فصل 5

Chapter Five

Case Study: The Boy in the Shower

Prosecution: When you were a graduate assistant in 2001, did something occur that was unusual?

McQueary: Yes.

P: Could you tell the jury about that occurrence?

March 21, 2017. Dauphin County Courthouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The witness is Michael McQueary, former quarterback turned assistant coach of the Pennsylvania State University football team: strapping, self-confident, with close-cropped hair the color of paprika. His interrogator is the Deputy Attorney General for the state of Pennsylvania, Laura Ditka.

McQueary: One night I made my way to the football building—Lasch Football Building—and proceeded to one of the locker rooms in the building.…I opened the locker room door. I heard showers running, heard slapping sounds, and entered another doorway that was already propped up open. My locker, in an aisle of lockers, was immediately to my right. Turned to my locker, and obviously I knew someone was in the locker room taking a shower. And the slapping sounds alerted me that something more than just a shower was going on.

At that point, Ditka stops him. What time of day was it? McQueary says, 8:30 at night on a Friday. That corner of the campus is quiet. The Lasch Building is all but deserted. The doors are locked.

P: OK. I interrupted you. I wanted to ask you another question. You’ve described something as slapping sounds. You aren’t talking about like clapping, like applause?

McQueary: No, no.

P: You were talking about a different kind of sound?

McQueary: Yes.

McQueary said he looked over his right shoulder to a mirror on the wall, which allowed him to see, at an angle, into the shower. He saw a man, naked, standing behind someone he called a “minor individual.” P: Were you able to make—you say a minor individual. Are we talking about a seventeen- or sixteen-year-old, or somebody who appeared younger?

McQueary: Oh, younger.

P: OK. What would be the estimation of the age of the boy you saw?

McQueary: Roughly ten to twelve years old.

P: OK. Were they clothed or unclothed?

McQueary: Unclothed, naked.

P: Did you see any movement?

McQueary: Slow, very subtle movement, but hardly any.

P: OK. But slow, subtle movement that you saw, what kind of movement was it? What was moving?

McQueary: It was Jerry behind the boy, right up against him.

P: Skin to skin?

McQueary: Yes, absolutely.

P: Stomach to back?

McQueary: Yes.

The “Jerry” McQueary was referring to was Jerry Sandusky, who had then just retired as defensive coordinator of the Penn State football team. Sandusky was a beloved figure at football-obsessed Penn State. McQueary had known him for years.

McQueary ran upstairs to his office and called his parents. “He’s tall and he’s a pretty strapping guy, and he’s not a scaredy-cat. But he was shaken,” McQueary’s father told the court after his son finished his testimony. “He was clearly shaken. His voice wasn’t right. Enough that his mom picked it up on the phone without ever seeing him. She said, ‘There’s something wrong, John.’” After McQueary saw Sandusky in the shower in February 2001, he went to see his boss, Joe Paterno, the legendary head coach of the Penn State football team.

P: Did you explain to him that Jerry Sandusky was naked in the shower?

McQueary: Yes, absolutely.

P: Did you explain to him that there was skin-on-skin contact with the boy?

McQueary: I believe so, yes, ma’am.

P: And did you explain to him you heard these slapping sounds?

McQueary: Yes.

P: Okay. What was—I’m not asking you what he said. What was his reaction? What was his demeanor?

McQueary: Saddened. He kind of slumped back in his chair and put his hand up on his face, and his eyes just kind of went sad.

