New appeal says Sandusky’s prosecutors secretly controlled a $20 million trust fund set up for the highest paid alleged ‘victim’ at Penn State
By Ralph Cipriano
The lead prosecutors in the Penn State sex abuse case, former deputy attorney generals Frank Fina and Joe McGettigan, allegedly profited from putting Jerry Sandusky in prison by overseeing a $12 million trust fund established for the alleged victim at PSU who pocketed the most cash.
That’s the most startling allegation made in an 84-page Post-Conviction Relief Act [PCRA] Petition filed on Friday that accuses Fina and McGettigan of all kinds of prosecutorial misconduct, including having a glaring conflict of interest, hiding evidence, and coaching witnesses to give false testimony.
The latest PCRA petition in the Sandusky case was filed, along with 400 pages of exhibits, (and here) in the Centre County Court of Common Pleas in Bellefonte, PA by Sandusky’s lawyers Jerry Russo, Barbara Zemlock, Heidi Freese and J. Andrew Salemme.
A bad apple
Frank Fina is already a discredited actor in the Penn State case. In February of 2020, the justices of the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court voted 5-1 to suspended Fina’s law license for a year and a day, because of “reprehensible” and “inexcusable” conduct in Fina’s prosecution of PSU’s top officials for an alleged cover-up of Sandusky’s sex crimes.
In his zeal to convict, Fina, the state Supreme Court’s disciplinary board found, had duped a grand jury judge into allowing him behind closed doors to pressure Cynthia Baldwin, Penn State’s former counsel, into breaking the attorney-client privilege.
By threatening to indict Baldwin for obstruction of justice, Fina persuaded Baldwin to testify in the grand jury against three top Penn State officials who were her former clients.
Life in prison
Sandusky, Joe Paterno’s longtime defensive coordinator at Penn State, was convicted on June 22, 2012 of 45 of 48 counts of sex abuse. He was sentenced on Oct. 9, 2021, to 30 to 60 years in prison.
Since Oct. 31, 2012, Sandusky, now 81, has spent nearly 13 years in prison, six of those years in solitary confinement.
Since he’s been in prison, Sandusky has filed three PCRA appeals that were ultimately rejected in 2017, 2019 and 2021 by judges bent on circling the wagons, to keep the stench of corruption in the Penn State case under wraps.
But this time the allegations are so shocking that Pennsylvania’s judges may be forced to hold an evidentiary hearing. That’s a spectacle where Fina and McGettigan would be hauled into court, placed under oath, and be forced to explain their conduct.
‘A financial incentive’ to convict
The PCRA petition states that Fina and McGettigan had “a financial incentive to induce allegations made” by Sabastian Paden, who testified against Sandusky at trial as “Victim No. 9,” and that “critical aspects of his [Paden’s] testimony were false.”
“Joseph McGettigan and Frank Fina financially profited from abuse allegations made by [Paden] and introduced [Paden] to civil attorneys during the course of Sandusky’s criminal proceedings to facilitate a civil suit against Penn State,” the PCRA petition states.
In the PCRA petition, Paden is identified only by his initials, S.P. On April 28, 2015, Paden collected the highest amount of the $118 million awarded to 36 alleged PSU victims, $20 million.
After he left the attorney general’s office on April 11, 2013, McGettigan joined a law firm headed by Dennis McAndrews, whom McGettigan had previously worked with in Delaware County as prosecutors.
It was McAndrews who, prior to Sandusky’s sentencing on Oct. 9, 2012, arranged for attorney Stephen Raynes to file a notice of claim against Penn State, on Paden’s behalf.
The PCRA petition alleges that McAndrews subsequently set up a trust fund for Paden to manage the settlement money, as well as a separate trust fund for Paden’s mother.
The trust fund’s officers
The trust for Paden established a “Trust Protective Committee” that had authority over the trust.
The members of the trust committee included Fina, Gay Warren, identified in the PCRA petition as “McGettigan’s paramour,” and Lauren Cliggitt, who served as Paden’s therapist.
Trust committee members, the PCRA petition states, were paid an annual $5,000, plus “reasonable hourly compensation.”
Attorneys McAndrews and McGettigan also established a power of attorney for Paden, appointing Chris Malanga to make legal and financial decisions on behalf of Paden.
According to the PCRA petition, McAndrews, McGettigan and Malanga appointed therapists to live with Paden.
After a claim was filed on Paden’s behalf, but before he got paid, Paden’s civil lawyers provided money via high-interest loans for Paden and his mother, to move into homes in Bryn Mawr and Malvern, PA.
