A List of the Most "Under Known" Facts of the Sandusky Scandal
Probably the toughest thing about convincing people that the media sold them a bill of goods about what really happened in the Sandusky scandal is that they usually think they know the story and they have created a very powerful narrative in their head. That narrative is largely false, but it can’t be removed from the minds of most people with just one fact. Instead, like a painting made up of thousands of brush strokes, the faulty ones need to be removed and replaced, one by one, until a very different image is left to remain in their mind’s eye.
To that end, I have compiled (feel free to email me with others) a list, in no particular order, of the most important data points of which the vast majority of the population and the media are completely unaware. All of these are vital to understanding just how wrong the media’s current narrative of what happened here really is.
Here are the most “under known” facts of the Jerry Sandusky scandal:
The report of Joe Paterno’s police interview just before he testified before the grand jury does not come close to referencing him saying anything about Mike McQueary telling him he saw something “sexual” between Sandusky and a boy in the shower.
Paterno’s statement to the grand jury about McQueary telling him he saw something "sexual" was far from declarative or definitive.
Jonelle Eschbach, the woman who questioned Paterno in that grand jury, posted on Facebook after the presentment was released that he shouldn’t be fired and Paterno was originally “praised” by a source in the AG’s office for acting appropriately.
No one is even alleging that Paterno didn't follow the exact procedure under both the law and school policies that he was supposed to.
Paterno was 84 years old and not in great health at time of his grand jury testimony.
The "I didn't want to ruin anyone's weekend" comment from Paterno about why he waited to inform Tim Curley and Gary Schultz was apparently the result of a faulty memory. They were informed of the McQueary allegation the next day (a Sunday) as was the Penn State lawyer who, apparently, determined that it was not a "reportable" event.
Jerry Sandusky and Paterno were not close friends (which might be why you only ever see one photo of the two of them being “buddy buddy” from what looks like about 1986) and had no regular contact after Sandusky retired.
Sandusky was an EX assistant when the episode Mike McQueary alleges happened.
Paterno didn’t run the school and didn’t always get what he wanted, specifically with the Sandusky retirement deal (he didn’t want Second Mile kids allowed on campus) and the location of the baseball field across from the football stadium named for his friend Anthony Lubrano.
Paterno did not admit guilt in the Sandusky affair. He took some responsibility by saying “with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”
Tim Curley had a son, who would have been seen by Sandusky fairly regularly, almost the same age as the alleged McQueary victim.
Sandusky had multiple football job offers after he retired from PSU but his desire to keep working at the Second Mile, not rumors of sexual abuse, killed the deals.
The Freeh Report specifically exonerates Paterno on Sandusky retirement because the process began before the 1998 allegation even happened.
Paterno was interviewed in 1999 by ESPN about the Sandusky retirement & gave the same answer as he did in 2012, which was that Jerry needed to decide between the Second Mile and football. Not coincidentally this is also the exact same issue which killed the other job offers.
Sandusky’s 1999 retirement came TWO seasons after 1998 allegation, which makes no sense if it was somehow “forced."
It would have been illegal for Paterno to know about details of the 1998 investigation and the evidence that he had any knowledge at all is remarkably weak.
1998 was not an allegation of “sex” and Sandusky was exonerated by the appropriate authorities (not Penn State).
Until the story went public, only one Sandusky victim alleged any form of intercourse and investigators were caught on tape conspiring to lie to that victim to get him to claim sex.
The thirst for vengeance was so great in the Sandusky trial that, incredibly, it was completed seven months after his arrest and he was somehow convicted for an episode which lacked both a victim and a witness.
Mike McQueary got the date of the shower episode wrong by over a year and it was not, as the prosecution originally made a huge deal out of, the “Friday night before Spring Break.”
Jerry Sandusky was source of the correct date for the McQueary shower episode.
The McQueary event took place almost ten years before there was testimony about it.
The victim in the McQueary episode (#2) was interviewed after the indictment by a former FBI investigator and unequivocally denied McQueary’s story.
Sandusky left voice messages for Victim 2 during the grand jury investigation indicating that he should come forward to tell his story, but the prosecution never called him in any proceeding and now claims he doesn’t even exist.
It appears that McQueary played in Second Mile golf events after the episode.
After the story broke, McQueary made up absurd stories to his friends and wide receivers about going after Victim 2, in contradiction of his own testimony.
The grand jury presentment, in a very unusual move, declared McQueary to be “highly credible,” even though he apparently never testified in front of the grand jury panel which actually voted to indict. It will eventually become clear that there are many things about McQueary which make that pronouncement particularly absurd.
