progress. Further leaks would provide Ganim with a basis for Pulitzer Prize-winning articles bearing such unsubtle headlines as “Former Coach Jerry Sandusky Used Charity to Molest Kids.” In that manner Sandusky, long before his indictment, would be convicted in the court of public opinion, and the actual jury pool would be sure to consist of Sandusky haters. Ganim’s sensationalism, moreover, could confer two further benefits: to dissuade Aaron Fisher from backsliding and to prompt new “victims” to come forward.
The need for such recruits was urgent if Sandusky were to be nailed as a serial abuser. Prosecutors were delighted, then, to come across an old police file on the Zachary Konstas inquiry of 1998. The file was supposed to have been deleted after Sandusky had been cleared of any wrongdoing. Now the AG’s operatives got in touch with a much older Konstas and told him he had showered with a pedophile at age eleven. Under guidance, Konstas came to regard that event as the source of persistent troubles in his life. During the shower, he would testify, he had briefly blacked out. Although he couldn’t be sure he had been abused, his later bouts of anguish struck him as proof of foul intentions on Sandusky’s part. At the very least, he now believed, Sandusky had been grooming him for later molestation. The jury, though lacking any evidence for the charge, would concur.
But it was unnecessary just to wait for further accusers to turn up. By April 2011 the new state attorney general, Linda Kelly, in coordination with her subordinate Jonelle Eshbach, had assigned twelve employees and many state troopers to interrogate nearly three hundred other ex-Second Milers, prodding them for revelations. Here was a real test of the pedophilia thesis. If Sandusky had been an active abuser for decades, the tracking down of Second Milers would surely yield many new cases.
Instead, all the searchers got for their pains was a large file of testimonials to Sandusky’s unfailing generosity, protection, and encouragement to clean living. As one police staffer wrote grudgingly in a memo, “We have recently been interviewing kids who don’t believe the allegations as published and believe Sandusky is a great role model for them and others to emulate.” Those encomiums went unmentioned in the final grand jury presentment, which instead put forward the sly insinuation that “through the Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of boys.” Nor, as the law required, were the exculpatory interview reports surrendered to the defense team. That fact alone, in the eyes of an unbiased appeals judge, could have warranted the overturning of Sandusky’s eventual conviction.
The prosecutors’ dragnet had come up empty, but then they caught a break. We recall that Dawn Fisher Daniels, the instigator of the entire campaign against Sandusky, was said to have envisioned his downfall as a bonanza for herself. Now she urged the AG’s office to get more focused by interviewing several former Second Milers who had once been photographed together in Sandusky’s presence. She was able to identify the boys who would soon join her son as Victims 4 (Brett Swisher-Houtz), 5 (Michal Kajak), and 7 (Dustin Struble), as well as another boy, Frankie Probst, who wouldn’t testify but would successfully petition Penn State for compensation. And one of that group may have prompted the investigators to contact Victim 3 (Jason Simcisko) as well. Swisher-Houtz, Kajak, and Struble had known both one another and Aaron Fisher as Second Milers, and Aaron was back in contact with them. All of those young men would acquire sex-abuse lawyers who were willing to waive fees in the expectation of sharing huge settlements from Penn State.
When an authentic serial abuser is finally brought to justice, it typically happens because one victim goes public and emboldens others, who can’t forget their traumas and may have subsequently revealed them to family members or friends. The Sandusky case was strikingly different. Although the Commonwealth now had six accusers in tow—Fisher, Konstas, Swisher-Houtz, Kajak, Struble, and Simcisko—not a single one of them had come forward without being either prodded or lured. None of them had ever said a word to anyone about having been molested. Indeed, all but Kajak initially denied that Sandusky had ever behaved inappropriately with them.
Some of the initial denials were quite emphatic. In April 2011, for example, Dustin Struble assured a grand jury that Sandusky had never approached him in a sexual way. And in July of the same year, Jason Simcisko told two policemen,
I lost touch with [Sandusky] around the time I went into tenth grade. I was in trouble a lot then: in and out of foster homes and stuff. He made me feel special, giving me stuff and spending time with me. I just always took it that he was trying to make sure I kept out of trouble. I don’t believe any of this stuff is true and hope that he’s found not guilty.
The key point to register here is that every “memory” of an assault by Sandusky came into the accuser’s consciousness later than the time of the putative event—so much later, in fact, that nearly all of them can justly be called products of the Sandusky scandal itself. As Jerry’s indictment and trial loomed nearer and his demonization in the press became more lurid, the former Second Milers who were coaxed into participating, or who simply wanted part of the action, “remembered” just enough abuse to be counted as victims. Then, typically, the content of their recollections kept shifting in response to the advice of their lawyers and the requirement of the prosecution to mount a consistent narrative of Sandusky’s practices.
Take, for example, the accusations of Michal Kajak. Like other veterans of Second Mile camps, Kajak, long after his alleged molestation, had continued to attend football games and tailgate parties with Sandusky. What set him somewhat apart was his immediate readiness to meet the police halfway. In his first interrogation on June 7, 2011, he began by merely saying that Sandusky had made him feel “uncomfortable” during the one shower they had shared. (Sandusky cannot recall ever having showered with him.) Urged to be more specific, Kajak alleged that Jerry had seized his hand and placed it on Jerry’s erect penis. Then Kajak seemed to recall a second shower, when further illicit touching supposedly occurred.
In tentative stages, Kajak was adjusting what he “remembered” to satisfy the requirements of his handlers. But, evidently chagrined about having to do so, he resisted full compliance. “He wants to say no about oral sex,” wrote a policeman after a speaker phone interview on November 9, 2011. Kajak hadn’t fallen completely in line with the prosecution’s script, whereby Sandusky had first groomed boys with favors, then fiddled with their genitals, and finally progressed to oral and/or anal rape.