According to Paden’s mother, when Paden got arrested on marijuana-related charges, McGettigan and Fina arranged for Paden to move to Colorado.
Paden’s mother: prosecutors exploited my son
The newly discovered evidence that Fina and McGettigan allegedly profited from prosecuting Sandusky was gathered by Frank Parlato. He identified himself in a 13-page affidavit attached to the PCRA petition as an “investigative journalist and publisher with more than thirty years of experience.”
According to Parlato’s affidavit, Paden’s mother, identified as “Marie,” told Parlato that her son “ ‘suffers from a learning and emotional disability,’ a vulnerability she states prosecutor Joseph McGettigan exploited.”
Marie told Parlato that her son’s account “‘changed significantly’ from initial denials to a narrative of abuse.”
Her son had “consistently represented to her that Sandusky had never molested him,” Parlato wrote.
But “after several lengthy meetings with McGettigan,” Parlato wrote, “[Paden’s] story changed from one in which Mr. Sandusky had not abused him to one where he did.”
A witness flip-flops
Sabastian Paden was a high school senior when police came knocking on his door. Paden, like virtually all of Sandusky’s alleged victims, initially told police that Sandusky had never abused him.
But then Paden changed his story to say that he had visited Sandusky’s house between 100 and 150 times from 2005 to 2008. And that each time, Sandusky kissed him. And then Sandusky began forcing him to engage in oral sex. And then he tried to have anal sex with him 16 times.
At Sandusky’s trial, Paden’s story grew more spectacular.
Paden told the jury that during his visits to Sandusky’s house, he had been kept as a virtual prisoner in Sandusky’s basement, without food, while he screamed for help. But Paden claimed that Sandusky’s wife, who was usually in the house during his visits, did nothing to help him.
But when Paden’s mother spoke to Parlato, she told him that she controlled her son’s activities. And that the actual number of visits Sabastian Paden made to Sandusky’s home during that same three-year period, from 2005 to 2008, was “no more than 10-15 times.”
Paden’s mother also told Parlato that around the time of the Sandusky trial, the prosecutors had assured her son, “You will never have to work a day in your life.”
False testimony
Paden’s mother told Parlato how at the Sandusky trial, McGettigan “instructed” her to mention that she wished that Sandusky had given her son underwear and socks as presents, instead of Nike gear.
At Sandusky’s trial, Paden’s mother was sequestered. So she was unaware that her son had testified that he had disposed of his underwear after being sexually abused by Sandusky.
So when Paden’s mother testified, in response to McGettigan’s questions, she did what the prosecutor had instructed her to do.
“Oh yeah,” she told McGettigan. He [Sandusky] gave him [Sabastian] gifts. I wish he would have just gave him some underwear to replace the underwear that I could never find in my laundry.”
According to what Paden’s mother told Parlato, however, the issue of her son’s missing underwear “predated any contact with Mr. Sandusky.”
But on the witness stand, McGettigan “directed [Paden’s mother] to present it [the missing underwear] in a way that would mislead the jury and imply it coincided with contact with Mr. Sandusky,” the PCRA petition states.
Expensive gifts
In Parlato’s affidavit, he explains that Paden’s mother told him that Paden’s civil lawyers bought her son “expensive gifts, moved the family to a Bryn Mawr condo, then to multiple homes in Malvern, and provided cash on request.”
“She later learned these funds were borrowed against a future settlement, including hundreds of thousands of dollars at 27% APR (monthly compounding)from US Claims, used for living expenses and numerous paid ‘therapists/professionals.’ ”
“If [Paden] seeks to terminate the Trust and assume control over his assets, termination requires a recommendation from two Committee members,” Parlato wrote. “Fina and Warren (McGettigan) can thus block his financial independence indefinitely.”
Parlato estimated that the trust fund for Paden began with $12 million in its coffers.
Paden was paid at the rate of $1,000 a week, or $52,000 a year. His draw was later increased to $1,500 a week, “ensuring ongoing dependency while the Committee retains — and is compensated for — full control” of Paden’s life, Parlato wrote.
“In substance, the Trust,” Parlato wrote, “places the prosecution team in permanent, paid control of the key witness; gives them veto power over large expenditures, removal power over the bank trustee, and gatekeeping power over termination; and compensates them annually (plus hourly) from the witness’s fund.”
In his affidavit, Parlato describes an Oct. 15, 2020 email, with the subject line “Family Meeting.” The email included among its addressees the email account of former Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina.
