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 appropriate way to follow up on ‘horsing around,’” Spanier said later. “I had never gotten a report like that before.”
If Harry Markopolos had been president of Penn State during the Sandusky case, of course, he would never have defaulted like this to the most innocent of explanations. A man in a shower? With a boy? The kind of person who saw through Madoff’s deceit a decade before anyone else would have leaped at once to the most damning conclusion: How old was the kid? What were they doing there at night? Wasn’t there a weird case with Sandusky a couple of years ago?
But Graham Spanier is not Harry Markopolos. He opted for the likeliest explanation—that Sandusky was who he claimed to be. Does he regret not asking one more follow-up question, not quietly asking around? Of course he does. But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency. Spanier behaved no differently from the Mountain Climber and Scott Carmichael and Nat Simons and Trinea Gonczar and virtually every one of the parents of the gymnasts treated by Larry Nassar. Weren’t those parents in the room when Nassar was abusing their own children? Hadn’t their children said something wasn’t right? Why did they send their child back to Nassar, again and again? Yet in the Nassar case no one has ever suggested that the parents of the gymnasts belong in jail for failing to protect their offspring from a predator. We accept the fact that being a parent requires a fundamental level of trust in the community of people around your child.
If every coach is assumed to be a pedophile, then no parent would let their child leave the house, and no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth—even when that decision carries terrible risks—because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise. And in those rare instances where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth deserve our sympathy, not our censure.
7.
Tim Curley and Gary Schultz were charged first. Two of the most important officials at one of the most prestigious state universities in the United States were placed under arrest. Spanier called his senior staff together for an emotional meeting. He considered Penn State to be a big family. These were his friends. When they told him the shower incident was probably just horseplay, he believed they were being honest.
“You’re going to find that everyone is going to distance themselves from Gary and Tim,” he said. But he would not.
Every one of you in here has worked with Tim and Gary for years. Some of you, for thirty-five or forty years, because that’s how long Tim and Gary, respectively, were at the university.…You’ve worked with them every day of your life, and I have for the last sixteen years.…If any of you operate according to how we have always agreed to operate at this university—honestly, openly, with integrity, always doing what’s in the best interests of the university—if you were falsely accused of something, I would do the same thing for any of you in here. I want you to know that.…None of [you] should ever fear doing the right thing, or being accused of wrongdoing when [you] knew [you] were doing the right thing…because this university would back them up.9
This is why people liked Graham Spanier. It’s why he had such a brilliant career at Penn State. It’s why you and I would want to work for him. We want Graham Spanier as our president—not Harry Markopolos, armed to the teeth, waiting for a squad of government bureaucrats to burst through the front door.
This is the first of the ideas to keep in mind when considering the death of Sandra Bland. We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to truth. When we try to send people like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in positions of authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers—without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
1 At the time, that was a record amount for a U.S. university in a sexual-abuse case. That record was soon broken, however, in the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University, where damages paid by the school may end up being $500 million.
2 Charges also included perjury (which was quickly dropped) and child endangerment. Eventually the two men pled guilty only to “child endangerment” so that all other charges could be dropped.
3 Just as this book was going to press, Spanier’s conviction was thrown out by a federal judge, the day before he was to finally report to prison. Whether or not the prosecution will appeal the ruling is—as we are going to press—unknown.
4 This was not unusual for Sandusky. He showered all the time after workouts with Second Mile boys, and loved playing locker-room games. “What happened is…the horsing around would lead to him starting like a soap battle,” one former Second Miler testified at the Sandusky trial. “There was soap dispensers beside each one of the showers, and he would pump his hand full of soap and basically throw it.”
5 The idea that traumatic memories are repressed and can be retrieved only under the direction of therapy is—to say the least—controversial. See the Notes for a further discussion of this.
6 The evidence gathered by Ziegler on this point is compelling. For example, when Dranov testified in the Spanier trial, he said he had met with Gary Schultz on an entirely separate matter late that February, and had brought up the issue of Sandusky “since this was maybe three months after the incident and we hadn’t heard any follow-up.” Will we ever know the exact date? Probably not.
Ziegler is the most vociferous of those who believe that Sandusky was wrongfully accused. See also: Mark Pendergrast, The Most Hated Man in America. Some of Ziegler’s arguments are more convincing than others. For a longer discussion of the Sandusky skeptics, see the Notes.
7 The prosecution’s report on Allan Myers is a doozy. An investigator named Michael Corricelli spoke to Myers’s lawyer, who told him that Myers now claimed to have been raped repeatedly by Sandusky. His lawyer produced a three-page account allegedly written by Myers detailing his abuse at the hands of Sandusky. The prosecution team read the account and suspected that it hadn’t been written by Myers at all but rather by his lawyer. Finally the prosecution gave up, and walked away from one of the most important figures in the entire case.
8 Courtney had doubts about Sandusky’s innocence. But in the end Sandusky’s cover story was just too convincing. Someone that goofed around with Second Mile kids all the time in public. Curley then called the executive director of the Second Mile, John Raykovitz. Raykovitz promised to have a word with Sandusky and tell him not to bring any more boys on campus. “I can only speak for myself, but I thought Jerry had a boundary issue, judgment issue, that needed to be addressed,” Curley explained. Sandusky needed to be careful, he felt, or people would think he was a pedophile. “I told him,” Raykovitz said, “that it would be more appropriate—if he was going to shower with someone after a workout—that he wear swim trunks. And I said that because…that was the time when there was a lot of stuff coming out about Boy Scouts and church and things of that nature.”