I had to make an extremely hard choice this week, Larry. I had to choose whether [to] continue supporting you through this or to support them: the girls. I choose them, Larry. I choose to love them and protect them. I choose to stop caring for you and supporting you. I choose to look you in the face and tell you that you hurt us, you hurt me…I hope you will see it from me in my eyes today that I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. I hope you cry like we cry. I hope you feel bad for what you’ve done. I hope more than anything, each day these girls can feel less pain. I hope you want that for us, but this is goodbye to you, Larry, and this time it’s time for me to close the door. It’s time for me to stand up for these little girls and not stand behind you anymore, Larry.
Goodbye, Larry. May God bless your dark, broken soul.
I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. Isn’t that an almost perfect statement of default to truth?
Default to truth operates even in a case where the perpetrator had 37,000 child-porn images on his hard drive, and where he had been accused countless times, by numerous people, over the course of his career. The Nassar case was open-and-shut—and still there were doubts. Now imagine the same scenario, only in a case that isn’t open-and-shut. That’s the Sandusky case.
5.
After the accusations against Sandusky were made public, one of his staunchest defenders was a former Second Mile participant named Allan Myers. When the Pennsylvania police were interviewing former Second Mile kids in an attempt to corroborate the allegations against Sandusky, they contacted Myers, and he was adamant. “Myers said that he does not believe the allegations that have been made, and that the accuser…is only out to get some money,” the police report read. “Myers continues to be in touch with Sandusky one to two times a week by telephone.” Myers told the police that he had showered in the locker room with Sandusky many times after workouts and nothing untoward had ever happened.
Two months later, Myers went further. He walked into the offices of Sandusky’s attorney and made a stunning revelation. After reading the details of McQueary’s story, he realized that he had been the boy in the shower that night. Curtis Everhart, an investigator for Sandusky’s lawyer, wrote a synopsis of his interview with Myers. It is worth quoting at length:
I asked the specific question: “Did Jerry ever touch you in a manner that you felt to be improper, or caused you to feel concern about his invading your personal space?” Myers answered with a very pronounced, “Never ever did anything like that ever occur.”
Myers stated, “Never in my life while with Jerry did I ever [feel] uncomfortable or violated. I think of Jerry as the father I never had.”…Myers stated on Senior Night at a West Branch High School football game, “I asked Jerry to walk onto the field with my mother. It was announced on the loudspeaker ‘Father Jerry Sandusky’ along with my mother’s name.
“I invited Jerry and Dottie to my wedding. Why would I ask Jerry, my father figure at Senior Night, ask Jerry and Dottie to be at my wedding, and the school asked me to ask Jerry to speak at my graduation, which he did, if there was a problem.…Why would I travel to games, go to his house, and make all the trips if Jerry had assaulted me? If that had happened, I would want to be as far away from him as possible.”
Myers described the night in question clearly:
Myers stated he and Jerry had just finished a workout and went into the shower area to shower and leave. “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 trying to sting each other. I would slap the walls and would 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, a sound I have heard before. I never saw who closed the locker. The grand jury report says Coach McQueary said he observed Jerry and I engaged in sexual activity. This is not the truth and McQueary is not telling the truth. Nothing occurred that night in the shower.”
A few weeks later, however, Myers signed up with a lawyer who represented a number of alleged Sandusky victims. Myers then made a statement to police in which he completely changed his tune. He was one of Sandusky’s victims, he now said.
You can be forgiven if you find this confusing. The boy in the shower was the most important witness in the whole case. Prosecutors had been searching high and low for him, because he would be the final nail in Sandusky’s coffin. So finally he surfaces, denies anything happened, then almost immediately flips, saying actually something did happen. So did Myers become the key prosecution witness in the Sandusky trial? That would make sense. He was the most important piece in the whole puzzle. No! The prosecution left him at home because they had no confidence in his story.7
The only time Myers ever appeared in court was to testify at Sandusky’s appeal. Sandusky had asked for him to testify, in the vain hope that Myers would revert to his original position and say that nothing happened in the shower. Myers did not. Instead, as Sandusky’s lawyers read back to Myers each of the statements he had made less than a year before about Sandusky’s innocence, Myers sat there stone-faced and shrugged at everything, including a picture of him standing happily next to Sandusky. Who are the people in the photo? he was asked.
Myers: That’s myself and your client.
Defense: And when was that picture taken? If you know.
Myers: That I do not remember.
It was a picture of Myers and Sandusky at Myers’s wedding. In all, he said he didn’t recall thirty-four times.
Then there was Brett Swisher Houtz, a Second Mile child with whom Sandusky had been very close. He was probably the most devastating witness at Sandusky’s trial. Houtz told of being repeatedly assaulted and abused—of dozens of lurid sexual encounters with Sandusky during his teenage years, in showers and saunas and hotel rooms.
Prosecution: Mr. Houtz, can you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury approximately how many times the defendant in either the East Area locker room or the Lasch Building shower…put his penis in your mouth?
Houtz: It would have to be forty times at least.
