Page 65 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

was just being goofy Jerry. Here is the Penn State lawyer, Wendell Courtney, recounting his
conversation with Gary Schultz.
Courtney: I asked at some point along the way whether this horseplay involving Jerry and a
young boy, whether there was anything sexual in nature. And he indicated to me that there
was not to his knowledge.…My vision, at least when it was being described to me and talking
with Mr. Schultz, was that it was, you know, a young boy with the showers on, a lot of water
in the shower area, group shower area just kinda, you know, running and sliding on the
floor…
Prosecution: Are you sure he didn’t say slapping sound or anything sexual in nature at all?
Courtney: I am quite positive he never said to me slapping sounds or anything sexual in nature
that was reported going on in the shower.
Courtney said he thought about it and considered the worst-case scenario. This was, after all, a
man and a boy in the shower after hours. But then he thought of what he knew of Jerry Sandusky
“as someone that goofed around with Second Mile kids all the time in public,” and he defaulted to
that impression. 8
Schultz and his colleague Tim Curley then go to see university president Spanier.
Prosecution: You did tell Graham Spanier it was “horseplay”?
Schultz: Yeah.
P: When did you tell him that?
Schultz: Well, the first—first report that we got that was passed on to us is “horsin’ around.”
Jerry Sandusky was seen in the shower horsin’ around with a kid.…And I think that word was
repeated to President Spanier that, you know…that he was horsin’ around.
Spanier listened to Curley and Schultz and asked two questions. “Are you sure that’s how it was
described to you, as ‘horsing around’?” They said yes. Then Spanier asked again: “Are you sure
that’s all that was said to you?” They said yes. Spanier barely knew Sandusky. Penn State has
thousands of employees. One of them—now retired—was spotted in a shower?
“I remember, for a moment, sort of figuratively scratching our heads and thinking about what’s
an appropriate way to follow up on ‘horsing around,’” Spanier said later. “I had never gotten a
report like that before.”
If Harry Markopolos had been president of Penn State during the Sandusky case, of course, he
would never have defaulted like this to the most innocent of explanations. A man in a shower? With
a boy? The kind of person who saw through Madoff’s deceit a decade before anyone else would
have leaped at once to the most damning conclusion: How old was the kid? What were they doing
there at night? Wasn’t there a weird case with Sandusky a couple of years ago?
But Graham Spanier is not Harry Markopolos. He opted for the likeliest explanation—that
Sandusky was who he claimed to be. Does he regret not asking one more follow-up question, not
quietly asking around? Of course he does. But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a
fundamentally human tendency. Spanier behaved no differently from the Mountain Climber and
Scott Carmichael and Nat Simons and Trinea Gonczar and virtually every one of the parents of the
gymnasts treated by Larry Nassar. Weren’t those parents in the room when Nassar was abusing their
own children? Hadn’t their children said something wasn’t right? Why did they send their child
back to Nassar, again and again? Yet in the Nassar case no one has ever suggested that the parents of
the gymnasts belong in jail for failing to protect their offspring from a predator. We accept the fact
that being a parent requires a fundamental level of trust in the community of people around your
child.

If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house,
and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth—even when that
decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And
in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our
sympathy, not our censure.