At the height of the controversy, Sandusky gave an interview to NBC sports anchor Bob Costas.
Costas: You say you’re not a pedophile.
Sandusky: Right.
Costas: But you’re a man who, by his own admission, has showered with young boys. Highly inappropriate.…Multiple reports of you getting into bed with young boys who stayed at your house in a room in the basement. How do you account for these things? And if you’re not a pedophile, then what are you?
Sandusky: Well, I’m a person that has taken a strong interest…I’m a very passionate person in terms of trying to make a difference in the lives of some young people. I worked very hard to try to connect with them…
Costas: But isn’t what you’re just describing the classic M.O. of many pedophiles?…
Sandusky: Well—you might think that. I don’t know.
Sandusky laughs nervously, launches into a long defensive explanation. And then:
Costas: Are you sexually attracted to young boys—to underage boys?
Sandusky: Am I sexually attracted to underage boys?
A pause.
Costas: Yes.
Another pause.
Sandusky: Sexually attracted, you know, I—I enjoy young people. I—I love to be around them. I—I—but no, I’m not sexually attracted to young boys.
Graham Spanier let that man roam free around the Penn State campus.
But here’s my question, in light of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff and Harry Markopolos and every bit of evidence marshaled by Tim Levine about how hard it is for us to overcome our default to truth: do you think that if you were the president of Penn State, confronted with the same set of facts and questions, you would have behaved any differently?
2.
Jerry Sandusky grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania. His father headed the local community recreation center, running sports programs for children. The Sanduskys lived upstairs. Their house was filled with baseball bats and basketballs and footballs. There were children everywhere. As an adult, Sandusky re-created the world of his childhood. Sandusky’s son E.J. once described his father as “a frustrated playground director.” Sandusky would organize kickball games in the backyard and, E.J. said, “Dad would get every single kid involved. We had the largest kickball games in the United States—kickball games with forty kids.” Sandusky and his wife, Dottie, adopted six children and were foster parents to countless more. “They took in so many foster children that even their closest friends could not keep track of them all,” Joe Posnanski wrote in a biography of Sandusky’s boss, Joe Paterno. “Children constantly surrounded Sandusky, so much so that they became part of his persona.”
Sandusky was a goofball and a cutup. Much of Sandusky’s autobiography—titled, incredibly, Touched—is devoted to stories of his antics: the time he smeared charcoal over the handset of his chemistry teacher’s phone, the time he ran afoul of a lifeguard for horseplay with his children in a public pool. Four and a half pages alone are devoted to water-balloon fights that he orchestrated while in college. “Wherever I went, it seemed like trouble was sure to follow,” Sandusky wrote. “I live a good part of my life in a make-believe world,” he continues. “I enjoyed pretending as a kid, and I love doing the same as an adult with these kids. Pretending has always been part of me.”
In 1977, Sandusky founded a charity called the Second Mile. It was a recreational program for troubled boys. Over the years, thousands of children from impoverished and unsettled homes in the area passed through the program. Sandusky took his Second Mile kids to football games. He wrestled with them. He would give them gifts, write them letters, take them on trips, and bring them into his home. Many of the boys were being raised by single mothers. He tried to be the father they didn’t have.
“If Sandusky did not have such a human side, there would be a temptation around [Penn State] to canonize him,” a writer for Sports Illustrated said, upon Sandusky’s retirement from the Penn State football-coaching staff. Here, from the same era, is part of an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
In more than one motel hallway, whenever you encountered him and offered what sounded like even the vaguest sort of compliment, he would blush and an engaging, lopsided grin of modesty would wrap its way around his face. He isn’t in this business for recognition. His defense plays out in front of millions. But when he opens the door and invites in another stray, there is no audience. The ennobling measure of the man is that he has chosen the work that is done without public notice.
The first questions about Sandusky’s conduct emerged in 1998. A Second Mile boy came home from a day with Sandusky, and his mother saw that he had wet hair. The boy said he had worked out with Sandusky, and then the two had taken a shower in the locker room. The boy said that Sandusky had wrapped his arms around him and said, “I’m gonna squeeze your guts out.” Then he lifted him up to “get the soap out of his hair,” with the boy’s feet touching Sandusky’s thigh.4
The mother told her son’s psychologist, Alycia Chambers, about what happened. But she was unsure what to make of the incident. “Am I overreacting?” she asked Chambers. Her son, meanwhile, saw nothing amiss. He described himself as the “luckiest boy in the world” because when he was with Sandusky he got to sit on the sidelines at Penn State football games.
The case was closed.
The next reported incident happened ten years later, involving a boy named Aaron Fisher, who had been in the Second Mile program since fourth grade. He came from a troubled home. He had gotten to know Sandusky well, and spent multiple nights at Sandusky’s home. His mother thought of Sandusky as “some sort of angel.” But in November 2008, when he was fifteen, Fisher mentioned to his mother that he felt uneasy about some of Sandusky’s behavior. Sandusky would hold him tightly and crack his back. He would wrestle with him in a way that felt odd.
Fisher was referred to a child psychologist named Mike Gillum, a believer in the idea that victims of sexual abuse sometimes bury their experiences so deep that they can be retrieved only with great care and patience. He was convinced that Sandusky had sexually abused Fisher, but that Fisher couldn’t remember it. Fisher met with his therapist repeatedly, sometimes daily, for months, with Gillum encouraging and coaxing Fisher. As one of the police investigators involved in the case would say later, “It took months to get the first kid [to talk] after it was brought to our attention. First it was, ‘Yeah, he would rub my shoulders,’ then it just took repetition and repetition, and finally we got to the point where he would tell us what happened.” By March 2009, Fisher would nod in answer to the question of whether he had had oral sex with Sandusky. By June, he would finally answer, “Yes.”
Here we have two complaints against Sandusky in the span of decade. Neither, however, led to Sandusky’s apprehension. Why? Once again, because of default to truth.
Did doubt and suspicions rise to the level where they could no longer be explained away in the 1998 case of the boy in the shower? Not at all. The boy’s psychiatrist wrote a report on the case arguing that Sandusky’s behavior met the definition of a “likely pedophile’s pattern of building trust and gradual introduction of physical touch, within a context of a ‘loving,’ ‘special’ relationship.” Note the word likely. Then a caseworker assigned to the incident by the Department of Public Welfare in Harrisburg investigated, and he was even less certain. He thought the incident fell into a “gray” area concerning “boundary issues.” The boy was then given a second evaluation by a counselor named John Seasock, who concluded, “There seems to be no incident which could be termed as sexual abuse, nor did there appear to be any sequential pattern of logic and behavior which is usually consistent with adults who have difficulty with sexual abuse of children.” Seasock didn’t see it at all. He said someone should talk to Sandusky about how to “stay out of such gray-area situations in the future.”