When Kajak testified before the grand jury on June 17, 2011, he further elaborated on his abuse and changed its occurrence from 1998 to 2002, or around the time that McQueary had erroneously cited as the date of the infamous witnessed shower in the Lasch Building. By the trial, however, McQueary had (still mistakenly) changed that date to February 9, 2001. Accordingly, Kajak’s memory shifted again. Now there had been only one Sandusky/Kajak shower after all, occurring in 2001, and not off campus but—can you guess?—in the Lasch Building. The changes of location and date appear to have been designed to increase Penn State’s liability. But they also threatened to boomerang, because Sandusky, it was conceded, had never brought any Second Mile boy onto university grounds after his scolding for imprudence in the McQueary affair.
The real grooming in the Sandusky case was being performed by the shapers of “victim” testimony. Their efforts were epitomized by two state troopers who, departing from their custom with Second Milers, tape recorded an interview with Brett Swisher-Houtz on April 21, 2011. The sex abuse lawyer Benjamin Andreozzi was in attendance. In the course of a long session in which Swisher-Houtz was repeatedly exhorted to dig deeper, the officers succeeded in bringing his recollections from wrestling around with Sandusky to sex acts that had stopped just short of penetration. Because that culminating charge was still missing, they invited Swisher-Houtz to get back in touch when further memories emerged. Sure enough, by the time of the trial he had “remembered” having been orally raped several hundred times, with Sandusky often forcibly jamming his penis into his mouth. Only on cross-examination did he scale that number back to fifty-plus instances.
What makes the recording of Swisher-Houtz’s interview especially instructive is that it accidentally includes a conversation between the two policemen and attorney Andreozzi during a break. “I know there’s been a rape committed somewhere along the line,” remarked one of the troopers. With patience, he assured Andreozzi, the truth would emerge. After all, he observed, “It took months to get the first kid [Aaron Fisher]. . . . It just took repetition and repetition, and finally we got to the point where he would tell us what happened.”
Mere repetition, though, seemed like an inefficient method. Andreozzi had a suggestion to offer. Can we say to Swisher-Houtz, he asked, “Listen, we have interviewed other kids, and other kids have told us that there was intercourse and that they have admitted this. Is there anything else that you want to tell us?” That tactic, employing a falsehood to pry loose a possible truth, struck the officers as a fine idea—but they had already been practicing it. “Yep,” replied one of them, Joseph Leiter, “we do that with all the other kids. Say, ‘Listen, this is what we found so far. You fit the pattern of all the other ones. This is the way he operates and the other kids we dealt with have told us that this has happened after this happened. Did that happen to you?’”
After the interview resumed, Swisher-Houtz was told that nine other victims had already attested to sexual contact with Sandusky. Actually, there had been only one, Aaron Fisher, and even he had wavered for months before “remembering” what was being continually urged upon him. Readers who were once struck by the sheer number of counts against Sandusky may now understand the means by which that total grew.
On the day Sandusky was arrested, November 5, 2011, Linda Kelly announced the establishment of a telephone hotline for further victims to come forward confidentially. An interested third party was the mother of Sabastian Paden (Victim 9). The eighteen-year-old was an unlikely candidate for the role of Sandusky prey. Since the age of eleven he had visited Jerry and Dottie’s home countless times, spending overnights with them and making use of game facilities in the basement with other boys. As late as October 2011, or six months into the press campaign to depict Sandusky as a monster, Sabastian had sat next to Jerry as his guest at a Penn State football game.
It was just weeks later that Sabastian’s mother, to whom he had never mentioned any abuse, decided on her own to have the police summoned. No, Sabastian told the officers at his door, Sandusky had never crossed a line with him. Shortly thereafter, unaware of that visit, Jerry phoned Sabastian to request that he testify for the defense—a fact that merits pondering in its own right. Would a rapist have asked for such an endorsement from his prey? But a transformation was already in progress. The high school senior equivocated; he would have to consult his mother before agreeing to testify. On November 9, astonishingly, Sabastian told the grand jury a gothic narrative of serial molestation and rape—a story whose absurdities and contradictions would continue to blossom during his testimony at the trial.
Paden was the seventh of the eight Second Milers who incriminated Sandusky. The eighth accuser, Ryan Rittmeyer, needed no incitement to dial the attorney general’s hotline, enroll himself with the ubiquitous attorney Andrew Shubin, and spin a fantastic yarn about Sandusky’s crimes. Rittmeyer was already known to the police; he had been in and out of prison, first for burglary in 2004 and then for burglary and assault in 2007. But now his criminal record—which would go on to include further convictions for impersonation, criminal solicitation, robbery, and reckless endangerment—could be blamed on trauma inflicted by Sandusky.
Like the other accusers, Rittmeyer had never revealed any of his multiple traumas to anyone—not even to his old Second Mile roommate, Jason Simcisko. Nor, according to his account, had he made any effort to avoid his serial abuser. On the contrary, he had joined Konstas, Fisher, Simcisko, Swisher-Houtz, and Paden in continuing to visit the Sanduskys at home. So he claimed, at any rate. But curiously, neither Jerry nor Dottie recalled ever having met him. Rittmeyer’s may have been the only testimony that, instead of interweaving real and notional events, was fabulous from beginning to end.
Because the testimony of most “victims” contradicted their initial denials, the difference had to be somehow accounted for. The proffered explanations turned out to sound remarkably alike. These working-class men from no-nonsense central Pennsylvania were now expressing themselves in psychobabble. “I tried to block this out of my brain for years,” testified Jason Simcisko. Dustin Struble swore he had “sort of pushed [the abuse] into the back of my mind, sort of like closing a door. . . .” Brett Swisher-Houtz said the same thing: “I have spent, you know, so many years burying this in the back of my mind forever.” More poetically, Zach Konstas chided 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.” And in a subsequent book whose coauthor was none other than Mike Gillum, Aaron Fisher declared, “I managed to lock it deep inside my mind somehow.”
