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 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 you because I was afraid that Kathie was going to tell you about my concerns,” she said.
And unfortunately, I was right. I felt ashamed, embarrassed, and overwhelmed that I had talked to Kathie about this. I vividly remember when you walked into that room, closed the door behind you, pulled up your stool and sat down in front of me, and said, “So, I talked to Kathie.” As soon as I heard those words, my heart sank. My confidence had been betrayed. I wanted to crawl into the deepest, darkest hole and hide.
Over the course of Nassar’s career as a sexual predator, there were as many as fourteen occasions in which people in positions of authority were warned that something was amiss with him: parents, coaches, officials. Nothing happened. In September 2016 the Indianapolis Star published a devastating account of Nassar’s record, supported by Denhollander’s accusations. Many people close to Nassar backed him even after this. Nassar’s boss, the Dean of Osteopathic Medicine at Michigan State, allegedly told students, “This just goes to show that none of you learned the most basic lesson in medicine, Medicine 101.…Don’t trust your patients. Patients lie to get doctors in trouble.” Kathie Klages had the gymnasts on her team sign a card for Nassar: “Thinking of you.”
It took the discovery of Nassar’s computer hard drive, with its trove of appalling images, to finally change people’s minds.
When scandals like this break, one of our first inclinations is to accuse those in charge of covering for the criminal—of protecting him, or deliberately turning a blind eye, or putting their institutional or financial interests ahead of the truth. We look for a conspiracy behind the silence. But the Nassar case reminds us how inadequate that interpretation is. Many of Nassar’s chief defenders were the parents of his patients. They weren’t engaged in some kind of conspiracy of silence to protect larger institutional or financial interests. These were their children.