Thursday, February 14, 2013

New report charges that Joe Paterno was unjustly demonized in Sandusky case

After reading the Freeh report on the Penn State child molestation case last year, I discovered that the evidence of a “cover-up” by three Penn State administrators and football coach Joe Paterno amounted to two or three pages worth of emails. We may presume that there were private discussions on handling what assistant coach Mike McQueary reported seeing in a campus shower room that were not recorded, but given the lack of evidence to judge what the accused knew of the exact nature Jerry Sandusky’s “activities”—none of his victims personally made an accusation against him until 2008—the Freeh report bases its conclusions on broad assumptions, understandable bias, and the “benefit” of hindsight. The report sought to put the worst possible spin on the administrators and Paterno, and there was clearly no effort at giving them a fair and impartial hearing. As for Sandusky, he has “defended” himself as being the “victim” of “troubled” kids looking for attention; only he and his wife continue to believe this. 

The Paterno family, angered about the how the Freeh report “unjustly” tarnished the late coach’s reputation, decided to hire the Washington D.C. law firm of King & Spalding to conduct their own “independent” report. This past weekend, their report, “The Rush to Injustice regarding Joe Paterno” was released. It is a scathing condemnation of the Freeh report and its influence on media reporting and NCAA sanctions against the school. Of course, it is natural that the “politically correct” thing to do is to insist that there was no “mitigating” factors in the way the Penn State Four handled the information they received, that we in the same situation would have acted differently. There is no doubt that in “hindsight” that is easy to say, but it is clear that given what was known,  Paterno—rather than being the all-powerful, all-knowing omnipotence on campus—seems to have been protected by an information cocoon, much the same way Ronald Reagan was from the details of the Iran-Contra scandal. As for the Penn State administrators, for right or wrong in their own minds, they apparently loathed to stir-up a media hornet’s nest, depending on other parties (like the Second Mile administrators) to “decide” for them what should be done based on the little information they allowed themselves to be privy to.

Unlike the Freeh report, the King & Spalding report did not rely on a literal or biased interpretation of the testimony that was presented to the grand jury. Three “prominent experts”—former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, Jim Clemente, a “former FBI profiler and child molestation and behavioral expert,” and Fred Berlin, a physician and psychologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine—were consulted to examine and offer their conclusions on Paterno’s role in the scandal. What they found was perhaps predictably favorable to Paterno, at least in a legal sense given the current dearth of information about what he knew and when. This may change, of course, during the upcoming perjury trial of two of the administrators, although they would have little to gain by throwing Paterno under the bus at this point.
The report gets to the point right-off: That the experts “each carefully examined the July 12, 2012 report prepared by Louis Freeh, and have each determined that the report is deeply flawed and that key conclusions regarding Joe Paterno are unsubstantiated and unfair.” It makes the following charges:

(1) Joe Paterno never asked or told anyone not to investigate fully the allegations in 2001,

(2) Joe Paterno never asked or told anyone, including Dr. Spanier and Messrs. Curley and Schultz, not to report the 2001 incident, and 

(3) Joe Paterno never asked or told anyone not to discuss or to hide in any way the information reported by Mr. McQueary. Joe Paterno reported the information to his superior(s) pursuant to his understanding of University protocol and relied upon them to investigate and report as appropriate.

Furthermore,

“Perhaps most significantly, the findings in the Freeh Report about Mr. Paterno concerning his alleged knowledge of the 1998 incident and purported concealment of the 2001 incident were not properly supported…This lack of evidence supporting the Report’s most scathing findings and the serious flaws with respect to the process of the Special Investigative Counsel’s investigation cause me (Thornburgh) to conclude that the Report’s findings concerning Mr. Paterno are unjust and wrong.”

The King report further criticizes the Freeh report as having “missed a critical opportunity to educate the public on the identification of child sexual victimization, and instead used the platform created by this scandal to sensationalize the blaming of Joe Paterno. The Freeh report ignored decades of expert research and behavioral analysis regarding the appropriate way to understand and investigate a child sexual victimization case… Mr. Jim Clemente is one of the leading former FBI profilers of child sex offenders, and himself a survivor of childhood sexual victimization. As Mr. Clemente bluntly put it: ‘The SIC failed to properly factor the dynamics of acquaintance child sexual victimization cases into their investigation. Consequently, the SIC misinterpreted evidence and behavior and reached erroneous conclusions. Any investigation will reach the wrong result by using the wrong approach and by interpreting the facts through the wrong filter.’”