Each of those protestations bespoke a recent introduction to pop-psychological concepts. In preparation for their testimony, the hostile witnesses had been subjected to Gillum’s brand of therapeutic memory retrieval. Indeed, Gillum himself was the prosecution’s favorite mind doctor. Mutual benefit from the referrals accrued to the Commonwealth, the sex-abuse attorneys, the therapists, and the “patients” themselves—unless, like Dustin Struble, they were unwary enough to take the therapeutic charade in earnest. As Struble wrote in a 2014 email message to Pendergrast,
Actually both of my therapists have suggested that I have repressed memories, and that’s why we have been working on looking back on my life for triggers. My therapist has suggested that I still may have more repressed memories that have yet to be revealed, and this could be a big cause of the depression that I still carry today.
Another source of that depression could be Struble’s awareness that he had ambushed a kindly benefactor and helped to put him behind bars for the remainder of his life.
The prosecutors made no secret of the fact that their case against Sandusky rested on supposedly recovered memories. The traumatized witnesses, Joseph McGettigan asserted in court, “had tried to bury” their awful experiences, and they still “don’t want to remember” them. The unspoken corollary was that if someone has become convinced of his abuse only through struggle a decade after the fact, the newly acquired mental scene must be genuine. Vagueness, McGettigan instructed the jury, can be another sign of authenticity: sometimes “the honest admission of the lack of memory about . . . minor detail gives the clearest indication of the absolute truth of the painful events. . . .”
This generous rule—the reality of an event can be validated either by recalling it or by forgetting parts of it—was an enabling assumption of our calamitous recovered memory movement in the 1980s and 1990s. That moral frenzy was a misguided hunt for previously unsuspected molesters. Like our zealous theoreticians back then, McGettigan was evading consideration of how a “repressed memory” typically gets crystallized—namely, through coaxing by a therapist steeped in folklore about the unconscious. Almost inevitably, a molestation “memory” that is “retrieved” in that manner will be a product of suggestion, or an imparting of the therapist’s prior certainty that the client must have been abused.
5. The Magic Predator
If the judge and jury had grasped the role of psychotherapy in the case against Sandusky, the bulk of incriminating testimony would have been deemed inadmissible. Even under Pennsylvania rules, whose vigilance against judicial pseudoscience still lags behind the national norm, a memory generated under therapeutic pressure wouldn’t pass muster. And a more astute defense team than Sandusky’s could have shown that the alleged molestations bore every classical trait of false recollections.
Such scenarios betray their illusory origin by being set at indefinite or incongruous times and places. They shift and proliferate capriciously; they clash with well-established facts about the perpetrator and/or the victim; corroborative evidence of their reality is lacking; and intimate associates of the victim never noticed a thing. In the Sandusky case, just one telltale peculiarity could have brought down the house of cards. Jerry was an inveterate moralizer, continually exhorting the boys in his care to avoid temptation and providing them with incentives for good behavior; yet no accuser charged him with having transgressed his own rules. It was as if their savage molestation had occurred in dreams, disconnected from the real mentor whom they oddly continued to admire.
The ghoulish stories that circulated during our recovered memory movement, sometimes involving satanic cults and cannibal feasts, should have taught us that false recollections, once triggered, keep on coming with ever-increasing implausibility. In the Sandusky matter, the task of therapists like Gillum was to get the fantasies rolling and then to convince their young clients that the imagined deeds were real. The task of the attorneys and prosecutors was to keep the most lurid and disillusioning of them out of view.
With or without a therapeutic boost, the tales that escaped winnowing and entered into testimony were quite ridiculous enough. Sabastian Paden’s three days and nights of sadistic rape in the Sanduskys’ basement, with an oblivious Dottie just above, take the prize for preposterousness. But the other witnesses’ less colorful narratives were no less flimsy. Brett Swisher-Houtz, for example, asserted that Sandusky used to purchase cigarettes for him, once drove him to see a drug dealer, and gave him $50 to buy marijuana, which he smoked in Sandusky’s car. But Sandusky never consumed cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs, much less supplied them to others. Or again, Ryan Rittmeyer claimed that Jerry had driven him around in a silver convertible, exposed his penis, and invited the boy to put it in his mouth. Upon Rittmeyer’s refusal, Sandusky had supposedly threatened to kill him. No one else could recall having ever seen the modest Sandusky driving a silver convertible, much less behaving menacingly toward anyone.
The multiple charges from each of several accusers appear doubly absurd when they are regarded collectively. The logistical demands of Jerry’s supposed crimes as he was thought to have rushed, day and night, from one unperceived sex act to the next were beyond anyone’s capacity—but especially the capacity of the man in question. While he was still working under the taskmaster Joe Paterno in 1997-1999, Jerry would have had no time for the social and libidinous contacts claimed by Swisher-Houtz and Rittmeyer. And then there is the period 2005-2008, when Aaron Fisher and Sabastian Paden were purportedly taking turns enduring hundreds of violent assaults, many of them in the Sanduskys’ often crowded home. At that time Jerry, already in his sixties, was suffering from prostatitis, dizzy spells, kidney cysts, a brain aneurysm, a hernia, bleeding hemorrhoids, chest pains, headaches, hypothyroidism, drowsiness, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea.
Those were not the only medical conditions that would have discouraged priapic feats. Jerry had been born with vestigial testicles that left him almost devoid of testosterone and incapable of fathering children, much less of raping them. He was closer to a eunuch than a satyr. And, revealingly, his conspicuous deformity went unremarked by every “victim,” including all thirty-six who would eventually divide Penn State’s settlement fund.
In order to suppose that Sandusky had been molesting children with impunity for some forty years while frolicking with them in public and inducing them to feign delight in his presence, one would have to credit him not only with diabolical cruelty but also with a unique adeptness at manipulation and dissembling. But anyone who has ever known him will tell you: with Jerry, what you see is what you get. And what you see is a man who scarcely thought it necessary to answer his detractors, much less to question their motives. In order to assess his degree of guile, consider that he titled his memoir Touched and emphasized his affection for Second Milers; that he was dumbstruck when asked by the sportscaster Bob Costas whether he was attracted to boys; that he assumed jurors from the State College community admired him and would stand behind him; and that he put himself in the hands of a local attorney, Joe Amendola, who would be outflanked at every juncture, would fail to press the recovered memory issue, and would start out by half conceding the prosecution’s case.