McQueary has never testified that he told a specific person he saw sex of any kind and Dr. Dranov, a mandated reporter for child sex abuse, never reported what Mike told him the night of the episode.
Sandusky was found not guilty on the McQueary “rape” allegation.
Paterno followed up twice with McQueary and Mike told him he was OK with how the situation was handled.
Paterno is only directly referenced in one relevant email in the Freeh Report.
The Freeh Report didn’t speak directly to any of the six Penn State employees closest to the case.
The Penn State Board of Trustees did not vote to agree with the findings of the Freeh Report.
The Penn State Board of Trustees did not vote “unanimously” to fire Paterno (all votes are deemed to be “unanimous” and it is unclear if there really even was a “vote”).
No one fought back because all the key players either died or were under indictment and those remaining at Penn State had an incentive to placate the media by throwing those no longer there under the bus while also diminishing football.
McQueary is not alleging being forced to take part in a cover up in his lawsuit against Penn State, which means that the “cover up” somehow didn’t include the most important person in the chain.
Within a couple of weeks of the McQueary episode, about a dozen people had some knowledge of the situation and would have had to have been part of the “cover up.”
Graham Spanier didn’t know that McQueary was the “graduate assistant” who witnessed the shower scene until the story went public.
Curley, Schultz and Spanier didn’t even bother to hire their own lawyers before their grand jury testimony which ended up blowing apart their “cover up.”
Had Joe Paterno just testified that he didn’t remember what McQueary told him ten years before, the “cover up” wouldn’t have been blown and he never would have been fired.
The Penn State “cover up” appears to be the first in human history which did not include the primary witness, the victim, or the perpetrator, and where none of those involved ended up flipping on each other after being indicted.
The perjury case against Spanier for the 2001 episode presumes that Curley and Schultz decided to needlessly let their boss in on the fact that they had decided to “cover up” the child molestation of a former employee.
The perjury case against Spanier for denying knowledge of the 1998 episode is based entirely on the fact that he was cc'd on two vague emails which informed him the case was closed (Spanier was out of the country when these emails were sent).
Sandusky not only ran a huge children’s charity but he also had several foster and adopted children (in other words, he “groomed” the town and authorities to see him with young boys, and he fooled everyone).
Louis Freeh has been credibly accused of heading a massive cover up of his own during his time as Director of the FBI and has had the results of previous investigations reversed.
Louis Freeh held a press conference less than an hour after releasing a 267 page report and has never answered questions since.
Freeh bizarrely/hypocritically praised the Penn State janitors who chose not to report an allegation of oral sex against Sandusky, all because they implausibly claimed, without a shred of evidence, that they feared Paterno would fire them if they came forward with an allegation against an ex assistant Paterno wasn't personally close to (at his press conference Freeh also appeared to not realize that there was only one witness to that event and that his people could not have interviewed this person because he has dementia).
Mark Emmert, the President of the NCAA, unbelievably told Franco Harris that Joe Paterno is not mentioned in, or punished by, the consent decree in the Penn State case, which is patently absurd.
The Paterno press conference the day before he was fired (sending the media into a feeding frenzy) was not canceled by Penn State but by anti Paterno BOT member John Surma.
Sports Illustrated had exactly zero straight news articles about the scandal they would later call “the worst in college sports history” in their first edition after story broke (that edition went to bed about 48 hours after the initial news report).
The high school football coach of Victim 1, which Sports Illustrated called a “hero,” a year later ran away from ABC News asking questions about why he had given Sandusky access to the boy and not believed his story of abuse.
Victim 1 (who is by far the most credible and important victim) and his mother clearly blame the high school and not Penn State or Paterno.
Gary Schultz, who was brought in to interview McQueary, oversaw the campus police, which is the real police force in charge of that jurisdiction (interestingly, McQueary claimed that he thought of Schultz as “the police,” but he based that assessment on an incident he saw on campus which occurred well AFTER the Sandusky shower episode).
Governor Tom Corbett was Attorney General when the Sandusky investigation began (almost 3 years before indictment) and he took hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from sources connected to the Second Mile, which was the beneficiary of significant state tax money.
Penn State informed Sandusky’s employer, the Second Mile charity, of the McQueary episode and it is still possible that, just as Curley and Schultz testified, child welfare was also informed.
ESPN repeatedly claimed Paterno/Penn State should have gone to the “police” and yet kept an incriminating tape in the Bernie Fine/Syracuse (where a huge portion of ESPN employees went to school) case unreported for many years.
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