by Bill Moushey
“I don’t know what I can say that would make anybody feel any different now. I would just say that if somehow people could hang out until my attorney has a chance to fight, you know, for my innocence. That’s about all I could ask right now. And you know, obviously, it’s a huge challenge.”
Costas thanked him for his time and the interview ended. Immediately the Internet was filled with commentary about why Sandusky would agree to take questions and why Amendola would allow it. In terms of specifics, bloggers were most curious about what took the disgraced coach so long to answer the question about sexually desiring young boys. They were shocked that he explained himself rather than just saying no. Newspaper reports were loaded with defense lawyers and child abuse experts who characterized that nonspecific answer as evidence affirming Sandusky’s prurient interests. His denials also sparked outrage from his accusers and their lawyers. The outrage alternated between castigation of Amendola for allowing the interview and anger over Sandusky’s across-the-board denials.
“This is one of the worst cases of voyeurism I’ve ever seen,” said Marci Hamilton, a lawyer and expert in child abuse cases who, at the time, was preparing a lawsuit she would later file on behalf of a man who said Sandusky assaulted him one hundred times. She could not understand why Amendola would put his client on national television before he was tried. Ultimately, she said, it was Sandusky’s choice, even if in her opinion it was a bad one for legal reasons. “The beauty of this was that once he began talking about taking showers with children, anyone who listened would see he doesn’t get it, that he’s so deeply involved in the world of child abuse and his own narcissism that he has an inability to understand how his message plays out with healthy adults. It is very typical [of child predators],” Hamilton said.
Andrew Shubin, a Pennsylvania lawyer who represented at least one of the young men, issued a written statement after the interview aired: “Our investigation reveals that Sandusky is an unrepentant child predator. He caused incalculable devastation to children, their families and our community and is continuing to do so through his attacks on the victims’ credibility.”
Justine Andronici, a victim’s rights lawyer who is working with Shubin and others on the Sandusky case, also lashed out in a statement of her own: “These statements play on the victims’ worst fears—that if they stand up and tell the truth they will be called liars and victimized again. Pedophiles seek to silence their victims with the threat that no one will believe them if they come forward. Perpetrators of sexual abuse also maintain manipulative, long-term contact with their victims for the very purpose of continuing to silence them.”
Michael Boni, the lawyer representing the Clinton County boy whose reports to state police started the grand jury investigation in 2008, said Sandusky’s interview with Costas felt like “another punch in the stomach” to his client and his client’s mother.
As if letting Costas have access to Sandusky weren’t enough, Amendola made his client available to the New York Times two weeks later. With his lawyer in the room, Sandusky talked for four hours over two days. He repeated many of the things he had told Costas, but he also tried to explain why he did not quickly and directly answer the question about whether he is attracted to young boys. “I’m sitting there saying, ‘What in the world is this question?’ If I say, ‘No, I’m not attracted to boys,’ that’s not the truth, because I’m attracted to young people—boys, girls.”
Sandusky’s lawyer could be heard in the background chiming in to help him with the answer. “Yeah, but not sexually,” Amendola said. “You’re attracted because you enjoy spending time [with them].”
Sandusky picked up the hint. “Right,” he agreed. “That’s what I was trying to say. I enjoy spending time with young people.”
Later Amendola said he was considering scheduling another network interview so Sandusky and his wife, Dottie, could defend against numerous allegations that children had been abused in their home, sometimes while Dottie was upstairs. The couple wanted to say the allegations were patently untrue.
The indictment did not directly implicate Dottie Sandusky, but she was mentioned in it. The presentment said she was in contact with at least two former Second Milers during the grand jury investigation. Like most of the others, the young man listed in the presentment as Victim 7 said he was abused repeatedly in Sandusky’s basement bedroom. According to the indictment, in the summer of 2011 he “had not had contact with Sandusky for nearly two years but was contacted by Sandusky, and separately by his wife and a friend in the weeks prior to Victim 7’s appearance before the Grand Jury. The callers left messages saying the matter was very important. Victim 7 did not return these phone calls.”
Also during the summer of 2011, after Sandusky had resigned from the charity under the cloud of the grand jury investigation, he and his wife invited the child later known as Victim 6 to dinner under the guise of hosting a get-together for Second Mile alumni. Victim 6 was the child whose mother reported Sandusky to police in 1998 after her son told her he’d inappropriately shared a shower with Sandusky in the Penn State football locker room. The boy’s lawyer and the Pennsylvania State Police discussed the Sandusky proposition with the child. If he was up to the task, they would send him with a wire and keep the residence under surveillance to protect him. The young man agreed to the sting, but said he was too afraid to wear a wire. He met for dinner with Jerry and Dottie; however, they did not discuss the grand jury.
After the interview with the New York Times, Amendola continued to say that the allegations were false. There was always so much activity in the Sandusky home when the children visited that the abuse described in the charges could never have happened, he said.
Dottie Sandusky had been a mother figure to The Second Mile for decades. While Jerry was still coaching, she was left to do the heavy lifting at home. The in-season demands on her husband’s time and his constant traveling throughout the year for football-related events and recruitment of players made her a football widow. Jerry joked that he was another kid for her to supervise; that’s why he affectionately called her “Sarge,” according to his autobiography.