There were further considerations, mentioned but not insisted upon by the defense, that could have shown how implausible the accusers’ stories were. Jerry had reached his fifties without having being suspected of homosexuality or pedophilia. Nor did he show any interest in pornography. (Later investigation did unearth porn of an exceptionally crude racist, sexist, homophobic kind, but it had been circulated on government computers by the chief prosecutor, Frank Fina, to selected staff members, police, FBI agents, and two members of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court.) As for Jerry’s showering with boys after workouts, it appears to have been utterly unselfconscious. As his son Jon has commented, Jerry’s “whole picture of the world was stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, with no concept of what was politically correct or what is taboo nowadays. . . . To him, horsing around in the shower, snapping towels or throwing soap wasn’t out of the realm of normality.”
It is possible, of course, that Jerry’s touching of children bore an erotic component. The relevant question, though, isn’t what kind of pleasure he experienced through such acts. It’s whether his touching ever degenerated into frotteurism, or the brushing of one’s erect penis against others’ flesh. Because frotteurism is typically deliberate, we can arrive at a likely answer by considering Jerry’s known values—the ones he professed and advocated without ever being accused of hypocrisy by any former “victim.”
Where varieties of sexual expression are concerned, Jerry has always been a prudish conservative. He takes a dim view of premarital sex and is repulsed by every deviation from missionary-position intercourse. As a Christian fundamentalist, furthermore, he believes that his views are rooted in Scripture. In prison he reads Bible passages every day, hoping thereby to discover God’s plan for him. A sense of being constantly watched and judged helps to account for his certainty that he never transgressed with a Second Miler.
The same consistency between belief and practice explains why Jerry’s fellow Methodist, Dottie, and five of his six adopted children entertain no doubt that he was wronged by the justice system. In the words of Jon Sandusky, “My parents live the Good Book. . . . When people say, ‘Angels walking among us,’ yes, and I have two of them as parents.”
6. A Perfect Storm
Once Sandusky had been indicted and arrested, his best hope of acquittal appeared to reside with Allan Myers. In the opinion of the scandal-saturated public and therefore of prospective jurors, the shower boy epitomized the case. Before learning that he had been that boy, Myers had rebuffed the state police for their coercive interview tactics. He had defiantly told them, “I will never have anything bad to say about Jerry.” And he had written a supportive letter both to two newspapers and to the attorney general. “Jerry’s been there for me for 13 years,” he had declared. “I don’t know what I would have done without him.” Then, as we have seen, on November 9, 2011, he gave the defense team a sworn statement that the Lasch Building shower had involved nothing more improper than boyish high jinks. But on that same day, Joe Paterno was fired—an event that, by showing how eager the Penn State trustees were to cleanse themselves of the Sandusky matter, virtually guaranteed that there would be huge payouts to “victims.” Two weeks later, Myers flipped from Sandusky defender to accuser.
Now Myers was evidently taking his cues from attorney Andrew Shubin. Although Shubin alleged that Sandusky had been molesting his new client since the age of ten, he didn’t want Myers to be questioned by either the prosecution or the defense. Even so, a postal inspector managed to interview Myers on three occasions, during which Myers couldn’t bring himself to say that Jerry had ever abused him. He failed to show up for a fourth scheduled meeting. In his place, Shubin handed the inspector a three-page document detailing a long series of violations, the last of which had allegedly occurred during the Lasch Building shower. The statement purported to be Myers’s own, but the inspector, regarding it as Shubin’s handiwork, refused to accept it.
Under Shubin’s management, Myers had rendered himself so problematic as to be a toxic witness for either side in the trial. (So Sandusky’s lead attorney judged, at any rate.) Neither the prosecution nor the defense would disclose that the shower boy, “Victim 2,” was no longer anonymous. Prosecutor Joseph McGettigan lied in court that the victim’s identity was known only to God. Yet just by remaining hidden, Myers contributed weightily to the trial’s outcome. In failing to dispute Mike McQueary’s doctored version of the shower incident, he kept the jurors from grasping that the whole case against Sandusky was a row of dominos, the first of which—the falsely inferred rape in the Lasch Building—could topple all of the others.
Myers’s ghostly role in the trial—absent and unnamed yet pervasively influential—was outdone for weirdness by another shower boy, “Victim 8,” whose very existence has never been corroborated. Prosecutors believed they had struck gold when a May 2011 dragnet of campus janitors turned up a possible witness, Ronald Petrosky. He declared that one night around 2000 a fellow janitor, Jim Calhoun, had told him he had just been terrified by the sight of a man licking a boy’s genitals during a Lasch Building shower. Calhoun himself couldn’t testify; by June 2012 he was suffering from dementia. But Petrosky testified on his behalf, even reproducing what he imagined to be Calhoun’s thought process from a dozen years before.
In the context of the Sandusky uproar, Petrosky now believed that Calhoun had named Jerry as the perpetrator. Further, he recalled that he himself had caught sight of Sandusky and the boy exiting the locker room together and that he had noticed Sandusky driving slowly around the building’s parking lot later that night and again around 2 a.m. But there were big holes in that story, beginning with the fact that neither Petrosky nor Calhoun had reported the incident to campus police or even to their own families. Surely the already retired assistant coach Sandusky wasn’t so fearsome a presence in 2000 that he could intimidate Penn State employees into silence regarding a witnessed crime.
The strongest indication that Petrosky’s recollection was faulty had been acquired thirteen months before the trial. Jim Calhoun, when his Alzheimer’s was still at an early stage, had been interviewed by state trooper Robert Yakicic on May 15, 2011. Asked what he thought of Sandusky, Calhoun had brightened and said he was “a pretty good guy.” Did Calhoun recall the shower incident? Absolutely, and he felt that even now he would recognize the abuser if he encountered him. Was it Sandusky? Calhoun answered at once, “No, I don’t believe it was.” An incredulous Yakicic asked, “You don’t?” Calhoun became more emphatic: “I don’t believe it was. I don’t think Sandusky was the person. It wasn’t him. There’s no way. Sandusky never did anything at all that I can see.”
