make sure that you have the facts again in case I have not been clear.” Then: “I cannot say 1000 percent sure that it was sodomy. I did not see insertion. It was a sexual act and / or way over the line in my opinion, whatever it was.” He wanted to correct the record. “What are my options as far as a statement from me goes?” he asked Eshbach.
Think about how McQueary must have felt as he read the way Eshbach had distorted his words. He had seen something he thought was troubling. For five weeks, as he wrestled with his conscience, he must have been in agony. What did I see? Should I say something? What if I’m wrong? Then he read the indictment, and what did he find? That the prosecutors, in order to serve their own ends, had turned gray into black and white. And what did that make him? A coward who witnessed a rape, ran away to call his parents, and never told the police.
“My life has drastically, drastically changed,” he wrote to Eshbach. The Sandusky who took showers with young boys late at night was a stranger to McQueary, and Eshbach had refused to acknowledge how difficult it is to make sense of a stranger. “My family’s life has drastically changed,” McQueary went on. “National media and public opinion has totally in every single way ruined me. For what?”
4.
It is useful to compare the Sandusky scandal to a second, even more dramatic child-molestation case that broke a few years later. It involved a doctor at Michigan State named Larry Nassar. Nassar served as the team physician for the USA Gymnastics women’s national team. He was bespectacled, garrulous, a little awkward. He seemed harmless. He doted on his patients. He was the kind of person you could call on at 2 a.m., and he would come running. Parents loved him. He treated hips and shins and ankles and the myriad other injuries that result from the enormous stress that competitive gymnastics puts on young bodies.
Nassar’s specialty was the treatment of what is known as “pelvic-floor dysfunction,” which involved him inserting his fingers into the vagina of a patient to massage muscles and tendons that had been shortened by the physical demands of gymnastics training. He did the pelvic-floor procedure repeatedly and enthusiastically. He did it without consent, without wearing gloves, and when it wasn’t necessary. He would massage his patients’ breasts. He would penetrate them anally with his fingers for no apparent reason. He used a medical procedure as the cover for his own sexual gratification. He was convicted on federal charges in the summer of 2017 and will spend the rest of his life in prison.
As sexual-abuse scandals go, the Nassar case is remarkably clear-cut. This is not a matter of “he said, she said.” The police retrieved the hard drive from Nassar’s computer and found a library of child pornography—37,000 images in all, some of them unspeakably graphic. He had photographs of his young patients as they sat in his bathtub taking ice baths prior to treatment. He didn’t have just one accuser, telling a disputed story. He had hundreds of accusers, telling remarkably similar stories. Here is Rachael Denhollander, whose allegations against Nassar proved critical to his conviction.
At age fifteen, when I suffered from chronic back pain, Larry sexually assaulted me repeatedly under the guise of medical treatment for nearly a year. He did this with my own mother in the room, carefully and perfectly obstructing her view so she would not know what he was doing.
Denhollander had evidence, documentation.
When I came forward in 2016, I brought an entire file of evidence with me.…I brought medical records from a nurse practitioner documenting my graphic disclosure of abuse…I had my journals showing the mental anguish I had been in since the assault.…I brought a witness I had disclosed it to…I brought the evidence of two more women unconnected to me who were also claiming sexual assault.
The Nassar case was open-and-shut. Yet how long did it take to bring him to justice? Years. Larissa Boyce, another of Nassar’s victims, said that Nassar abused her in 1997, when she was sixteen. And what happened? Nothing. Boyce told the Michigan State gymnastics coach, Kathie Klages. Klages confronted Nassar. Nassar denied everything. Klages believed Nassar, not Boyce. The allegations raised doubts, but not enough doubts. The abuse went on. At Nassar’s trial, in a heartrending moment, Boyce addressed Nassar directly: “I dreaded my next appointment with