Paterno told his boss, the athletic director at Penn State, Tim Curley. Curley told another senior administrator at the university, Gary Schultz. Curley and Schultz then told the school’s president, Graham Spanier. An investigation followed. In due course, Sandusky was arrested, and at his trial an extraordinary story emerged. Eight young men testified that Sandusky had abused them hundreds of times over the years, in hotel rooms and locker-room showers, and even in the basement of his home while his wife was upstairs. Sandusky was convicted of forty-five counts of child molestation. Penn State paid over $100 million in settlements to his victims.1 He became—as the title of one book about the case reads—“the most hated man in America.” The most sensational fact about the Sandusky case, however, was that phrase “in due course.” McQueary saw Sandusky in the shower in 2001. The investigation into Sandusky’s behavior did not start until nearly a decade later, and Sandusky wasn’t arrested until November 2011. Why did it take so long? After Sandusky was put behind bars, the spotlight fell on the leadership of Penn State University. Joe Paterno, the school’s football coach, resigned in disgrace and died shortly thereafter. A statue of him that had been erected just a few years before was taken down. Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, the two senior university administrators McQueary had met with, were charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and failure to report a case of child abuse.2 Both went to jail. And in the scandal’s final, devastating conclusion, prosecutors turned their attention to the university’s president, Graham Spanier. He had led the school for sixteen years and had transformed its academic reputation. He was beloved. In November 2011, he was fired. Six years later, he was convicted of child endangerment.3 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.” The caseworker and a local police detective met with Sandusky. Sandusky told them he had hugged the boy but that there “wasn’t anything sexual about it.” He admitted to showering with other boys in the past. He said, “Honest to God, nothing happened.” And remember, the boy himself also said nothing happened. So what do you do? You default to truth.

Aaron Fisher’s story was just as ambiguous.5 What Fisher remembered, during all those conversations with his therapist and sessions with the grand jury, kept changing. Once he said the oral sex stopped in November 2007; another time he said it started in the summer of 2007 and continued until September 2008; another time he said it started in 2008 and continued into 2009. He said that he had performed oral sex on Sandusky many times. A week later he said he had done it only once, and then five months later he denied ever having done it at all. Fisher testified about Sandusky before a grand jury twice in 2009, but it seems the grand jury didn’t find him credible. They declined to indict Sandusky.

The police began systematically interviewing other boys who had been in the Second Mile program, looking for victims. They came up empty. This went on for two years. The prosecutor leading the case was ready to throw in the towel. You have a grown man who likes to horse around with young boys. Some people had doubts about Sandusky. But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.

Then, out of the blue, in November 2010, the prosecutor’s office received an anonymous email: “I am contacting you regarding the Jerry Sandusky investigation,” the email read. “If you have not yet done so, you need to contact and interview Penn State football assistant coach Mike McQueary. He may have witnessed something involving Jerry Sandusky and a child.” No more troubled teenagers with uncertain memories. With Michael McQueary, the prosecution finally had the means to make its case against Sandusky and the leadership of the university. A man sees a rape, tells his boss, and nothing happens—for eleven years. If you read about the Sandusky case at the time, that is the version you probably heard, stripped of all ambiguity and doubt.

“You know, there’s a saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely,” the prosecutor, Laura Ditka, said in her closing argument at Spanier’s trial. “And I would suggest to you that Graham Spanier was corrupted by his own power and blinded by his own media attention and reputation; and he’s a leader that failed to lead.” At Penn State, the final conclusion was that blame for Sandusky’s crimes went all the way to the top. Spanier made a choice, Ditka said: “We’ll just keep it a secret,” she imagined him saying to Curley and Schultz. “We won’t report it. We won’t tell any authorities.” If only things were that simple.

3.

Michael McQueary is six foot five. When he started as quarterback for Penn State, his weight was listed as 225 pounds. At the time of the shower incident, he was twenty-seven years old, in the physical prime of his life. Sandusky was thirty years older, with a laundry list of medical ailments.

First question: If McQueary was absolutely sure he witnessed a rape, why didn’t he jump in and stop it?

In Part Three of Talking to Strangers, I’m going to tell the story of an infamous sexual-assault case at Stanford University. It was discovered when two graduate students were cycling at midnight through the campus and saw a young man and woman lying on the ground. The man was on top, making thrusting movements. The woman was still. The two students approached the couple. The man ran. The students gave chase. There were enough suspicious facts about that situation to trigger the grad students out of the default assumption that the encounter on the ground was innocent.

