By Frank Parlato
Last week, Jerry Sandusky filed a Post Conviction Relief Act petition alleging the men who put him behind bars—prosecutors Frank Fina and Joe McGettigan—later installed themselves as gatekeepers over a $12 million trust for Penn State’s top-paid trial victim.
In 2012, the former Penn State football defensive coach was convicted on 45 counts of sexual abuse of ten boys and sentenced to 30-60 years in prison.
On April 16, 2015, Sabastian Paden, victim 9 in the trial of Sandusky, executed a settlement trust funded by his civil recovery from Penn State (the petition lists the gross at $20 million).
Newly discovered evidence shows that since its creation, the trust has been controlled by the trial prosecutors through a three-member Trust Protective Committee with consent authority over distributions above $100,000, power to remove and replace the trustee ‘for any reason whatsoever,’ and compensation for committee members paid from trust assets.
Its three members include:
Frank Fina — former Pennsylvania Senior Deputy Attorney General; prosecutor in Sandusky case.
Gay Warren — described in the petition as longtime “paramour” of lead prosecutor Joseph McGettigan.
Lauren Cliggitt— Paden’s therapist.
Each member billed hourly at their professional rate—plus $5,000 annually—”paid from the trust.” And if the beneficiary (Paden) ever sought to terminate the trust, TPC members would have to sign off.
The petition states:
“Prosecutors Joseph McGettigan and Frank Fina profited from abuse allegations made by S.P. and assisted in procuring him a civil attorney and in setting up a trust fund for S.P. in which Fina served as a trustee along with McGettigan’s paramour.”
When two former prosecutors from the underlying criminal case control a trust and draw compensation tied to the committee’s continued existence—the arrangement could create a built-in incentive to preserve control and fees.
The therapist’s participation heightens the conflict. Combining a therapeutic relationship with paid financial gatekeeping over the patient could blur clinical judgment with financial control.
27% Loans Before the Settlement
The trust was not the only financial device at work. Less than five weeks after Sandusky’s conviction, on July 27, 2012, Paden signed a “Purchase Agreement” with US Claims, a litigation funding company.
For a net advance of $50,000 at 27% APR, compounded monthly, the amount due by April 2015 was ≈ $104,200, when the case settled.
The fax header indicates that the agreement was routed directly to Stephen Raynes, the civil lawyer who filed the claim. The deal demonstrates that, even before Penn State agreed to pay Paden, financial players were already carving up the award.
Shaping Testimony?
In an affidavit, Paden’s mother—identified here as ‘Marie’— says her son repeatedly told her Sandusky never molested him. Still, after several lengthy meetings with lead prosecutor McGettigan, his story changed.
Marie swore that prosecutors promised her son, “You will never have to work a day in your life,” and referred her to civil attorney Dennis McAndrews before sentencing.
Marie also testified in the Sandusky trial.
McGettigan, she swore, told her to testify that she wished Sandusky had bought her son underwear, to plant the impression that missing underwear meant Sandusky had raped the then-teenage boy. She said missing underwear pre-dated Sandusky by years.
Civil Counsel and Trust Funding
Within a year of winning the Sandusky trial, McGettigan quit the PA Attorney General’s office and joined McAndrews’ firm – in time to be part of the law firm that both drew the trust documents and referred the case to the civil attorney of record in the Penn State settlement claims.
Penn State paid $20 million to Paden on April 28, 2015, according to the petition.
After legal fees, referral fees, loan repayments at 27 percent interest, and the creation of the trust, prosecutors and their allies held control over the remaining balance, which Marie said she believed was about $12 million when it was established in 2015.
Two Timelines, One Weekend Claim
Marie’s affidavit also challenged the prosecution’s timeline.
At trial, her son testified he stayed at Sandusky’s home “100 to 150 times” — nearly every weekend for three years, between the ages of 13 and 15, where he said he endured abuse such as anal rape, being locked in a soundproof basement without food, and his screams for help went unheeded.
Marie, who said she was not permitted to hear her son’s testimony because she was also a witness, said in her affidavit that her son went no more than “10–15” times, and these visits mainly were tied to home football weekends, with other boys present.
She said her son’s testimony that Sandusky “held (him) captive in the basement every weekend for three years” is not true. She also notes that Sandusky did not have a soundproof basement and that her son would not have returned weekend after weekend, more than 100 times, to be abused.
