Page 58 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

5
Aaron Fisher’s story was just as ambiguous. What Fisher remembered, during all those
conversations with his therapist and sessions with the grand jury, kept changing. Once he said the
oral sex stopped in November 2007; another time he said it started in the summer of 2007 and
continued until September 2008; another time he said it started in 2008 and continued into 2009. He
said that he had performed oral sex on Sandusky many times. A week later he said he had done it
only once, and then five months later he denied ever having done it at all. Fisher testified about
Sandusky before a grand jury twice in 2009, but it seems the grand jury didn’t find him credible.
They declined to indict Sandusky.
The police began systematically interviewing other boys who had been in the Second Mile
program, looking for victims. They came up empty. This went on for two years. The prosecutor
leading the case was ready to throw in the towel. You have a grown man who likes to horse around
with young boys. Some people had doubts about Sandusky. But remember, doubts are not the
enemy of belief; they are its companion.
Then, out of the blue, in November 2010, the prosecutor’s office received an anonymous email:
“I am contacting you regarding the Jerry Sandusky investigation,” the email read. “If you have not
yet done so, you need to contact and interview Penn State football assistant coach Mike McQueary.
He may have witnessed something involving Jerry Sandusky and a child.”

No more troubled teenagers with uncertain memories. With Michael McQueary, the prosecution
finally had the means to make its case against Sandusky and the leadership of the university. A man
sees a rape, tells his boss, and nothing happens—for eleven years. If you read about the Sandusky
case at the time, that is the version you probably heard, stripped of all ambiguity and doubt.
“You know, there’s a saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely,” the prosecutor, Laura
Ditka, said in her closing argument at Spanier’s trial. “And I would suggest to you that Graham
Spanier was corrupted by his own power and blinded by his own media attention and reputation;
and he’s a leader that failed to lead.” At Penn State, the final conclusion was that blame for
Sandusky’s crimes went all the way to the top. Spanier made a choice, Ditka said: “We’ll just keep it
a secret,” she imagined him saying to Curley and Schultz. “We won’t report it. We won’t tell any
authorities.”
If only things were that simple.

3.

Michael McQueary is six foot five. When he started as quarterback for Penn State, his weight was
listed as 225 pounds. At the time of the shower incident, he was twenty-seven years old, in the
physical prime of his life. Sandusky was thirty years older, with a laundry list of medical ailments.
First question: If McQueary was absolutely sure he witnessed a rape, why didn’t he jump in and
stop it?
In Part Three of Talking to Strangers, I’m going to tell the story of an infamous sexual-assault
case at Stanford University. It was discovered when two graduate students were cycling at midnight
through the campus and saw a young man and woman lying on the ground. The man was on top,
making thrusting movements. The woman was still. The two students approached the couple. The
man ran. The students gave chase. There were enough suspicious facts about that situation to trigger
the grad students out of the default assumption that the encounter on the ground was innocent.
McQueary faced a situation that was—in theory, at least—a good deal more suspicious. It was
not two adults. It was a man and a boy, both naked. But McQueary didn’t step in. He backed away,
ran upstairs, and called his father. His father told him to come home. Then his father asked a family
friend, a medical doctor by the name of Jonathan Dranov, to come over and hear Michael’s story.
This is Dranov, under oath, describing what McQueary told him:
He said that he heard sounds, sexual sounds. And I asked him what he meant. And he just said,
“Well, you know, sounds, sexual sounds.” Well, I didn’t know exactly what he was talking
[about]. He didn’t become any more graphic or detail[ed than] that, but as I pressed him, it was
obvious that he didn’t have anything more he was going to say about it at the time. I asked him