Page 162 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Sandusky. Corricelli examined the document and indicated to me that he suspected the document
was written by Anthony Shubin. I advised that I did not want a copy of a document that was
suspected to be written by Attorney Shubin.” Sassano concluded: “At this time, I don’t anticipate
further investigation concerning Allan Myers.”
For more on the controversy over repressed traumatic memories (in footnote), see, for example, C.
J. Brainerd and V. F. Reyna, The Science of False Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
E. F. Loftus and K. Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of
Sexual Abuse (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994); R. J. McNally, Remembering Trauma
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); R. Ofshe and E. Watters, Making Monsters:
False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (New York: Scribner, 1994); D. L. Schacter,
The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2001).
“I am contacting you…Jerry Sandusky and a child”: Geoffrey Moulton, Jr., Report to the
Attorney General of the Investigation of Gerald A. Sandusky, May 30, 2014, Appendix J,
http://filesource.abacast.com/commonwealthofpa/mp4_podcast/2014_06_23_REPORT_to_AG_ON
_THE_SANDUSKY_INVESTIGATION.pdf.
Let’s be clear. The Sandusky case is weird. Ever since Sandusky’s arrest and conviction, a small
group of people have insisted that he is innocent. The most outspoken is the radio talk-show host
John Ziegler, a conservative-leaning journalist. Ziegler is involved with three others in the website
www.framingpaterno.com, which is devoted to poking holes in the prosecution’s case against
Sandusky.
As I mention in my discussion of the Sandusky case, Ziegler is the one who persuasively argues that
there was at least a five-week lag between McQueary’s spotting Sandusky in the shower and his
telling anyone in the Penn State leadership about it. See John Ziegler, “New Proof that December
29, 2000, Not February 9, 2001, was the Real Date of the McQueary Episode,” The Framing of Joe
Paterno (blog), February 9, 2018, http://www.framingpaterno.com/new-proof-december-29-2000-
not-february-9th-2001-was-real-date-mcqueary-episode. Ziegler thinks this is evidence that
McQueary didn’t see what he thought he saw. I think it suggests—in the context of default to truth
—that McQueary had doubts about what he saw. Needless to say, there is a big difference between
those two interpretations.
Ziegler has uncovered a number of other facts, which for reasons of space and focus I did not
include in the chapter. (The Sandusky case is a very very deep and winding rabbit hole.) According
to Ziegler’s reporting, at least some of Sandusky’s victims are not credible. They appear to have
been attracted by the large cash settlements that Penn State was offering and the relatively lax
criteria the university used for deciding who would get paid.
In the course of reporting this chapter, I corresponded on several occasions with Ziegler and chatted
with him on the phone. He generously shared a number of documents with me—including the
memo written by private investigator Curtis Everhart. I’m not convinced of Ziegler’s ultimate
conclusion—that Sandusky is innocent. But I do agree with him that the case is much more
ambiguous and unusual than the conventional press accounts suggest. If you would like to go down
the Sandusky rabbit hole, you may want to start with Ziegler.
A second (and perhaps more mainstream) Sandusky skeptic is author Mark Pendergrast, who
published The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment in 2017.
Pendergrast argues that the Sandusky case was a classic example of a “moral panic” and the frailty
of human memory. I drew heavily from Pendergrast’s book in my account of the Aaron Fisher and
Allan Myers cases. One of the noteworthy things about Pendergrast’s book, I must say, is the back
cover, which has blurbs from two of the most influential and respected experts on memory in the
world: Richard Leo of the University of San Francisco, and Elizabeth Loftus of the University of
California at Irvine.
Here is what Loftus had to say: “The Most Hated Man in America tells a truly remarkable story. In
all the media coverage the Sandusky case has received, it’s amazing that no one else has noticed or
written about so many of these things, including all the ‘memories’ that were retrieved through
therapy and litigation. One would think that the sheer insanity of so much of this will have to
eventually come out.”