In examining what the accused knew of Sandusky’s activities, the report’s “expert analysis” of Sandusky revealed a “skilled and masterful manipulator, who deceived an entire community to obscure the signs of child abuse, using a variety of proven techniques. Those techniques included: perpetuating an image as a playful ‘nice guy’ who was a foster and adoptive parent with kids around him at all hours in all types of capacities, leveraging his position as a respected member of the community, and creating a children’s charity to legitimize his credibility in interacting with kids…Expert analysis shows that Jerry Sandusky fooled qualified child welfare professionals and law enforcement, as well as laymen inexperienced and untrained in child sexual victimization like Joe Paterno. Sandusky’s techniques as a pillar of the community created a proven psychological and cognitive impediment for them to recognize the red flags and other signs that Sandusky was a child molester. Joe Paterno himself knew very little about Jerry Sandusky’s personal life and did not know private details about Sandusky or his victims. 

“For decades, Joe Paterno respected Sandusky’s talent as a coach and professional colleague and recognized Sandusky’s widely-stated passion for helping kids, but the Freeh report missed that they disliked each other personally, had very little in common outside work, and did not interact much if at all socially…Expert analysis shows that while signs of Jerry Sandusky’s child molestation existed with the benefit of hindsight, at the time of the 2001 shower incident reported by graduate assistant Mike McQueary, information was conveyed to Joe Paterno in terms that were too general and vague for him to disregard decades of contrary experience with Sandusky and to conclude that Sandusky was a child predator.”

The former FBI profiler Clemente concluded that Paterno actions were like many people who are confronted with even the suggestion that someone they thought they knew was engaged in an activity beyond their own comprehension: ‘Given my 30 years of education, training and experience working, evaluating and assessing child sex crimes investigations around the world, it is my expert opinion that Paterno did not know, or even believe in the possibility, that Sandusky was capable of sexually assaulting boys. At worst, he believed that Sandusky was a touchy-feely guy who had boundary issues. This fact is clear from his repeated statements before he died…

“[Paterno] did what he believed was reasonable and necessary to address the situation based on his understanding of the facts, and his position at the time. Paterno did what most people who cared about children would have done in the same situation. More than a decade later, and in hindsight, Paterno showed his concern for the victims when he stated he, ‘wished [he] had done more…

“Paterno, like everyone else who knew Sandusky, simply fell victim to effective ‘grooming.’ [Grooming is a dynamic process of seemingly innocent, positive public behaviors by the offender, aimed at gaining the trust of the targeted child, parents and the community.] As an expert behavioral analyst and based on my review of the evidence, Paterno did not believe that the information he received from McQueary amounted to Sandusky being a predatory child sex offender.”

Clemente describes a man who “like many others, was fooled by Sandusky’s nice-guy, goofy image. In Mr. Clemente’s expert judgment as an FBI profiler who specializes in child sexual victimization investigations, Joe Paterno was not equipped to process and recognize a preferential ‘nice-guy’ child molester under the circumstances of this case. Mr. Clemente analyzed the 2001 report of a Sandusky shower incident from graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, to Joe Paterno. Mr. Clemente concluded that the report was couched in too vague and general terms for Joe Paterno, as a 72-year-old football coach who was untrained in the complicated, counterintuitive dynamics of child sexual victimization and who came from a traditional background where even consensual sex was not discussed, to conclude that Sandusky was a child molester…“Given my 30 years of education, training and experience working, evaluating and assessing child sex crimes investigations around the world, it is my expert opinion that Paterno did not know, or even believe in the possibility, that Sandusky was capable of sexually assaulting boys. At worst, he believed that Sandusky was a touchy-feely guy who had boundary issues. This fact is clear from his repeated statements before he died.”