She believes the prosecutors gave him that story to tell the jury.
Her account dovetails with preserved Facebook messages from Dawn Fisher Daniels, mother of Victim 1, Aaron Fisher.
Fisher also testified that he went to Sandusky’s home every weekend for the same three years, 2005-2008, more than 100 times, where he said he was alone and that Sandusky forced him into mutual acts of fellatio.
Fisher’s mother said her son’s overnights were sporadic: “probably a three year span he went there overnight but was never every weekend.”
That means two of the state’s central witnesses — who both claimed to be alone with Sandusky “every weekend” between 2005 and 2008 — were making mutually exclusive claims, each contradicted by their own mothers.
Neither can both “every weekend” claims be true simultaneously.
Marie added that Paden had a cell phone and could have called her and left at any time.
Victim 10 Recantation
This summer, another accuser, Victim 10, Ryan Rittmeyer, came forward with an affidavit.
He described psychological manipulation, leading questions, and assurances from McGettigan that trauma fragments memory, allowing him to testify to events he did not clearly recall.
“I was told my role was critical to stopping a predator,” he wrote. He says he later received a $5.5 million settlement, of which his attorneys took 40%. (net ≈ $3.3M pre-expenses)
He says that multi-hour prep sessions pushed him to ‘revisit and reframe’ his story until it fit.
Procedural Posture and Claims
Sandusky filed his petition for post-conviction relief in the Centre County Court of Common Pleas.
The petition includes new affidavits and documents that Sandusky’s lawyers say show his conviction was “infected at every level,” from coached testimony to charges filed outside the statute of limitations.
Therapist as Secret Prosecutor
The petition also raises new details about Michael Gillum, the therapist for Aaron Fisher, the prosecution’s first accuser.
Gillum not only treated Fisher but also trained investigators on interviewing witnesses, accompanied Fisher during his grand jury testimonies and sat with Attorney General Linda Kelly during the trial.
When Fisher, who for two years was the only potential accuser the state had, failed to testify that Sandusky abused him, the proceedings were interrupted for Gillum to coach him and administer medication.
Fisher first denied abuse; after months with Gillum, his account escalated to forced mutual fellatio, described as recovered memory.
At the same time, Gillum was co-authoring Silent No More with Fisher and his mother, a book published just two weeks after Sandusky’s sentencing.
Sandusky’s lawyers argue that this triad role, as therapist, prosecution aide, and author, was never disclosed to the jury.
Tilted Field: Emails, Witnesses, Omissions
The trust, the roles of civil lawyers, prosecutors, and therapists, Rittmeyer’s recantation, Paden’s mother’s affidavit, land atop long-standing concerns:
The story that created the media sensation in the lead-up to the trial: Assistant coach Mike McQueary’s story that he saw Sandusky rape a 10-year-old boy in the public Penn State showers a decade earlier shifted repeatedly.
Before the trial, McQueary wrote to Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach, “I cannot say 1000 percent sure that it was sodomy. I did not see insertion.”
In a second email to Eshbach, McQueary complained about “being misrepresented” in the media. To which Eshbach replied, “I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect, and it is hard not to respond. But you can’t.”
Those emails were never shared with the defense before trial.
Allan Myers Affidavit
A young man, then-24-year-old Allan Myers, came forward and signed an affidavit that he was the boy in the shower, that it was simply a post-workout shower, and that nothing sexual ever occurred.
The prosecution did not call him as a witness and may have taken steps to actively hide him by offering him, through a civil attorney, a paid vacation while the trial was ongoing.
Janitor Calhoun Recording
A state police recorded interview had Penn State janitor Jim Calhoun saying it wasn’t Sandusky that the prosecutors said molested a boy in the showers; jurors never heard that tape because prosecutors buried the tape and chose not to call Calhoun as a witness, claiming without citing medical documentation in the record that he was suffering from dementia.
Alleged Story Expansion and Incentives & Settlement Payouts
Other accusers expanded their claims after therapy and after they retained civil lawyers, changing dates and locations and the number of times they were abused.
