Sunday, September 23

The Mind of a Pedophile - Getting it Right

NEW YORKER's Malcomb Gladwell - A realistic look at Sandusky in The Mind of a Pedophile. 

It has been a long time coming but is there finally some common sense and reality slipping into the conscience of the media?

The PSU Board of Trustees could have made this a real debate 10 months ago had they simply stood by Joe, Tim, Gary, and Graham Spanier and made the Attorney General prove her absurd charges that a cover up of a known pedophile had occurred at PSU. Instead led by Tom Corbett and John P. Surma they hired Louis Freeh to cement the idea of a cover up in the public consciousness. 

This move to hire disgraced former FBI failure Louis Freeh for a second unwarranted fictional indictment compounded the egregious error by John P Surma - who cancelled Joe Paterno's press conference and then led the charge to fire him and Dr Spanier - signaling the media that the Board of Trustees believed they were guilty of this Linda Kelly imagined cover up. Surma evidently did this as part of a personal vendetta against the aging coach. 
 — the people who knew Sandusky, saw him with children, saw him playing and touching and even showering with them, and never suspected he was what he was.
Childcare specialists  trained in identifying the tell-tale signs of pedophilia cleared Sandusky during the 1998 probe into a mother’s concern over a workout and shower. No charges were brought in that case.



Three years later, when Mike McQueary told Joe Paterno that he heard sounds of "a sexual nature" from Sandusky in a shower with a young boy, Paterno dutifully passed the matter up to the chain of command. Just what McQueary told Paterno, and later AD Tim Curley and VP Gary Schultz, remains in dispute.

After Sandusky’s arrest last year, Paterno was asked if he considered calling the cops after hearing McQueary’s story.

Paterno told author Joe Posnanski. “This isn’t my field. I didn’t know what to do. I had not seen anything. Jerry didn’t work for me anymore. I didn’t have anything to do with him. I tried to look at Penn State guidelines to see what I was supposed to do. It said I was supposed to call Tim (Curley). So I called him.” All that, sounds strangely reasonable, does it not?

It was Curley and Schultz, who after talking to McQueary, talked to Sandusky. No one, as Gladwell makes clear, is better at feigning hurt innocence than a self-deluding pedophile.

Despite, McQueary’s story, whatever it was, it was decided that Curley would notify Jack Raykovitz, head of the Second Mile, the charity for children Sandusky founded, that they had a problem with Sandusky’s behavior.  
Gil Spencer in the delco times writes about the New Yorker article 
Not reported by Gladwell, but told to me by a person close to the case, Raykovitz, a trained psychologist himself, raised and dismissed the concern that Sandusky might be a child molester.
“Are you trying to tell me that you think Jerry Sandusky is a pedophile?” Raykovitz asked Curley. Because, if that’s what he was trying to tell him, Raykovitz suggested, Tim Curley had lost his mind.

Tim Curley's Grand Jury testimony indicated that he believed Sandusky’s problem was boundary issues that could be misconstrued into something else — not that he had a full-blown child predator on his hands. As it turned out, Curley, and the rest of PSU’s official leadership were wrong about that. But then so were many, many others.

The media, Louis Freeh and the PSU BoT caused a deeply held belief of a lot people that Paterno, Curley, Schultz and PSU President Graham Spanier understood what Sandusky was and covered it up to protect the university and its football program from “bad publicity.” The more likely reality is that Jerry Sandusky simply fooled them all.



10 comments:

  1. Keep up the good work Barry. May want to check this out as well.

    http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/8408091/ncaa-president-mark-emmert-happy-penn-state-response-sanctions

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  2. The one thing that really gets me about this is the Philadelphia Police not investigating Sandusky in the late 80s with Ed Savitz. The witnesses in the 80s were willing to testify against Sandusky the police could have shut down what sounds like a pedophile ring. I really believe some of the people at those parties were the same ones who may have helped convince Gricar not pursue in 1998. We need those witnesses from the 80s to come forward and try to identify some of the party goers from that time.
    Also the fact that Freeh was intertwined with Second Mile and PSU's BOT should have disqualified him from even taking on the investigation in the first place. I am not a fresh ham, a side of bacon, or a turkey so I do not want people blowing smoke up my A$$.

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  3. Another excellent installment, Barry. I urge everyone to read the entire New Yorker article and pass on the link to all of your contacts.

    Barry, I would imagine by now your dedication (and that of the other contributors to this site) has caught the eye of Joe Posnanski. So, Joe Pos, I hope you are considering a Part II to your "Paterno" book, to thoroughly expose the misfeasance and malfeasance of the PSU BOT, PA AG Kelly, Corbett, Surma, Erickson, Emmert, and others.

    Surely you will have major input into how the movie is made. Please do not let the producers make this movie without presenting the truth. There is so much more to tell that would help rehabilitate the legacy of this very honorable man known as JoePa.

    And I hope Emmert is portrayed as the tyrant and utter fool that he is. He has entirely ignored the truth and continues to make statements indicating that he has not even studied most of the facts. History should remember Mark Emmert as a man who did not lead when leadership was needed, but who jumped to unfounded conclusions and carelessly and negligently destroyed reputations.

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  4. This isn't on topic, but when will Ray be putting out his review of the Freeh report and what if anything is going on with examining the emails for tampering?

    thanks

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  5. Patience, please. Moving slowly to get it right. Don't want anyone to poke holes in anything or be able to use the same comebacks they did with Spanier. Also, timing is important. Nothing is coming out until after the election and will be watching the news cycle for a dead spot.

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  7. I can also confirm the substance abuse issue me and Vic Jr attended the same rehab in delray beach fl, we spoke very often and he gave me many inside details of the penn state scandal that I have still not repeated to this day. This was right in the middle of the case, Vic Jr had a problem with multiple drugs the day released from rehab he left and immeadietly used drugs. Took the credit card his parents supplied him with and bought flat screen televisions and proceeded to pawn them for money to purchase crack cocaine. He then pawned an iPad he had for more crack cocaine and was living on the beach for two weeks. I have not since heard from him since July of 2012. To put it in short words without revealing inside information there is a lot more to the Sandusky case then the public knows me and victor where very close through out rehab.

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