Page 64 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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
therapist, 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