“The email,” Parlato wrote, “reflects that the prosecutor in the criminal case was coordinating meetings regarding the personal affairs of [Paden] and his family eight years after the trial had ended.”
An ex-con calls the hot line
The PCRA petition also claims that Fina and McGettigan coached and induced Ryan Rittmeyer, who testified at trial, to “make false allegations against Sandusky.”’
In the PCRA petition, Rittmeyer is identified only by his initials, as R.R.
On November 29, 2011, Rittmeyer, an ex-con with zero credibility, called in on the Pennsylvania state attorney general’s sex abuse hotline. He subsequently became Victim “No. 10” in the Sandusky case.
Rittmeyer’s rap sheet featured 17 arrests from 2005 to 2016, for crimes including reckless endangerment, theft by deception and false impression, receiving stolen property, criminal solicitation and robbery, simple assault, and possession of a firearm.
After he called the sex abuse hotline, Rittmeyer told police that Sandusky had groped him at a swimming pool and then attempted to have oral sex while driving him around in a silver convertible.
But as Sandusky’s fellow coaches will tell you, Sandusky never owned a silver convertible. He drove Fords or Hondas.
But at Penn State, instead of investigating the constantly evolving and often ludicrous stories of the alleged victims, they simply wrote checks.
Rittmeyer laughed all the way to the bank, after he collected $5.5 million.
Victim 10’s false allegations
Years after he blew through the money, however, a broke Rittmeyer came forward, at Parlato’s request, to correct the record.
In 2011, when he was a 24 year-old ex-con, Rittmeyer told Parlato, he was approached by state investigators, who told him that his participation in the Sandusky case was “critical to stopping a predator.”
The authorities, Rittmeyer told Parlato, “encouraged [him] to believe he had been molested despite an absence of clear memory of such conduct.”
“He characterizes his evolving testimony as the product of emotional strain, leading questions, investigative pressure, and psychological manipulation,” Parlato wrote, but “not deliberate deceit.”
“He recalls extensive pretrial meetings, including one lasting six hours, where he was asked to revisit and reframe his account until it aligned with what appeared to be the prosecution’s desired narrative,” Parlato wrote.
“He states he felt he could not leave, as travel/lodging were arranged by the prosecution,” Parlato wrote. “He was kept in a small office, and repetition of key themes suggested he would not be released until his answers confirmed the case narrative.”
“He characterizes his testimony as ‘shaped by’ investigators/prosecutors whose professional/reputational interests were tied to his cooperation — rather than by independent recollection,” Parlato wrote.
“He identifies prosecutor Joseph McGettigan as a source of repeated misleading conduct during the process and expresses regret for his role in what he now views as a deeply flawed prosecution,” Parlato wrote.
Brady violations
The PCRA petition also claims that “prosecutors failed to disclose the continuing evolution of the accusers’ allegations against Sandusky,” in violation of Brady v. Maryland.
That’s the 1963 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled that prosecutors have a duty to turn over to defense lawyers any so-called exculpatory evidence that would tend to exonerate a defendant.
The PCRA petition also states that the prosecutors “Did not disclose court documents that reveal that other accusers ‘did in fact undergo therapy intended to aid them reconstruct memories of alleged abuse.’”
“That civil attorneys recruited accusers and then altered their stories to take advantage of the possibility of greater financial gain for themselves, and the accusers, is crystal clear,” the PCRA petition states.
The Sandusky prosecution also featured “improper influences of therapists such as Michael Gillum and Cynthia MacNab,” the PCRA petition states.
The misconduct of therapists and the civil attorneys in the Sandusky case, the PCRA petition states, “demonstrate that the accusers were highly incentivized and encouraged to make false allegations — infecting Sandusky’s trial in ways totally unknown to the jury.”
The PCRA petition also discloses medical conditions that might have limited Sandusky’s activities as an alleged serial predator.
“Unbeknownst to the accusers, Sandusky had atrophied testicles and suffered from extraordinarily low levels of testosterone,” the PCRA petition states.
“Not a single accuser described Sandusky’s genitalia to match the medical condition that he suffered from,” the PCRA petition states.
Nor did any accuser who claimed that Sandusky had engaged them in high-risk sexual activity, such as anal sex, ever request “any medical information regarding potential sexually transmitted diseases” that their alleged predator may have had, such as AIDs.
(Read more of Ralph Cipriano’s outstanding coverage at BigTrial.com)