McQueary faced a situation that was—in theory, at least—a good deal more suspicious. It was not two adults. It was a man and a boy, both naked. But McQueary didn’t step in. He backed away, ran upstairs, and called his father. His father told him to come home. Then his father asked a family friend, a medical doctor by the name of Jonathan Dranov, to come over and hear Michael’s story.

This is Dranov, under oath, describing what McQueary told him:

He said that he heard sounds, sexual sounds. And I asked him what he meant. And he just said, “Well, you know, sounds, sexual sounds.” Well, I didn’t know exactly what he was talking [about]. He didn’t become any more graphic or detail[ed than] that, but as I pressed him, it was obvious that he didn’t have anything more he was going to say about it at the time. I asked him what he saw. He said he didn’t see anything, but again he was shaken and nervous.

Dranov is a physician. He has a duty to report any child abuse he becomes aware of. Second question: So why doesn’t Dranov go to the authorities when he hears McQueary’s story? He was asked about this during the trial.

Defense: Now, you specifically pressed him that night and you wanted to know what specifically he had seen, but my understanding is he did not tell you what he had seen. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

D: All right. He told—but you left that meeting with the impression that he heard sexual sounds. Correct?

Dranov: What he interpreted as sexual sounds.

What he interpreted as sexual sounds.

D: And your—your plan that you presented to him or proposed to him was that he should tell his boss, Joe Paterno. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

D: You did not tell him to report to Children and Youth Services. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

Q: You did not tell him that he should report to the police. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

D: You did not tell him that he should report to campus security. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct…

D: You did not think it was appropriate for you to report it based on hearsay. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

D: And indeed, the reason that you did not tell Mike McQueary to report to Children and Youth Services or the police is because you did not think that what Mike McQueary reported to you was inappropriate enough for that sort of report. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.

Dranov listens to McQueary’s story, in person, on the night it happened, and he isn’t convinced.

Things get even more complicated. McQueary originally said he saw Sandusky in the showers on Friday, March 1, 2002. It was spring break. He remembered the campus being deserted, and said that he went to see Paterno the following day—Saturday, March 2. But when investigators went back through university emails, they discovered that McQueary was confused. The date of his meeting with Paterno was actually a year earlier—Saturday, February 10, 2001—which would suggest the shower incident happened the evening before: Friday, February 9.

But this doesn’t make sense. McQueary remembers the campus as being deserted the night he saw Sandusky in the showers. But on that Friday evening in February, the Penn State campus was anything but deserted. Penn State’s hockey team was playing West Virginia at the Greenberg Pavilion next door, in a game that started at 9:15 p.m. There would have been crowds of people on the sidewalk, filing into the arena. And a five-minute walk away, at the Bryce Jordan Center, the popular Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies was playing. On that particular evening, that corner of the Penn State campus was a madhouse.

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.

Here is one gymnast’s mother—a medical doctor herself, incidentally—in an interview for Believed, a brilliant podcast about the Nassar scandal. The woman was in the room while Nassar treated her daughter, sitting a few feet away.

And I remember out of the corner of my eye seeing what looked to be potentially an erection. And I just remember thinking, “That’s weird. That’s really weird. Poor guy.” Thinking, like, that would be very strange for a physician to get an erection in a patient’s room while giving her an exam… But at the time, when you’re in the room, and he’s doing this procedure, you just think he’s being a good doctor and doing his best for your child. He was that slick. He was that smooth.

In another instance, a young girl goes to see Nassar with her father. Nassar puts his fingers inside her, with her dad sitting in the room. Later that day, the gymnast tells her mother. Here is the mother looking back on the moment: I remember it like it was five seconds ago. I’m in the driver’s seat, she’s in the passenger seat, and she said, “Larry did something to me today that made me feel uncomfortable.” And I said, “Well, what do you mean?”

“Well, he…touched me.”

And I said, “Well, touched you where?”

And she said, “Down there.” And the whole time you know what she’s saying but you’re trying to rationalize that it can’t be that.

