Page 60 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

handed down in November of 2011 states that the “graduate assistant”—meaning McQueary—“saw
a naked boy…with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked
Sandusky.” Then the next day McQueary “went to Paterno’s home, where he reported what he had
seen.” But neither of those claims matches the facts, does it?
When McQueary read those words in the indictment, he emailed Jonelle Eshbach, the lead
prosecutor in the case. He was upset. “I feel my words were slightly twisted and not totally
portrayed accurately in the presentment,” he wrote. “I want to make sure that you have the facts
again in case I have not been clear.” Then: “I cannot say 1000 percent sure that it was sodomy. I did
not see insertion. It was a sexual act and / or way over the line in my opinion, whatever it was.” He
wanted to correct the record. “What are my options as far as a statement from me goes?” he asked
Eshbach.
Think about how McQueary must have felt as he read the way Eshbach had distorted his words.
He had seen something he thought was troubling. For five weeks, as he wrestled with his
conscience, he must have been in agony. What did I see? Should I say something? What if I’m
wrong? Then he read the indictment, and what did he find? That the prosecutors, in order to serve
their own ends, had turned gray into black and white. And what did that make him? A coward who
witnessed a rape, ran away to call his parents, and never told the police.
“My life has drastically, drastically changed,” he wrote to Eshbach. The Sandusky who took
showers with young boys late at night was a stranger to McQueary, and Eshbach had refused to
acknowledge how difficult it is to make sense of a stranger. “My family’s life has drastically
changed,” McQueary went on. “National media and public opinion has totally in every single way
ruined me. For what?”

4.

It is useful to compare the Sandusky scandal to a second, even more dramatic child-molestation case
that broke a few years later. It involved a doctor at Michigan State named Larry Nassar. Nassar
served as the team physician for the USA Gymnastics women’s national team. He was bespectacled,
garrulous, a little awkward. He seemed harmless. He doted on his patients. He was the kind of
person you could call on at 2 a.m., and he would come running. Parents loved him. He treated hips
and shins and ankles and the myriad other injuries that result from the enormous stress that
competitive gymnastics puts on young bodies.
Nassar’s specialty was the treatment of what is known as “pelvic-floor dysfunction,” which
involved him inserting his fingers into the vagina of a patient to massage muscles and tendons that
had been shortened by the physical demands of gymnastics training. He did the pelvic-floor
procedure repeatedly and enthusiastically. He did it without consent, without wearing gloves, and
when it wasn’t necessary. He would massage his patients’ breasts. He would penetrate them anally
with his fingers for no apparent reason. He used a medical procedure as the cover for his own sexual
gratification. He was convicted on federal charges in the summer of 2017 and will spend the rest of
his life in prison.
As sexual-abuse scandals go, the Nassar case is remarkably clear-cut. This is not a matter of “he
said, she said.” The police retrieved the hard drive from Nassar’s computer and found a library of
child pornography—37,000 images in all, some of them unspeakably graphic. He had photographs
of his young patients as they sat in his bathtub taking ice baths prior to treatment. He didn’t have
just one accuser, telling a disputed story. He had hundreds of accusers, telling remarkably similar
stories. Here is Rachael Denhollander, whose allegations against Nassar proved critical to his
conviction.
At age fifteen, when I suffered from chronic back pain, Larry sexually assaulted me repeatedly
under the guise of medical treatment for nearly a year. He did this with my own mother in the
room, carefully and perfectly obstructing her view so she would not know what he was doing.
Denhollander had evidence, documentation.
When I came forward in 2016, I brought an entire file of evidence with me.…I brought medical
records from a nurse practitioner documenting my graphic disclosure of abuse…I had my