The exculpating tape was in the possession of Sandusky’s lead attorney, Joe Amendola, but he couldn’t make use of it at the trial. Indeed, he may not have even known he had it. The tape had been included among a “document dump” of 12,000 pages that was provided to the defense only ten days before the trial began; and Judge John Cleland, unresponsive to desperate pleas for postponement, refused to allow sufficient time for the materials to be analyzed. The jury found Petrosky’s testimony compelling and pronounced a guilty verdict on every charge that stemmed from it.
That result constituted a legal landmark of sorts. Petrosky’s yarn was hearsay at a twelve-year remove. There was no known victim who might come forward. Something had been done, but what, and by whom? Judge Cleland, called upon to rule whether Petrosky’s testimony was admissible, asked lead prosecutor Frank Fina for advice: “Can the jury consider that other crimes have been committed in the shower room and therefore the pattern would sustain a guilty verdict on #8?” Understandably, Fina concurred. When Cleland then pronounced himself satisfied, the whole rationale of the Sandusky conviction—namely, that one dubious anecdote deserves another—was made explicit.
Meanwhile, Allan Myers’s defection to Andrew Shubin, a move that would net a fortune for each of them, was neither the last nor the most dumbfounding betrayal of Sandusky before his conviction. Readers will recall that Matt (Heichel) Sandusky had been quoted in 1999 as believing that Jerry’s combination of discipline and support had turned his life around. Interrogated by prosecutors a decade later, he hotly denied that Jerry had ever abused him, and he repeated the point under oath before the grand jury in 2011. But three days into the trial, instead of following through on his promise to serve as a character witness, he went to the police and declared himself to have been still another recipient of Jerry’s abuse.
That turnabout may strike us as one more Judas play for money, especially since Matt also acquired Shubin as his attorney at just this time. A review of his troubles with the law could reinforce that suspicion. When Dottie and Jerry took Matt into their home at age sixteen, they were sparing him prosecution for suspected arson. In later years he repeatedly stole from them and made unauthorized use of their credit card. He also tried to steal computers from Penn State. And he committed delinquent acts with his biological brother, who would eventually be sentenced to a life term for murder.
As Mark Pendergrast has convincingly argued, however, Matt’s flipping probably had less do with money than with his psychological state. There had been signs of trouble all along. Matt had repeatedly exposed himself to one of his new sisters. After a suicide attempt at age seventeen, he had been diagnosed as bipolar and put on a regimen of Prozac. Following a divorce in 2010, at age thirty-one, he was so broken up that he begged to be readmitted into the family home. Jerry and Dottie had reluctantly consented, but Matt continued to disappoint them. And shortly before the trial, having been turned out by his pregnant second wife, he was briefly back with them again.
In Jerry’s recollection, Matt “began to act weird a couple of weeks before the trial.” When, on June 13, he told his adoptive sister Kara that he now believed Jerry had molested him, he also mentioned that he had been experiencing a mysterious odor, finding that Tarot cards were revealing things to him, and, in Kara’s words, “hearing these weird voices calling his name.”
At Jerry and Dottie’s urging, Matt had already been seeing a psychotherapist. But shortly before the trial, and possibly with the encouragement of Andrew Shubin, he appears to have come under the influence of a memory enhancer. As Shubin remarked to Sara Ganim, quite a few of the victims “have never told their story before.” With the help of “a team of psychologists and social workers,” he and his assistant attorneys would be “providing mental help.” We have already seen that the help amounted in part to teasing forth fantasies of abuse that would then be promoted to memories.
When Matt went to the police on June 14, he told them that his suspicion of victimhood had strengthened as he listened to the testimony of Brett Swisher-Houtz three days before. His recollections, he said, were just beginning to return; he didn’t yet recall that he had been sodomized or subjected to oral sex. Subsequently, he framed his experience in the familiar idiom of recovered memory treatment. When asked by Oprah Winfrey in 2014 whether he had initially repressed the worst recollections, he replied, “Uh-huh, absolutely. The physical part is the part that, you know, you can erase.” And he added, in explanation of his delayed recall, “My child self had protected my adult self”—a cliché that would be elaborated in terms of “dissociation” theory in his 2016 memoir, Undaunted: Breaking My Silence to Overcome the Trauma of Child Sexual Abuse.
Among Jerry’s supposed victims, Matt appeared to pose the most extreme example of “massive” or “robust” repression. That is the unsubstantiated notion whereby dozens of traumas, spread over a course of years, are salted away in the unconscious just as soon as they occur, leaving other relations with the perpetrator unaffected. Not only had Matt continued to welcome Jerry’s company for some twenty-five years; he had joined his household, begged to be adopted by him, and, most strikingly, signed a contract with him specifying a reward of Penn State tuition for Matt’s future good behavior. Why would either party enter into such an agreement if Jerry had repeatedly molested Matt?
Allan Myers’s defection had been a crushing setback to Sandusky’s slim chances for acquittal; Matt’s proved to be another. As in Myers’s case, neither of the contending lead attorneys wanted to risk calling such a volatile witness; but that was disastrous for Sandusky. Not only did he lose the benefit of Matt’s supportive testimony to the grand jury; he was advised not to testify in his own defense, lest an opening be provided for Matt to be summoned as the most deeply wronged victim. Thus the jury that would hear Sandusky described as a maniacal rapist of children wouldn’t get an opportunity to form a different impression from his earnest and indignant demeanor on the stand. Nor could he confront his “victims” and shame at least some of them out of betraying a man who had steered them away from vice.
