Ziegler has uncovered a number of other facts, which for reasons of space and focus I did not include in the chapter. (The Sandusky case is a very very deep and winding rabbit hole.) According to Ziegler’s reporting, at least some of Sandusky’s victims are not credible. They appear to have been attracted by the large cash settlements that Penn State was offering and the relatively lax criteria the university used for deciding who would get paid.
In the course of reporting this chapter, I corresponded on several occasions with Ziegler and chatted with him on the phone. He generously shared a number of documents with me—including the memo written by private investigator Curtis Everhart. I’m not convinced of Ziegler’s ultimate conclusion—that Sandusky is innocent. But I do agree with him that the case is much more ambiguous and unusual than the conventional press accounts suggest. If you would like to go down the Sandusky rabbit hole, you may want to start with Ziegler.
A second (and perhaps more mainstream) Sandusky skeptic is author Mark Pendergrast, who published The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment in 2017. Pendergrast argues that the Sandusky case was a classic example of a “moral panic” and the frailty of human memory. I drew heavily from Pendergrast’s book in my account of the Aaron Fisher and Allan Myers cases. One of the noteworthy things about Pendergrast’s book, I must say, is the back cover, which has blurbs from two of the most influential and respected experts on memory in the world: Richard Leo of the University of San Francisco, and Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California at Irvine.
Here is what Loftus had to say: “The Most Hated Man in America tells a truly remarkable story. In all the media coverage the Sandusky case has received, it’s amazing that no one else has noticed or written about so many of these things, including all the ‘memories’ that were retrieved through therapy and litigation. One would think that the sheer insanity of so much of this will have to eventually come out.”
What do I think? I have no idea. I will let others tackle the morass of conflicting evidence and speculation and ambiguity that is the Sandusky case. My interest is simply this: if the case is such a mess, how on earth can you put Spanier, Curley, and Schultz behind bars?
the “graduate assistant…reported what he had seen”: Sandusky Grand Jury Presentment, November 5, 2011, https://cbsboston.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/sandusky-grand-jury-presentment.pdf, pp. 6–7.
McQueary’s email to Jonelle Eshbach was obtained by Ray Blehar, a blogger in the Penn State area. Ray Blehar, “Correcting the Record: Part 1: McQueary’s 2001 Eye-witness Report,” Second Mile – Sandusky Scandal (SMSS): Searching for the Truth through a Fog of Deception (Blog), October 9, 2017, https://notpsu.blogspot.com/2017/10/correcting-record-part-1-mcquearys-2001.html#more.
Rachael Denhollander’s statement: “Rachael Denhollander delivers powerful final victim speech to Larry Nassar,” YouTube, January 24, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CjVOLToRJk&t=616s.
“And unfortunately, I was right…deepest, darkest hole and hide”: “Survivor reported sexual assault in 1997, MSU did nothing,” YouTube, January 19, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYJIx_3hbRA.
“This just goes to show…patients lie to get doctors in trouble”: Melissa Korn, “Larry Nassar’s Boss at Michigan State Said in 2016 That He Didn’t Believe Sex Abuse Claims,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/deans-comments-shed-light-on-culture-at-michigan-state-during-nassars-tenure-1521453600.
Quotes from Believed podcast: Kate Wells and Lindsey Smith, “The Parents,” Believed, NPR/Michigan Radio, Podcast audio, November 26, 2018, https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=669669746.
“He does that to me all the time!”: Kerry Howley, “Everyone Believed Larry Nassar,” New York Magazine/The Cut, November 19, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/how-did-larry-nassar-deceive-so-many-for-so-long.html.
“I had to make an extremely hard choice…your dark, broken soul”: “Lifelong friend, longtime defender speaks against Larry Nassar,” YouTube, January 19, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Aa2MQORd4.
“I asked the specific question…as far away from him as possible”: Allan Myers interview with Curtis Everhart (Criminal Defense Investigator), November 9, 2011.
The only time Myers ever appeared…he didn’t recall thirty-four times: Commonwealth v. Gerald A. Sandusky (Appeal), November 4, 2016, p. 10.
“Are you sure…like that before” and “Every one of you…would back them up”: Jeffrey Toobin, “Former Penn State President Graham Spanier Speaks,” The New Yorker, August 21, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/former-penn-state-president-graham-spanier-speaks.
Chapter Six: The Friends Fallacy
Dialogue is from Friends, “The One with the Girl Who Hits Joey” (episode 15, season 5), directed by Kevin Bright, NBC, 1998.
It was developed by legendary psychologist (in footnote): Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Facial Action Coding System, parts 1 and 2 (San Francisco: Human Interaction Laboratory, Dept. of Psychiatry, University of California, 1978).
In my second book, Blink (Little, Brown and Company, 2005), I devoted a large chunk of Chapter Six, “Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading,” to a discussion of the work of Paul Ekman, one of the most important psychologists of the last century. He is the coinventor of FACS, which I asked Jennifer Fugate to use to analyze that episode of Friends. FACS has become the gold standard for understanding and cataloging how human emotion is displayed on the face. Ekman’s principal scientific contribution was to demonstrate the idea of “leakage”—that the emotions we feel are often, involuntarily, displayed on our faces in some distinctive configuration of facial muscles. And if you are trained in the “language” of the face and have the opportunity to break down videotape of someone’s expressions millisecond by millisecond, you can identify those configurations.
Here is what I wrote on p. 210 of Blink: “Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that emotion is automatically expressed by the muscles of the face. That response may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second or be detectable only if electrical sensors are attached to the face. But it’s always there.”
Ekman was making two bold claims. First, that emotion is necessarily expressed on the face—that if you feel it, you’ll show it. And second, that these kinds of emotional expressions are universal—that everyone, everywhere, uses their face to display their feelings in the same way.