Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell Page 0,37

a family friend, a medical doctor by the name of Jonathan Dranov, to come over and hear Michael’s story.

This is Dranov, under oath, describing what McQueary told him:

He said that he heard sounds, sexual sounds. And I asked him what he meant. And he just said, “Well, you know, sounds, sexual sounds.” Well, I didn’t know exactly what he was talking [about]. He didn’t become any more graphic or detail[ed than] that, but as I pressed him, it was obvious that he didn’t have anything more he was going to say about it at the time. I asked him what he saw. He said he didn’t see anything, but again he was shaken and nervous.

Dranov is a physician. He has a duty to report any child abuse he becomes aware of. Second question: So why doesn’t Dranov go to the authorities when he hears McQueary’s story? He was asked about this during the trial.

Defense: Now, you specifically pressed him that night and you wanted to know what specifically he had seen, but my understanding is he did not tell you what he had seen. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

D: All right. He told—but you left that meeting with the impression that he heard sexual sounds. Correct?

Dranov: What he interpreted as sexual sounds.

What he interpreted as sexual sounds.

D: And your—your plan that you presented to him or proposed to him was that he should tell his boss, Joe Paterno. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

D: You did not tell him to report to Children and Youth Services. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

Q: You did not tell him that he should report to the police. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

D: You did not tell him that he should report to campus security. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct…

D: You did not think it was appropriate for you to report it based on hearsay. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

D: And indeed, the reason that you did not tell Mike McQueary to report to Children and Youth Services or the police is because you did not think that what Mike McQueary reported to you was inappropriate enough for that sort of report. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

Dranov listens to McQueary’s story, in person, on the night it happened, and he isn’t convinced.

Things get even more complicated. McQueary originally said he saw Sandusky in the showers on Friday, March 1, 2002. It was spring break. He remembered the campus being deserted, and said that he went to see Paterno the following day—Saturday, March 2. But when investigators went back through university emails, they discovered that McQueary was confused. The date of his meeting with Paterno was actually a year earlier—Saturday, February 10, 2001—which would suggest the shower incident happened the evening before: Friday, February 9.

But this doesn’t make sense. McQueary remembers the campus as being deserted the night he saw Sandusky in the showers. But on that Friday evening in February, the Penn State campus was anything but deserted. Penn State’s hockey team was playing West Virginia at the Greenberg Pavilion next door, in a game that started at 9:15 p.m. There would have been crowds of people on the sidewalk, filing into the arena. And a five-minute walk away, at the Bryce Jordan Center, the popular Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies was playing. On that particular evening, that corner of the Penn State campus was a madhouse.

John Ziegler, a journalist who has written extensively about the Penn State controversy, argues that the only plausible Friday night in that immediate time frame when the campus would have been deserted is Friday, December 29, 2000—during Christmas break. If Ziegler is right—and his arguments are persuasive—that leads to a third question: If McQueary witnessed a rape, why would he wait as long as five weeks—from the end of December to the beginning of February—to tell anyone in the university administration about it?6

The prosecution in the Sandusky case pretended that these uncertainties and ambiguities didn’t exist. They told the public that everything was open-and-shut. The devastating 23-page indictment 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

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