In depriving Jerry of such opportunities, attorney Joe Amendola could almost be said to have been working for the prosecution. That scandalous thought will repeatedly occur to careful readers of Mark Pendergrast’s The Most Hated Man in America. There they will learn, for example, that on the evening before a scheduled preliminary hearing that could have exposed crucial flaws in the prosecution’s case, Amendola attended a secret meeting in a motel with Judge Cleland, another judge, and prosecutors Fina, Eshbach, and McGettigan. There he quixotically bargained away his trusting client’s right to the hearing. And his opening statement to the jury was even more self-defeating. “This is a daunting task,” he said of his assignment. “. . . The Commonwealth has overwhelming evidence against Mr. Sandusky.” As you are aware by now, there wasn’t a scrap of substantial evidence that Sandusky had ever molested anyone.
If Amendola wasn’t actively conspiring with Sandusky’s pursuers, he must have been cowed by the same barrage of negative publicity that closed the minds of jurors long before they were selected. But that brainwashing alone can’t account for the sense of urgency, apparently extending even to Sandusky’s own counsel, that he be condemned and removed from public view at the earliest possible date. In order to understand that mood, we must segue from the case itself to its larger significance within and beyond State College.
7. The Big Picture
The debacle in Happy Valley resulted from a confluence of several factors, beginning with Jerry’s obliviousness to widespread alarm regarding the sexual abuse of children. But the most striking feature of the whole business was the adamancy with which he was hounded. At points where objective inquirers would have asked themselves whether their suspect really was a child molester, the authorities always doubled down. They knew, for example, that Mike McQueary hadn’t been sure of what he had seen, but they wouldn’t disclose that fact to the public or the jury. No less prejudicial were the refusal to be swayed by hundreds of tributes to Sandusky’s fine qualities, the recruiting of new accusers, the recourse to fibbing, cajoling, and “memory retrieval,” the felonious leaking of grand jury material, and the resultant demonizing of the accused for fourteen months preceding his trial.
What accounts for all those departures from due process? When the common handicaps to objectivity—mistaken beliefs, moral outrage, confirmation bias, and the drive to win at any cost—have been taken into account, there remains a surplus of malice that cries out for explanation. And it can be explained by a modestly speculative connecting of the dots.
Pennsylvanians will recognize the name of Tom Corbett, their Republican governor from 2011 to 2015, who then earned the distinction of being the only holder of that office since the 1840s to lose his bid for a second term. But Corbett did serve twice as the state’s attorney general, first from 1995 to 1997 and then from 2005 until his election as governor on November 2, 2010. Oddly, that was the day before an anonymous tip pointed investigators to Mike McQueary, thus imparting momentum to the flagging pursuit of Sandusky. Until that point, to the frustration of Jonelle Eshbach in the State College branch of the attorney general’s office, Corbett had ignored her requests for enhanced resources to scour the countryside for more believable victims than the confused and hesitant Aaron Fisher.
When Corbett began his run for the governorship, he hoped for support from PSU’s president, Graham Spanier, who remained formally neutral. Corbett is said to have become enraged when he noticed Spanier socializing with his Democratic opponent at a football game. Within the hearing of some Penn State trustees, he vowed that once he became governor, Spanier would be fired.
Post-McQueary, the Sandusky file was no longer wholly about a retiree who may or may not have used a charity as a candy store. Because “the shower” had occurred in the Lasch Building, attention turned to Penn State and its obligation to ensure safety and report crimes committed on its property. And Corbett, who as governor was about to become an ex officio trustee, cared about Penn State—but not in a positive way. Reputedly, he had little sympathy for public higher education and especially for the flagship campus and its venerated hero, Joe Paterno. When McQueary entered the picture, Corbett must have put two and two together and realized that the Sandusky furor could play out to his satisfaction. Now at last, Corbett and Jonelle Eshbach were on the same page. Sandusky’s conviction had become a top priority, and it would remain one under Corbett’s chosen successor as attorney general, his friend Linda Kelly.
As Graham Spanier now explains in an illuminating book, In the Lions’ Den: The Penn State Scandal and a Rush to Judgment, one of Corbett’s first acts as governor was to propose statewide cuts in funding for education, including a drastic subtraction of $182 million from Penn State’s budget. That would have necessitated a substantial increase in tuition, effectively completing the university’s already advanced privatization. President Spanier deftly and dramatically protested, and he prevailed. Now Corbett was more than ever bent on revenge. As the third Sandusky grand jury was wrapping up its work in the fall of 2011, Corbett began taking an interest in the university board meetings he had formerly shunned. Within the small circle of trustees who controlled the votes of the inert majority, he urged the dismissal of Spanier and any other officials who had allowed Sandusky’s molestations to continue after 2001.
Although the attorney general’s office had repeatedly leaked grand jury testimony injurious to Sandusky, it had maintained secrecy about another aspect of the investigation: that Sandusky was not the only target. The third and last grand jury was falsely told that four Penn State officials—Spanier, Curley, Schultz, and Paterno—had conspired to cover up the Lasch Building sodomy. By keeping that news secret, the prosecutors, in harmony with Tom Corbett’s wishes, ensured that none of the four men would be prepared to defend himself on the day of reckoning.
That day came on November 4, 2011, when it was learned through premature release of the grand jury presentment that Curley and Schultz were being indicted along with Sandusky. Their alleged crimes were child endangerment and perjury—the latter charge owing to their actually truthful testimony, when they hadn’t known they were suspects, that Mike McQueary had never told them about a rape. Spanier’s indictment on similar charges would come a year later. As for the venerated Paterno, he was not in danger of prosecution; but before his death eleven weeks later, he was unanimously and self-righteously castigated in the national media.
On the morning of November 9, Graham Spanier, having lost the confidence of his trustees, resigned as president of Penn State. That evening, an emergency meeting of the board was dominated by Governor Corbett in a conference call. “Remember the little boy in the shower,” he admonished. Although his nemesis, Spanier, was now disgraced and disarmed, Joe Paterno remained to be taken down. It would send the wrong message about child abuse, Corbett urged, if Paterno were allowed to lead his team onto the field even once more. And so, in a jarring late-night phone call, the eighty-five-year-old Paterno was informed that his coaching career was over. He hung up before he could be told the reason: he was believed to have protected Sandusky in order to forestall bad publicity for his football program.
