The Mind of a Pedophile - Getting it Right

NEW YORKER's Malcomb Gladwell - A realistic look at Sandusky in The Mind of a Pedophile. 

It has been a long time coming but is there finally some common sense and reality slipping into the conscience of the media?

The PSU Board of Trustees could have made this a real debate 10 months ago had they simply stood by Joe, Tim, Gary, and Graham Spanier and made the Attorney General prove her absurd charges that a cover up of a known pedophile had occurred at PSU. Instead led by Tom Corbett and John P. Surma they hired Louis Freeh to cement the idea of a cover up in the public consciousness. 

This move to hire disgraced former FBI failure Louis Freeh for a second unwarranted fictional indictment compounded the egregious error by John P Surma - who cancelled Joe Paterno's press conference and then led the charge to fire him and Dr Spanier - signaling the media that the Board of Trustees believed they were guilty of this Linda Kelly imagined cover up. Surma evidently did this as part of a personal vendetta against the aging coach. 

 — the people who knew Sandusky, saw him with children, saw him playing and touching and even showering with them, and never suspected he was what he was.

Childcare specialists  trained in identifying the tell-tale signs of pedophilia cleared Sandusky during the 1998 probe into a mother’s concern over a workout and shower. No charges were brought in that case.



Three years later, when Mike McQueary told Joe Paterno that he heard sounds of "a sexual nature" from Sandusky in a shower with a young boy, Paterno dutifully passed the matter up to the chain of command. Just what McQueary told Paterno, and later AD Tim Curley and VP Gary Schultz, remains in dispute.

After Sandusky’s arrest last year, Paterno was asked if he considered calling the cops after hearing McQueary’s story.

Paterno told author Joe Posnanski. “This isn’t my field. I didn’t know what to do. I had not seen anything. Jerry didn’t work for me anymore. I didn’t have anything to do with him. I tried to look at Penn State guidelines to see what I was supposed to do. It said I was supposed to call Tim (Curley). So I called him.” All that, sounds strangely reasonable, does it not?

It was Curley and Schultz, who after talking to McQueary, talked to Sandusky. No one, as Gladwell makes clear, is better at feigning hurt innocence than a self-deluding pedophile.

Despite, McQueary’s story, whatever it was, it was decided that Curley would notify Jack Raykovitz, head of the Second Mile, the charity for children Sandusky founded, that they had a problem with Sandusky’s behavior.  

Gil Spencer in the delco times writes about the New Yorker article 

Not reported by Gladwell, but told to me by a person close to the case, Raykovitz, a trained psychologist himself, raised and dismissed the concern that Sandusky might be a child molester.
“Are you trying to tell me that you think Jerry Sandusky is a pedophile?” Raykovitz asked Curley. Because, if that’s what he was trying to tell him, Raykovitz suggested, Tim Curley had lost his mind.

Tim Curley's Grand Jury testimony indicated that he believed Sandusky’s problem was boundary issues that could be misconstrued into something else — not that he had a full-blown child predator on his hands. As it turned out, Curley, and the rest of PSU’s official leadership were wrong about that. But then so were many, many others.

The media, Louis Freeh and the PSU BoT caused a deeply held belief of a lot people that Paterno, Curley, Schultz and PSU President Graham Spanier understood what Sandusky was and covered it up to protect the university and its football program from “bad publicity.” The more likely reality is that Jerry Sandusky simply fooled them all.