She called her husband and asked him if he had left the room at any time during the appointment? He said he hadn’t.

And…God forgive me, I dropped it. I filed it back in the parenting filing cabinet until 2016.

After a while, the stories all start to sound the same. Here’s another parent: And she’s sitting in the car very quiet and depressed and saying, “Dad, he’s not helping my back pain. Let’s not go anymore.” But this is Larry. This is the gymnastics doctor. If he can’t cure her, nobody will cure her. Only God has more skills than Larry. “Be patient, honey. It’s gonna take time. Good things take time.” That’s what we always taught our kids. So, I would say, “OK. We’re gonna go again next week. We’re gonna go again the following week. And then you will start seeing the progress.” She said, “OK, Dad. You know. I trust your judgment.”

The fact that Nassar was doing something monstrous is exactly what makes the parents’ position so difficult. If Nassar had been rude to their daughters, they would have spoken up immediately. If their daughters had said to them on the way home that they had smelled liquor on Nassar’s breath, most parents would have leapt to attention. It is not impossible to imagine that doctors are occasionally rude or drunk. Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine. Is Ana Montes the most highly placed Cuban spy in history, or was Reg Brown just being paranoid? Default to truth biases us in favor of the most likely interpretation. Scott Carmichael believed Ana Montes, right up to the point where believing her became absolutely impossible. The parents did the same thing, not because they were negligent but because this is how most human beings are wired.

Many of the women he had abused, in fact, defended Nassar. They couldn’t see past default to truth either. Trinea Gonczar was treated 856 times by Nassar during her gymnastics career. When one of her teammates came to Gonczar and said that Nassar had put his fingers inside her, Gonczar tried to reassure her: “He does that to me all the time!” When the Indianapolis Star broke the Nassar story, Gonczar stood by him. She was convinced he would be exonerated. It was all a big mix-up. When did she finally change her mind? Only when the evidence against Nassar became overwhelming. At Nassar’s trial, when Gonczar joined the chorus of his victims in testifying against him, she finally gave in to her doubts: I had to make an extremely hard choice this week, Larry. I had to choose whether [to] continue supporting you through this or to support them: the girls. I choose them, Larry. I choose to love them and protect them. I choose to stop caring for you and supporting you. I choose to look you in the face and tell you that you hurt us, you hurt me…I hope you will see it from me in my eyes today that I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. I hope you cry like we cry. I hope you feel bad for what you’ve done. I hope more than anything, each day these girls can feel less pain. I hope you want that for us, but this is goodbye to you, Larry, and this time it’s time for me to close the door. It’s time for me to stand up for these little girls and not stand behind you anymore, Larry.

Goodbye, Larry. May God bless your dark, broken soul.

I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. Isn’t that an almost perfect statement of default to truth?

Default to truth operates even in a case where the perpetrator had 37,000 child-porn images on his hard drive, and where he had been accused countless times, by numerous people, over the course of his career. The Nassar case was open-and-shut—and still there were doubts. Now imagine the same scenario, only in a case that isn’t open-and-shut. That’s the Sandusky case.

5.

After the accusations against Sandusky were made public, one of his staunchest defenders was a former Second Mile participant named Allan Myers. When the Pennsylvania police were interviewing former Second Mile kids in an attempt to corroborate the allegations against Sandusky, they contacted Myers, and he was adamant. “Myers said that he does not believe the allegations that have been made, and that the accuser…is only out to get some money,” the police report read. “Myers continues to be in touch with Sandusky one to two times a week by telephone.” Myers told the police that he had showered in the locker room with Sandusky many times after workouts and nothing untoward had ever happened.