P: Did you want him to do it—
Houtz: No.
P: —on any of those occasions?
Houtz: No.
Then Sandusky’s wife, Dottie, was called to the stand. She was asked when she and her husband last saw Brett Houtz.
D. Sandusky: I think it was three years ago, or two years ago. I’m not sure.
The stories Houtz told of his abuse were alleged to have happened in the 1990s. Dottie Sandusky was saying that two decades after being brutally and repeatedly victimized, Houtz decided to drop by for a visit.
Defense: Can you tell us about that?
D. Sandusky: Yeah. Jerry got a phone call. It was Brett. He said, I want to come over. I want to bring my girlfriend and my baby for you to see. The baby was like two years old. And they came over and my friend Elaine Steinbacher was there, and we went and got Kentucky Fried Chicken and had dinner. And it was a very pleasant visit.
This is a much more perplexing example than Trinea Gonczar in the Nassar case. Gonczar never denied that something happened in her sessions with Nassar. She chose to interpret his actions as benign—for entirely understandable reasons—up until the point when she listened to the testimony of her fellow gymnasts at Nassar’s trial. Sandusky, by contrast, wasn’t practicing some ambiguous medical procedure. He is supposed to have engaged in repeated acts of sexual violence. And his alleged victims didn’t misinterpret what he was doing to them. They acted as if nothing had ever happened. They didn’t confide in their friends. They didn’t write anguished accounts in their journals. They dropped by, years later, to show off their babies to the man who raped them. They invited their rapist to their weddings. One victim showered with Sandusky and called himself the “luckiest boy in the world.” Another boy emerged with a story, after months of prodding by a t
herapist, that couldn’t convince a grand jury.
Sexual-abuse cases are complicated, wrapped in layers of shame and denial and clouded memories, and few high-profile cases were as complicated as Jerry Sandusky’s. Now think about what that complication means for those who must make sense of all that swirling contradiction. There were always doubts about Sandusky. But how do you get to enough doubts when the victims are happily eating Kentucky Fried Chicken with their abuser?
6.
So: McQueary goes to see his boss, Joe Paterno on a Saturday. An alarmed Paterno sits down with Tim Curley and Gary Schultz the following day, Sunday. They immediately call the university’s counsel and then brief the university president, Graham Spanier, on Monday. Then Curley and Schultz call in Mike McQueary.
You can only imagine what Curley and Schultz are thinking as they listen to him: If this really was a rape, why didn’t you break it up? If what you saw was so troubling, why didn’t anyone—including your family friend, who is a doctor—tell the police? And if you—Mike McQueary—were so upset about what you saw, why did you wait so long to tell us?
Curley and Schultz then call the university’s outside counsel. But McQueary hasn’t given them much. They instinctively reach—as we all do—for the most innocent of explanations: Maybe Jerry was just being goofy Jerry. Here is the Penn State lawyer, Wendell Courtney, recounting his conversation with Gary Schultz.
Courtney: I asked at some point along the way whether this horseplay involving Jerry and a young boy, whether there was anything sexual in nature. And he indicated to me that there was not to his knowledge.…My vision, at least when it was being described to me and talking with Mr. Schultz, was that it was, you know, a young boy with the showers on, a lot of water in the shower area, group shower area just kinda, you know, running and sliding on the floor…
Prosecution: Are you sure he didn’t say slapping sound or anything sexual in nature at all?
Courtney: I am quite positive he never said to me slapping sounds or anything sexual in nature that was reported going on in the shower.
Courtney said he thought about it and considered the worst-case scenario. This was, after all, a man and a boy in the shower after hours. But then he thought of what he knew of Jerry Sandusky “as someone that goofed around with Second Mile kids all the time in public,” and he defaulted to that impression.8
Schultz and his colleague Tim Curley then go to see university president Spanier.
Prosecution: You did tell Graham Spanier it was “horseplay”?
Schultz: Yeah.
P: When did you tell him that?
Schultz: Well, the first—first report that we got that was passed on to us is “horsin’ around.” Jerry Sandusky was seen in the shower horsin’ around with a kid.…And I think that word was repeated to President Spanier that, you know…that he was horsin’ around.
Spanier listened to Curley and Schultz and asked two questions. “Are you sure that’s how it was described to you, as ‘horsing around’?” They said yes. Then Spanier asked again: “Are you sure that’s all that was said to you?” They said yes. Spanier barely knew Sandusky. Penn State has thousands of employees. One of them—now retired—was spotted in a shower?
“I remember, for a moment, sort of figuratively scratching our heads and thinking about what’s an appropriate way to follow up on ‘horsing around,’” Spanier said later. “I had never gotten a report like that before.”
If Harry Markopolos had been president of Penn State during the Sandusky case, of course, he would never have defaulted like this to the most innocent of explanations. A man in a shower? With a boy? The kind of person who saw through Madoff’s deceit a decade before anyone else would have leaped at once to the most damning conclusion: How old was the kid? What were they doing there at night? Wasn’t there a weird case with Sandusky a couple of years ago?