While she did make contact with grand jury witnesses in the summer of 2011, it remains unclear if she knew about the full range of the accusations against her husband, including the abuse reports from 1998 and 2002. A friend of some of the Sandusky children thought she knew more than she was letting on. He told a newspaper reporter for the Centre Daily Times that Dottie had once discussed with him her long-standing concern that her husband’s touchy-feely behavior toward children might one day cause someone to take him the wrong way.
She took her first and only public stand in a written statement after a second set of charges was filed against her husband on December 7, 2011, in relation to two more accusers who came forward with allegations of sexual abuse against Sandusky. One of the accusers suggested Dottie may have known her husband was molesting him in their basement. According to the presentment, that young man said he was told to stay in the basement during his visits to the Sandusky home. He said Sandusky delivered his meals to him there and that he was repeatedly abused and raped by Sandusky in the finished basement bedroom. Most disturbingly, he said while he was being anally raped “on at least one occasion he screamed for help, knowing that Sandusky’s wife was upstairs, but no one ever came to help him.”
That allegation that Dottie may have ignored a sexual assault in her basement provoked Dottie’s only public statement. In a letter to the press, Dottie vehemently defended her husband and addressed the young man’s allegations: “I have been shocked and dismayed by the allegations made against Jerry, particularly the most recent one that a young man has said he was kept in our basement during visits and screamed for help as Jerry assaulted him while I was in our home and didn’t respond to his cries for help. As the mother of six children, I have been devastated by these accusations. I am also angry about these false accusations that such a terrible incident ever occurred in my h
ome.”
Dottie insisted that all the hundreds of children who visited their home over the years were treated like family. She said her own family and friends could vouch for their good care of children. She finished by thanking all of their supporters and saying Jerry would prove his innocence.
Dottie hasn’t been seen in public much since, although she had to wade through a sea of cameras on December 7, when she came to district court after a second set of charges was filed against her husband. Two more young men had come forward with allegations of abuse, and a judge remanded him to jail, pending a $250,000 cash bond. Dottie had to sign over the deed to their house and put up as collateral a $50,000 cashier’s check to secure her husband’s release. She and her husband were also seen, surrounded by several members of their family, when they arrived at the Centre County Courthouse in early December 2011 for Sandusky’s preliminary hearing. Dottie’s full head of red hair had faded to gray, and the vibrant smile present when cameras caught her in good times had turned into a stoic frown. She followed her husband into court peering straight ahead. She did not utter a word, as if there were nothing more she could say.
Chapter 13
The Court of Public Opinion
Before dawn on December 12, 2011, more than two hundred reporters crowded into the Centre County Courthouse in bucolic Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, almost two hours before Jerry Sandusky was expected to face as many as ten young accusers prepared to testify under oath that he was a predatory pedophile. Outside the steepled courthouse at least twice that many photographers and television technicians were jammed onto a frozen patch of lawn that had been painted with red lines to give every network a piece of earth from which to broadcast their reports about one of the most infamous child sex abuse cases in American history. A representative from Oprah Winfrey was passing out handwritten letters to lawyers from the television impresario asking for exclusive interviews with their clients. More than thirteen hundred people had registered for a lottery for one of a hundred courtroom seats available to the general public. The overflow crowd could watch the proceedings via closed circuit television in a county office building across the street. In an unprecedented ruling, a visiting judge allowed reporters to bring laptop computers into the courtroom to transmit minute-by-minute accounts of the proceedings via Twitter and other social networks.
Never before had security in Bellefonte, a town of just over six thousand people, been so tight. The Centre County seat, which got its name from a natural spring buried deep below it, was better known for fly-fishing than courtroom drama. But on this crisp morning heavily armed local and state police surrounded the courthouse. Snipers with high-powered rifles scanned the scene from perches behind Victorian eaves on the roofs of historic buildings, whose unique charm was normally fodder for walking tours led by architecture enthusiasts.
About an hour before the hearing was to begin on that subfreezing morning, Jerry Sandusky emerged from a vehicle in a back lot and smiled briefly as his grim-faced wife gripped his arm and walked silently beside him. A tan shawl shielded her from the cold, and white pearls adorned her ears. The gray-haired grandmother with wire-rimmed glasses added nothing to written statements she had given in the weeks leading up to the hearing, when she had offered full support for her husband of forty years.
As the couple walked deliberately toward the front steps of the courthouse, neither they nor those who had come out to support them this cold winter day avoided the cameras, but they all ignored questions. Sandusky’s smile had vanished by the time he went through the metal detector and made the solemn walk to the upstairs courtroom. The room was quiet as Dottie and other family members veered to the right to find their reserved seats. Sandusky walked behind his lawyer, Joseph Amendola, who glad-handed attorneys and reporters as he waltzed up the courtroom aisle like a politician on the campaign trail. Sandusky made no eye contact with anyone, instead gazing blankly ahead or occasionally up at the painted gold leaves crowning the ceiling.
