The baby was like two years old. And they came over and my friend Elaine Steinbacher was there, and we went and got Kentucky Fried Chicken and had dinner. And it was a very pleasant visit.
This is a much more perplexing example than Trinea Gonczar in the Nassar case. Gonczar never denied that something happened in her sessions with Nassar. She chose to interpret his actions as benign—for entirely understandable reasons—up until the point when she listened to the testimony of her fellow gymnasts at Nassar’s trial. Sandusky, by contrast, wasn’t practicing some ambiguous medical procedure. He is supposed to have engaged in repeated acts of sexual violence. And his alleged victims didn’t misinterpret what he was doing to them. They acted as if nothing had ever happened. They didn’t confide in their friends. They didn’t write anguished accounts in their journals. They dropped by, years later, to show off their babies to the man who raped them. They invited their rapist to their weddings. One victim showered with Sandusky and called himself the “luckiest boy in the world.” Another boy emerged with a story, after months of prodding by a therapist, that couldn’t convince a grand jury.
Sexual-abuse cases are complicated, wrapped in layers of shame and denial and clouded memories, and few high-profile cases were as complicated as Jerry Sandusky’s. Now think about what that complication means for those who must make sense of all that swirling contradiction. There were always doubts about Sandusky. But how do you get to enough doubts when the victims are happily eating Kentucky Fried Chicken with their abuser?
6.
So: McQueary goes to see his boss, Joe Paterno on a Saturday. An alarmed Paterno sits down with Tim Curley and Gary Schultz the following day, Sunday. They immediately call the university’s counsel and then brief the university president, Graham Spanier, on Monday. Then Curley and Schultz call in Mike McQueary.
You can only imagine what Curley and Schultz are thinking as they listen to him: If this really was a rape, why didn’t you break it up? If what you saw was so troubling, why didn’t anyone—including your family friend, who is a doctor—tell the police? And if you—Mike McQueary—were so upset about what you saw, why did you wait so long to tell us?
Curley and Schultz then call the university’s outside counsel. But McQueary hasn’t given them much. They instinctively reach—as we all do—for the most innocent of explanations: Maybe Jerry 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