There was an assumption by Freeh and the media that Paterno and Sandusky were “friends,” and this was a motive to “protect” Sandusky.” But the King report found that while the two coaches respected each other, they were not friends and had “clashed” for years. According to a 2012 biography of Paterno by Joe Posnanski, “The two men despised each other from the start. This was well-known among those who knew Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky, but at the end it seemed like nobody wanted to mention it. The news reports would assume they were the best of friends or, at the very least, colleagues who respected each other. . .Sandusky, in the words of Penn State’s marketing guru and many others, was ‘a knucklehead.’ He liked practical jokes and messing around, knocking a guy’s hat off his head, making prank calls, sneaking up behind people to startle them. . . At one of the first practices before the season, Sandusky was supposed to be on the field but was instead joking around with some players. . . Later, when Paterno watched film of the practice, he saw Sandusky running onto the field waving his arms like a bird and shouting, ‘The breakdown coach is on the way! The breakdown coach was on the way!’ It was ridiculous. Paterno called in Sandusky, screamed at him at length, called him a complete goofball. . . Over time, for all of their personal differences, Paterno did come to admire Sandusky’s coaching on the field. . . When he was focused, Sandusky was a force of nature around the players; he connected to them in ways Paterno never could. He joked with them, hugged them, taunted them, and often inspired them. The players, most of them, loved him for that. . . He was like a big brother teasing them, pushing them, grabbing them, reminding them that they could be great.”

Thus it was “easy” for Penn State officials to believe Sandusky’s explanation that he was just “horsing around” with the kids.

The King report pointed out that Paterno and the Penn State administrators were not the only people who made a mistake in their interpretation of Sandusky’s activities. “Between 1998 and 2001 alone, the following trained experts were fooled by Sandusky’s deceptions: a detective, a police officer, a caseworker for the Department of Public Welfare, a caseworker for the Centre County Children and Youth Services, an outside counselor who did contract work for Children and Youth Services, and apparently everyone at a kids charity, The Second Mile, including its executive director, Jack Raykovitz, who is a licensed psychologist.”  Furthermore, the fact that Sandusky was able to adopt six children demonstrated that he “was evaluated by state officials and a Pennsylvania judge for fitness to adopt; and six times Sandusky passed that expert scrutiny.”

The report noted that during the years that Sandusky was victimizing boys, none had come forward with an allegation until 2008. It was also noted that the Freeh report supplied not a single written communication from Paterno “reflecting any knowledge of Sandusky and sexual misconduct allegations in 1998. In the 2001 incident reported to him by McQueary, the report claims although McQueary’s story didn’t make sense to Paterno—McQueary himself testified he was vague about details, “out of respect” for the 75-year-old Joe Paterno,  and due to his own embarrassment, “did not provide him with specific and graphic details of the 2001 incident.” However, because of the emotional state he was, Paterno did feel obligated to report the incident to his superiors.

The report did not address the culpability of or defend former Penn State president Graham Spanier, athletic director Timothy Curley and senior vice president Gary Schultz, although it was suggested that they were as likely fooled by Sandusky’s “goofy” and “nice guy” persona as they suggested Paterno was. On the other hand, they likely allowed themselves to be fooled, because the information they had—even from McQueary to them or even in his grand jury testimony—did bring up the subject of sodomy. Male-on-male pedophilia—particularly when it involves sodomy which was at one time was considered not only a criminal offense in this country, but a capital offense in many parts of Europe; as late as 1835 two Englishmen were hanged for “buggery.” Perhaps the Penn State administrators—and certainly the devout Roman Catholic Paterno—could not imagine something that was so far beyond their comprehension, that they clung to any rationalization to the contrary; it is certainly easy to condemn them for not wanting to know more than the facts as were presented to them. 

Does the King report exonerate Joe Paterno, who by all accounts was a person who had been known for his upstanding moral character? The Freeh report, it is true, overturns this impression—but in a way that seems more self-congratulatory and self-righteous than based on the knowable facts.  Given the state of the evidence, it does provide ample proof that it is unlikely that it would be sufficient to convict Paterno of being an accessory to a cover-up. After all, he was obligated to and did contact his superiors when he was informed by McQueary admittedly vague report. Should he have simply gone to the police—who had declined to cite Sandusky in 1998? It is easy enough to say that he should have; but then again, without anything other than an emotional state to go on, it was only natural to “pass the buck” to his superiors who would have had a better understanding of how to proceed with a potentially explosive accusation.   

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