Victim 1, Aaron Fisher, $7.5 million,
Victim 2, Allan Myer, $6.9 m
Victim 3, Jason Simciscko, $7.25 m
Victim 4, Brett Swisher Houtz, $7.25 m
Victim 5, Michal Kajak, $8.1 m
Victim 6, Zach Konstas, $1.5 m
Victim 7, Dustin Struble, $3.25 million,
Vixctim 8 (Never identified)
Victim 9 , Sabastian Paden, $20m
Victim 10, Ryan Rittmeyer, $5.5 m
Plaintiffs had strong financial incentives, the petition argues, to adjust their stories. Most accusers began by saying Sandusky did not abuse them, as evidenced by police reports. Stories shifted after the prosecutors or police referred them to civil lawyers and memory recovery therapists.
Fina’s Record
The filing casts the new trust evidence as part of a broader pattern of overreach and concealment by the senior prosecutor in the case, Frank Fina.
Fina was a central figure in Pennsylvania’s “Porngate” scandal, the state-wide dissemination of pornographic and offensive emails that engulfed judges and law-enforcement officials.
Fina was the leading participant, creating many of the emails with racist and explicit sexual overtones including violence toward women.
Two Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices left the bench amid the email scandal popularly dubbed “Porngate.” Seamus McCaffery resigned (2014) a week after he was suspended over hundreds of explicit emails sent/received on state systems. J. Michael Eakin resigned (2016) while facing disciplinary proceedings for exchanging offensive emails.
As the messages surfaced, the Philadelphia City Council publicly demanded that DA Seth Williams fire Fina; instead, he was reassigned, then quietly exited the DA’s office in June 2016 amid the uproar to enter private practice.
Four years later, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court suspended Fina’s law license for a year and a day over his “reprehensible” handling of grand-jury testimony in the Penn State matter.
In 2013, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court took Judge Barry Feudale off the statewide grand-jury post that had covered major cases (including Sandusky). In 2015 Chief Justice Thomas Saylor removed Feudale from the bench altogether. The Court said Feudale’s judicial objectivity appeared “clouded” by his relationship with prosecutor Fina.
Hotel Meeting and Waiver
In another episode, Fina and the trial judge James Cleland arranged a “secret” hearing to persuade Sandusky’s trial lawyer Joe Amendola to waive the right to learn the names of the accusers and test their claims and challenge the controversial science of repressed recovered memory therapy before trial.
At an evening meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn (State College), Judge Cleland presided and prosecutor Fina met with defense attorney Joe Amendola; no court reporter; defendant absent.
The defense says this led to waiving the preliminary hearing—foreclosing pretrial tests on accuser identities, memory-science challenges and agreeing to set a accelerated trial schedule. (The case from indictment to conviction was seven months.)
None of this was put on the record.
The petition states that it was not until four years after the conviction that “Judge Cleland, for the first time, disclosed that he had been present for an off-the-record nighttime meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn wherein the parties negotiated to waive Sandusky’s preliminary hearing.”
After the disclosure, Judge Cleland recused himself from further involvement in the post-conviction hearings, but no discipline was imposed for this unusual extrajudicial proceeding nor any relief granted to Sandusky on a decision that sealed his fate.
What Sandusky Seeks
Sandusky, 81, convicted on June 22, 2012, of 45 of 48 counts and sentenced on October 9, 2012, to 30–60 years, seeks an evidentiary hearing and ultimately a new trial.
The petition argues that the trust, loan, and affidavits constitute after-discovered evidence that the defense could not have obtained earlier with due diligence, and if proven, would likely produce a different result on key counts.
Under Pennsylvania’s PCRA, after-discovered evidence must be new, not discoverable with due diligence, and likely to change the outcome.
Medical Claims
The petition also notes medical records showing atrophied testicles and low testosterone, making it unlikely that he could have committed many of the acts the state accused him of committing.
The defense further argues that no accuser described genitalia consistent with that condition or sought STD information, facts the defense frames as undermining allegations involving genital contact.
Attorneys Jerry J. Russo, J. Andrew Salemme, Barbara A. Zemlock, and Heidi Freese of Tucker Arensberg, P.C. bring the petition.
The Commonwealth has not yet filed its response.
For a detailed overview of the Sandusky case, read this article:
A Conviction Built on Recovered Memories: An Overview of the Sandusky Case
Links to key exhibits:
- Exhibit J: Ryan Rittmeyer Affidavit
- Exhibit K: AQ (“Marie”) Affidavit
- Exhibit M: SP Trust Agreement
- Exhibit N: US Claims Loan Agreement for SP
- Exhibit O: Frank Parlato Affidavit
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