But Graham Spanier is not Harry Markopolos. He opted for the likeliest explanation—that Sandusky was who he claimed to be. Does he regret not asking one more follow-up question, not quietly asking around? Of course he does. But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency. Spanier behaved no differently from the Mountain Climber and Scott Carmichael and Nat Simons and Trinea Gonczar and virtually every one of the parents of the gymnasts treated by Larry Nassar. Weren’t those parents in the room when Nassar was abusing their own children? Hadn’t their children said something wasn’t right? Why did they send their child back to Nassar, again and again? Yet in the Nassar case no one has ever suggested that the parents of the gymnasts belong in jail for failing to protect their offspring from a predator. We accept the fact that being a parent requires a fundamental level of trust in the community of people around your child.
If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth—even when that decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure.
7.
Tim Curley and Gary Schultz were charged first. Two of the most important officials at one of the most prestigious state universities in the United States were placed under arrest. Spanier called his senior staff together for an emotional meeting. He considered Penn State to be a big family. These were his friends. When they told him the shower incident was probably just horseplay, he believed they were being honest.
“You’re going to find that everyone is going to distance themselves from Gary and Tim,” he said. But he would not.
Every one of you in here has worked with Tim and Gary for years. Some of you, for thirty-five or forty years, because that’s how long Tim and Gary, respectively, were at the university.…You’ve worked with them every day of your life, and I have for the last sixteen years.…If any of you operate according to how we have always agreed to operate at this university—honestly, openly, with integrity, always doing what’s in the best interests of the university—if you were falsely accused of something, I would do the same thing for any of you in here. I want you to know that.…None of [you] should ever fear doing the right thing, or being accused of wrongdoing when [you] knew [you] were doing the right thing…because this university would back them up.9
This is why people liked Graham Spanier. It’s why he had such a brilliant career at Penn State. It’s why you and I would want to work for him. We want Graham Spanier as our president—not Harry Markopolos, armed to the teeth, waiting for a squad of government bureaucrats to burst through the front door.
This is the first of the ideas to keep in mind when considering the death of Sandra Bland. We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to truth. When we try to send people like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in positions of authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers—without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
1 At the time, that was a record amount for a U.S. university in a sexual-abuse case. That record was soon broken, however, in the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University, where damages paid by the school may end up being $500 million.
2 Charges also included perjury (which was quickly dropped) and child endangerment. Eventually the two men pled guilty only to “child endangerment” so that all other charges could be dropped.
3 Just as this book was going to press, Spanier’s conviction was thrown out by a federal judge, the day before he was to finally report to prison. Whether or not the prosecution will appeal the ruling is—as we are going to press—unknown.
4 This was not unusual for Sandusky. He showered all the time after workouts with Second Mile boys, and loved playing locker-room games. “What happened is…the horsing around would lead to him starting like a soap battle,�
� one former Second Miler testified at the Sandusky trial. “There was soap dispensers beside each one of the showers, and he would pump his hand full of soap and basically throw it.”
5 The idea that traumatic memories are repressed and can be retrieved only under the direction of therapy is—to say the least—controversial. See the Notes for a further discussion of this.
6 The evidence gathered by Ziegler on this point is compelling. For example, when Dranov testified in the Spanier trial, he said he had met with Gary Schultz on an entirely separate matter late that February, and had brought up the issue of Sandusky “since this was maybe three months after the incident and we hadn’t heard any follow-up.” Will we ever know the exact date? Probably not.
Ziegler is the most vociferous of those who believe that Sandusky was wrongfully accused. See also: Mark Pendergrast, The Most Hated Man in America. Some of Ziegler’s arguments are more convincing than others. For a longer discussion of the Sandusky skeptics, see the Notes.
7 The prosecution’s report on Allan Myers is a doozy. An investigator named Michael Corricelli spoke to Myers’s lawyer, who told him that Myers now claimed to have been raped repeatedly by Sandusky. His lawyer produced a three-page account allegedly written by Myers detailing his abuse at the hands of Sandusky. The prosecution team read the account and suspected that it hadn’t been written by Myers at all but rather by his lawyer. Finally the prosecution gave up, and walked away from one of the most important figures in the entire case.
8 Courtney had doubts about Sandusky’s innocence. But in the end Sandusky’s cover story was just too convincing. Someone that goofed around with Second Mile kids all the time in public. Curley then called the executive director of the Second Mile, John Raykovitz. Raykovitz promised to have a word with Sandusky and tell him not to bring any more boys on campus. “I can only speak for myself, but I thought Jerry had a boundary issue, judgment issue, that needed to be addressed,” Curley explained. Sandusky needed to be careful, he felt, or people would think he was a pedophile. “I told him,” Raykovitz said, “that it would be more appropriate—if he was going to shower with someone after a workout—that he wear swim trunks. And I said that because…that was the time when there was a lot of stuff coming out about Boy Scouts and church and things of that nature.”
Talking to Strangers Page 11