Two young men sat silently in a courthouse anteroom just a few feet from where they expected to take the witness stand and unburden themselves of terrible secrets. Eight other young men sat in a private conference room in a state police barracks outside of town, ready to report to the courthouse accompanied by undercover state troopers when it was their turn to testify. All of them were being consoled by their lawyers, who had prepped them extensively during the past week for what they could expect. Some had known each other from picnics and swimming meets and other programs they experienced as young children at The Second Mile; others had met as they awaited their turn on a psychologist’s couch. A few of them were there because their mothers had called police when they learned of Sandusky’s misdeeds; most of them had never intended to face down the man. They had merely answered questions when investigators asked if they had experienced inappropriate behavior by Sandusky.
The young men were not from the same towns in central Pennsylvania, but they were bonded by common threads in their backgrounds. All of them had troubled family situations or had been in trouble at school. All of them went to The Second Mile because it offered programs and people who would help them build needed structure in their lives. They also learned through the program to develop a positive outlook to face their adversities.
To the outside world, they would be identified by the collective label of “victim” in the Sandusky case and assigned numbers one through ten to tell them apart. But inside the conference room they had faces and names and personalities that made them flesh-and-blood human beings. They also had another thing in common: all of them had told a statewide investigating grand jury they had been sexually assaulted by Sandusky after they turned to or were sent by school counselors to The Second Mile. They had sworn under oath that once Sandusky identified them as marks for abuse, he plied them with material things they previously could only dream of. In each case, the boys thought they had found a male role model who genuinely cared about them. Now they were prepared to say in open court that Sandusky had made inappropriate sexual advances toward them and in some cases that he had molested them for months or years.
That morning they all felt the underlying tension. They would have to stare down the jovial, white-haired Sandusky and tell a judge that the man who professed to love them had betrayed their trust and stolen their souls. All of them had been advised not to share the details of their sexual molestation at the hands of Sandusky. They didn’t need to. By that point all of them had read the original forty-count indictment as well as the twelve additional counts against their former mentor. All of them now understood that Sandusky was being accused with crafting a grooming plan of abuse as tightly as he had strategies for defensive success on the gridiron. They now knew they weren’t alone in their nightmares.
The plan put together by prosecutors called for the first two witnesses already in the courthouse to complete their testimony. Then the rest would be driven one by one from the state police barracks to face down Sandusky. Some of these young men had waited fifteen years to break their silence. They waited because they feared Sandusky, or were so ashamed of what he had done to them that they preferred to keep it secret, or were convinced no one would believe them. Now the day had finally come to confront their internal and external demons in front of a national audience.
In the days leading up to this first showdown, Amendola worked the media in an effort to knock down the seriousness of charges against his client. He proclaimed to almost any reporter who asked that Sandusky was innocent and that his actions had been misunderstood. Sandusky himself had given two interviews, in which he admitted that he had showered with boys and had engaged in contact that others would, at the very least, deem inappropriate. Sandusky’s actions, Amendola argued, were not sexual but the acts of an “overgrown kid.” Amendola, who pointedly referred to the young men as “accusers,” stated that as many as half of them might be called to testify as character witnesses on Sandusky’s behalf.
The courtroom audience c
ouldn’t wait to hear the evidence and listen to the voices of young men whose stories had only been told in printed statements from the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office. Before Sandusky even took his seat, Amendola led him into a back room for a meeting with prosecutors. Fifteen minutes later the two men emerged. The man who had been pictured in news reports for years pumping his fists and smiling broadly after college football victories slumped forlornly into his seat at the defense table. His head drooped as if he couldn’t summon the strength to hold it up, his hands folded on the table in front of him.
After a quick and hushed meeting in front of Senior Magisterial District Judge Robert E. Scott, Sandusky’s lawyer announced that his client would waive his preliminary hearing and take his case directly to trial. In less than two minutes after Sandusky told the judge he agreed with the waiver the hearing was over.
People inside and outside the courtroom were stunned. If his intention had been to waive the hearing, why had he waited until the last minute and put all his alleged victims through the horrible process of preparing to testify? One possible scenario was that Sandusky, the ultimate control freak, wanted to let the process go forward only to be the ultimate director of the action. Caught by reporters as he exited a back door of the courthouse, Sandusky was resolute and offered a football metaphor as a sound bite: “We fully intend to put together the best possible defense that we can do, to stay the course, to fight for four quarters. . . . We want the opportunity to present our side.”
Reporters had expected a full day or more in court and testimony from as many as ten of Sandusky’s accusers. Now they had to chase after Amendola, who was ready and more than willing to present his case in the court of public opinion in front of a forest of microphones on the front lawn of the courthouse.
Amendola said he had legitimate reasons for waiting until trial to contest the charges. First of all, he said, rules of preliminary hearings in Pennsylvania courts limit cross-examination of witnesses. Prosecutors have to present only enough evidence that a crime had occurred, known as prima facie, or first blush, to cause the matter to be held for trial. In talks late the previous night, he said, prosecutors agreed to quickly turn over discovery materials, a legal term that describes the state’s obligation to turn over all evidence in the cases against Sandusky, especially any negative information they possess about any potential witnesses. He said they also agreed that if future charges were to be filed against his client, prosecutors would not ask for a higher bond.