Two months later, Myers went further. He walked into the offices of Sandusky’s attorney and made a stunning revelation. After reading the details of McQueary’s story, he realized that he had been the boy in the shower that night. Curtis Everhart, an investigator for Sandusky’s lawyer, wrote a synopsis of his interview with Myers. It is worth quoting at length: I asked the specific question: “Did Jerry ever touch you in a manner that you felt to be improper, or caused you to feel concern about his invading your personal space?” Myers answered with a very pronounced, “Never ever did anything like that ever occur.” Myers stated, “Never in my life while with Jerry did I ever [feel] uncomfortable or violated. I think of Jerry as the father I never had.”…Myers stated on Senior Night at a West Branch High School football game, “I asked Jerry to walk onto the field with my mother. It was announced on the loudspeaker ‘Father Jerry Sandusky’ along with my mother’s name.

“I invited Jerry and Dottie to my wedding. Why would I ask Jerry, my father figure at Senior Night, ask Jerry and Dottie to be at my wedding, and the school asked me to ask Jerry to speak at my graduation, which he did, if there was a problem.…Why would I travel to games, go to his house, and make all the trips if Jerry had assaulted me? If that had happened, I would want to be as far away from him as possible.” Myers described the night in question clearly:

Myers stated he and Jerry had just finished a workout and went into the shower area to shower and leave. “I would usually work out one or two days a week, but this particular night is very clear in my mind. We were in the shower and Jerry and I were slapping towels at each other trying to sting each other. I would slap the walls and would slide on the shower floor, which I am sure you could have heard from the wooden locker area. While we were engaged in fun as I have described, I heard the sound of a wooden locker door close, a sound I have heard before. I never saw who closed the locker. The grand jury report says Coach McQueary said he observed Jerry and I engaged in sexual activity. This is not the truth and McQueary is not telling the truth. Nothing occurred that night in the shower.” A few weeks later, however, Myers signed up with a lawyer who represented a number of alleged Sandusky victims. Myers then made a statement to police in which he completely changed his tune. He was one of Sandusky’s victims, he now said.

You can be forgiven if you find this confusing. The boy in the shower was the most important witness in the whole case. Prosecutors had been searching high and low for him, because he would be the final nail in Sandusky’s coffin. So finally he surfaces, denies anything happened, then almost immediately flips, saying actually something did happen. So did Myers become the key prosecution witness in the Sandusky trial? That would make sense. He was the most important piece in the whole puzzle. No! The prosecution left him at home because they had no confidence in his story.7 The only time Myers ever appeared in court was to testify at Sandusky’s appeal. Sandusky had asked for him to testify, in the vain hope that Myers would revert to his original position and say that nothing happened in the shower. Myers did not. Instead, as Sandusky’s lawyers read back to Myers each of the statements he had made less than a year before about Sandusky’s innocence, Myers sat there stone-faced and shrugged at everything, including a picture of him standing happily next to Sandusky. Who are the people in the photo? he was asked.

Myers: That’s myself and your client.

Defense: And when was that picture taken? If you know.

Myers: That I do not remember.

It was a picture of Myers and Sandusky at Myers’s wedding. In all, he said he didn’t recall thirty-four times.

Then there was Brett Swisher Houtz, a Second Mile child with whom Sandusky had been very close. He was probably the most devastating witness at Sandusky’s trial. Houtz told of being repeatedly assaulted and abused—of dozens of lurid sexual encounters with Sandusky during his teenage years, in showers and saunas and hotel rooms.

Prosecution: Mr. Houtz, can you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury approximately how many times the defendant in either the East Area locker room or the Lasch Building shower…put his penis in your mouth?

Houtz: It would have to be forty times at least.

P: Did you want him to do it—

Houtz: No.

P: —on any of those occasions?

Houtz: No.

Then Sandusky’s wife, Dottie, was called to the stand. She was asked when she and her husband last saw Brett Houtz.

D. Sandusky: I think it was three years ago, or two years ago. I’m not sure.

The stories Houtz told of his abuse were alleged to have happened in the 1990s. Dottie Sandusky was saying that two decades after being brutally and repeatedly victimized, Houtz decided to drop by for a visit.

Defense: Can you tell us about that?

D. Sandusky: Yeah. Jerry got a phone call. It was Brett. He said, I want to come over. I want to bring my girlfriend and my baby for you to see. 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 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.