That charge, which would later become the basis for HBO’s one-sided docudrama Paterno (2018), was ironic on several counts. Paterno had never concerned himself with public opinion, good or bad. He had cared about maintaining integrity, developing character, and serving his university in every way he could, such as leading the fundraising campaign for a new library. Year after year, his football players had compiled the best graduation record among all first-division teams. And he had never once winked at a star’s misbehavior in order to keep him on the field. It was touchdown-happy alumni who had set Penn State football and Paterno himself on a pedestal. But like the statue of him that would be unceremoniously forklifted away from Beaver Stadium on July 22, 2012, Paterno was being toppled from that pedestal by a single false allegation.
Tom Corbett’s influence was also operative in the trustees’ next move, a momentous one. This was the appointing of a special task force, under the leadership of former FBI director Louis Freeh, to investigate the whole Sandusky scandal, assign blame where appropriate within Penn State, and propose rules and procedures that could forestall future lapses of vigilance. That agenda might strike us as bizarrely premature, given that Sandusky’s trial still lay a half-year ahead. In theory, though, an independent body such as Freeh’s, by testing the credibility of Mike McQueary, Allan Myers, and the eight accusers at the trial, might form its own judgment that there had been no cover-up because no crimes had been committed. (Not by Sandusky, anyway.)
That very inference was soon drawn by John Snedden, a federal investigator dispatched to State College in order to determine whether Graham Spanier’s security clearance ought to be revoked. But Freeh, who spurned Snedden’s findings when Spanier offered them to him, understood from the outset that his charge was different. Sandusky’s guilt was to be regarded as an established fact; the ousted officials were to be pilloried; and Penn State was to be issued a sanctimonious rebuke. The “inquiry,” in other words, was going to be kabuki whose concluding bow would be Penn State’s promise to reform itself. More practically, the trustees’ admission that they had placed altogether too much emphasis on football was expected to mollify the National Collegiate Athletic Association and, as a consequence, spare the next football season from cancellation—an outcome that would be financially advantageous to both Penn State and the NCAA.
On July 12, 2012, three weeks after Sandusky’s conviction, Freeh unveiled his report. “In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity,” the text declared, “the most powerful leaders at the University—Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley—repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from authorities, the University’s Board of Trustees, the Penn State community, and the public at large.” Conveniently, then, Penn State’s problems could be traced to four men who had been stripped of authority nine months earlier. The healing process was already under way.
In a sentence that could have been dictated by Governor Corbett, Freeh singled out Spanier as a bureaucrat who unfortunately “discouraged discussion and dissent.” But the report’s main villain was Paterno, misleadingly depicted as having been the campus’s “single most powerful individual.” According to the report, Paterno had been aware of Sandusky’s pedophilia ever since he was told about the Zach Konstas incident in 1998, but he had done nothing about it then or later. And it was by bending to Paterno’s imperious will, the authors fantasized, that Spanier, Curley, and Schultz had betrayed the public trust.
Several elected members of Penn State’s board, dissenters from the executive committee’s line, took the trouble to read Freeh’s 267-page text and were amazed by its shallowness and inaccuracy. The university had paid $8.3 million for a document that, in the guise of presenting research, had merely dramatized the state’s criminal charges, propagated the myth of Penn State as one big tailgate party, and heaped calumny on an unpretentious man. But the minority was overruled by more politic colleagues who argued that any criticism of the report would make the university look insufficiently penitent. When the NCAA, taking Freeh’s assessment as its rationale, announced that Penn State would be fined $60 million, deprived of fourteen seasons’ worth of football victories, banned from postseason games for the next four years, and stripped of many football scholarships, the university’s official posture was We deserve all this; it will make us better.
In retrospect, the alacrity with which the NCAA embraced the Freeh report cannot be regarded as surprising. Internal messages, subsequently brought to light, show that the task force members were aiming from the start to please the athletic association. Freeh’s private group had been only recently launched. Its leaders hoped that their contribution to Penn State’s chastisement and cleansed rebirth would be so gratifying to the NCAA that they might then be appointed as that body’s standing team of investigators. The motive of currying favor, in short, took precedence over any old-fashioned notions about seeking the truth.
Much more important, however, and potentially explosive, were the Freeh group’s relations with the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office. As with the NCAA, there was a perfect fit between Freeh’s and the prosecutors’ skewed outlook on Sandusky-related matters. And once again, there was nothing coincidental about the match.
Copies of a seventy-nine-page diary kept by Freeh’s top investigator, Kathleen McChesney, formerly second in command at the FBI, came into the hands of both Sandusky’s and Spanier’s legal teams. The diary reveals that Freeh and the attorney general’s office were continually strategizing and feeding information to each other; that grand jury secrets were routinely disclosed; that the lead prosecutor of both Sandusky and Spanier, Frank Fina, was also the main coordinator of exchanges with Freeh; and that Fina was telling Freeh whom to interview and whom to leave alone. We also learn that Freeh obtained knowledge of Judge Cleland’s intention to get the Sandusky trial wrapped up at the earliest possible date, probably in deference to the NCAA and the imperiled football schedule. The prosecutor, the judge, the regulatory body, and the “independent” task force were all devoted to bringing about the same predetermined result.
Although McChesney had to admit to herself, four months into her mission, that there was “no smoking gun to indicate cover-up,” the Freeh group never deviated from scapegoating Spanier, Curley, Schultz, and Paterno. Curley and Schultz had already been indicted along with Sandusky, and Paterno was dead, but Spanier remained in Frank Fina’s crosshairs. It is noteworthy, then, that the Freeh team was kept apprised of Fina’s hardball tactics regarding Spanier.
McChesney knew, for example, that Fina wished to keep Spanier’s attorney from seeing a 2001 email chain that would figure centrally in the indictment. She also learned that Fina planned to entrap witnesses into committing perjury. (To her credit, she wondered how ethical that was.) As for Spanier’s arrest, another confidential document reveals that a Freeh operative had been told just when and where it would take place; but Spanier’s own lawyers were to be kept in the dark until an hour before the charges were announced.
Thanks to its undeserved aura of FBI authority, the Freeh report impressed the media and public as if it had been written by Eliot Ness himself. No further doubt could be entertained that certain officials had known all along about Sandusky’s marauding and had colluded to facilitate it. Now the child endangerment charges against Spanier, Curley, and Schultz were sure to prevail—as indeed they did, although a federal judge would overturn Spanier’s conviction on a technicality in 2019, just as he was about to be jailed. (The 3d US Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Spanier’s sentence in 2020.)
The Freeh report left the public with only one misgiving—one that has scarcely abated even today. It concerned Joe Paterno, whose portrait in the document bore no resemblance to the man whom countless associates and former players fondly remembered. The Paterno heirs sought redress, not from Freeh but from the NCAA, which calmed the family somewhat by restoring the deleted football victories and thereby safeguarding Joe’s record as the “winningest” of major football coaches. But other voices, encouraged by the minority of Paterno loyalists within Penn State’s board of trustees, continue to press for a fuller reckoning.
The last major development in the 2011-2012 saga, a farcical one, began playing out after the Freeh report was issued. Right from the beginning in 2008, when Dawn Fisher Daniels thought it worthwhile to report Sandusky’s unusual behavior to the authorities, there had been a scent of money in the air. It became unmistakable even before the abuse chasers Andrew Shubin and Benjamin Andreozzi, anticipating a jackpot for themselves, prepped their new clients to testify against Sandusky. Who can say which factor, greed or the therapeutic contamination of memory, exercised greater influence over what was finally alleged in court?
What we do know is that Penn State, by embracing the Freeh report without demur, smeared its own reputation and placed itself in jeopardy of being entangled in drawn-out lawsuits that would be devastating to future enrollments and gifts. The chosen recourse was to establish an expandable reparations fund, backed by insurance, from which handsome settlements would be quickly issued not only to Allan Myers and the trial accusers but also to just about anyone who could attest with a straight face that he had once been molested by Sandusky. Many applicants came forward. As of now, thirty-six men, along with their contingency fee attorneys, have split a pie totaling $118 million.
Because Penn State’s liability commenced with the admitted though imaginary cover-up in 2001, parties who claimed abuse by Sandusky after that date could expect to get the largest sums, with bonus points for having been molested on campus. Those incentives explained a number of changes in testimony from police interrogations to the grand jury, to the trial, and finally to demands to be compensated for post-traumatic stress.
As for verification of claims, little or none was required until Penn State’s disgruntled insurance company sued the university for the return of extravagant or completely unwarranted sums. Even thereafter, standards remained lax. There was no formal provision for sworn statements, medical or psychiatric proof of damage, forensic investigation, cross-examination, or background checks. (At least twelve of the thirty-six beneficiaries would be found to possess criminal records.) The claimants could even stay anonymous, forestalling any risk of being exposed by their acquaintances as scammers. As one observer noted in 2017, recipients were simply on a “gravy train.” The criticism was voiced by Ira Lubert, the Penn State trustee who had been responsible for overseeing the approval process for awards.
Not every “victim” went along with the university’s plan. Zachary Konstas, for example, sued separately and was granted $1.5 million, a pleasing result in view of his inability to specify just what Sandusky had done to him. Looking back, though, Konstas must have regretted his choice. Dustin Struble came away with $3.25 million; Ryan Rittmeyer with $5.5 million; Allan Myers with $6.9 million; Brett Swisher-Houtz and Jason Simcisko with $7.25 million each; and Michal Kajak with $8.1 million. Then there were five mutually acquainted residents of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, three of whom shared the same lawyer; their hauls totaled $30 million.
One of the Lock Haven claimants was the earliest Second Miler to have accused Sandusky, Aaron Fisher, who received $7.5 million. In 2015 a laughing Fisher, recumbent on a bed and raising his middle finger in salute to the public, posed for Facebook while covered with dollar bills. But the grand prize winner was the “kidnap victim” Sabastian Paden, whose impossible narrative earned him $20 million. On Facebook Paden held his PTSD in check long enough to exult: “Shit I’m balling like a mother fuck man hell yea $.”
Penn State was hoping that its no-questions-asked munificence, in combination with institutional reform, would make the Sandusky scandal go away. The strategy has backfired. While the contracts that were signed with applicants for redress technically absolved the university of wrongdoing, the giant settlements themselves suggested a mountain of guilt. Moreover, as I have said, the ongoing anguish in State College has been focused solely on Joe Paterno; and with every disbursed check the university has driven another stake into Paterno’s heart.
It isn’t simply that the payments remind everyone that Paterno was fired for supposedly having been negligent in 2001. Seeking to establish a lucrative Penn State angle to their grievances, some claimants have alleged that they mentioned their abuse by Sandusky to an indifferent and scoffing Paterno as early as 1971. By requiting those fictions with money, Penn State has affirmed and embellished the Freeh report’s libel, now portraying the beloved coach as having knowingly harbored a sexual villain for some forty years.
From the hour of Joe Paterno’s firing on November 9, 2011, his family members have condemned Jerry Sandusky and washed their hands of his case. That attitude persists today and is shared by Penn State alumni and even the dissenting trustees, stranding the traduced Sandusky beyond consideration. Once actively loathed by all, and held in solitary confinement for the first five years of his sentence, he is now largely forgotten. Surely, however, it is time for Paterno’s defenders to understand that his rehabilitation will never be complete until Sandusky himself is exonerated. Joe did nothing wrong because Jerry did nothing wrong. It’s as simple as that.
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If you find this essay convincing, please circulate it and, if possible, link or repost it. Meanwhile, Jerry continues to press for a new trial but is desperately short of money for legal fees. Please consider making a contribution online at justiceforjerry.com, or by check to The Impact Fund, c/o Dick Anderson, P.O. Box 1151, State College, PA 16804.
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