By
Ray Blehar
As the lawsuit for Victim 9 splashed into the news last week, the Associated Press reported that Victim 9 had been abused past his sixteenth birthday into the Fall of 2009. The Collegian reported that Victim 9 met Sandusky in 2005 and his abuse spanned four years.
Those media accounts match the trial testimony, which also stated that Victim 9 was sixteen when the abuse finally ended. Victim 9 was born on July 29, 1993, which places his abuse into late 2009.
However, Patriot News staffer Charles Thompson wrote on November 22nd, that Victim 9's attorneys were suing for abuse that took place between 2005 and 2008, shaving the last year off the time frame of the crimes (my emphasis added).
The new plaintiff's attorneys, asserting that their client suffered among the worst of the injuries inflicted by Sandusky on any boy through a period from 2005 through 2008, disagree.
Former Patriot News staffer and Pulitzer Prize winner, Sara Ganim, now reporting for CNN, also truncated the years of Victim 9's abuse in her November 21st article, stating that his abuse ended "about the time that another victim's allegations started a police investigation." (Hat tip, JimmyW)
Obviously, Ganim was not being completely truthful with her statement because she fled the courtroom right before she was to be called as a witness in the case. As a result, the attorneys stipulated that Ganim had passed the contact information for an investigator to the mother of one of the victims in the event the mother wished to contact authorities.
But more to the point, if Ganim sat through the trial every single day and listened to the testimony of the victims, then she had to know that Victim 9 stated his abuse occurred up until he was sixteen and thus into 2009.
So, the million dollar question is why do the Patriot News, Ganim, and Thompson, continue to obsfuscate the end date of this crime?
Are they protecting DPW? Who should have insisted that The Second Mile put a protection plan in place to keep Sandusky away from children.
Or are they protecting The Second Mile? Who knowingly let Sandusky access children after they knew he was under investigation?
As I wrote in last week's blogpost, Ganim wrote in her five part-series on The Second Mile (in August 2012) that the charity immediately banned Sandusky from interacting with children and advised him not to contact children in outside activities after learning of his investigation in November 2008.
Raykovitz, a well-known and respected child psychologist in central Pennsylvania, immediately removed Sandusky from all events involving children, and strongly urged him to stay away from children outside of charity functions, too.
However, that passage has been debunked because several news reports from The Progress, a local news outlet serving Clearfield, Curwensville, Philipsburg, and Moshannon Valley, reported that Sandusky would be speaking at the Clearfield County Chapter of The Second Mile's all sports banquet to be held on March 1, 2009. From the article....
Dinner will follow at 5:30 p.m. in the high school cafeteria before those in attendance move to the auditorium where The Second Mile founder Jerry Sandusky will speak, and the players will share stories about their journeys to becoming collegiate student-athletes.
The evidence is clear in this case. The Second Mile kept the Sandusky investigation under wraps and did not immediately prevent Sandusky from future access to children.
It's also clear that the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare did not have an effective policing or enforcement method in place to ensure Sandusky's access was cut off.
The other thing that's clear is that some people in Harrisburg, the Patriot News, and Ganim don't want you to know about it.
This is why I get cynical Ray. This third world style of "reporting" is a result of payoffs. As long as Corbett remains in control as the Governor, he will continue to buy news coverage the way he wants it to go. And the longer this goes on, the less chance there is for the public to actually accept the truth. That being, the state is the corrupt player in the Sandusky issue, not PSU. If all this "factual" reporting goes on long enough, the public will look at Kane like she's crazy if she ever really does unveil the truth here.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing that this can go on in the United States, an easy manipulation of news coverage by a criminal element of state government. I mean, it's like we're talking about a dictatorship, not the U.S.! I'd like to know how the money changes hands. Is there a way to trace it? Of course, Corbett has plenty of lackeys that sneak the money into the executives' hands at these various media sources. Who knows, they probably even mail a regular check out to a P.O. box somewhere! All Corbett has to do is sit back, pick his teeth and laugh at Kane.
Kane has simply got to speed up the investigation into Corbett, and get him out of the picture. Or he will, most likely, successfully thwart her and Moulton's attempts to find the truth and present it to the public.
It certainly looks like someone's meteoric rise in the media world was bought and paid for by Corbett and friends. One has to wonder why they plucked her from Happy Valley to do their bidding rather than using an old hand like Charlie Thompson.
DeleteRecent history shows the media tells the story they want to tell until someone proves they are wrong.
They are being proven wrong.
Government people manipulating the media?? Nooooooo
Deletehttp://youtu.be/A1jeJmeeMjs
if you've watched the first season of "House of Cards" on Netflix, I always felt Kate Mara's character (Zoe Barnes) carried eerie parallels to Ganim. Except Barnes finally realized she was getting screwed (literally and figuratively) by a corrupt politician and decided to grow a conscience. Ganim does not appear to have such moxie.
DeleteMaybe Charles Thompson should entertain the notion that victim #9 is lying. Paterno taking him and Sandusky to lunch a couple times?? About as believable as being in the Lasch building with Sandusky during pre season practice in August. And Dottie says #9 is lying. I think that Dottie has consistently told the truth.
ReplyDeleteWhat really bothers me is that several of the victims' stories have egregious anomalies and not a single PA reporter has homed in on them.
The media universally is afraid to question the stories of the victims because the media themselves are victims of the mass hysteria surrounding the Sandusky case, which as most of us know, is very similar to the hysteria that surrounded the day care sex abuse cases in the 1980s and 1990s. In those cases, the far fetched stories of secret tunnels, babies being flushed down toilets, drinking of animal blood, and other bizarre acts described by children were believed by juries. In the majority of cases, the jury's verdicts were overturned on appeal.
DeleteIn this case, the issue at hand is that cases of child sex abuse were investigated by a narcotics agent and other policemen who were not trained to investigate or interview child sex abuse victims. As a result, the Sandusky allegations ranged widely from grooming to anal rape. Legitimately trained CSA investigators would have determined how to properly charge the case, because in some instances victims downplayed what happened to them (likely V6) and in other cases they exaggerated (likely V9).
No doubt, most of the individuals are victims of Sandusky, but there are many anomolies in their versions of events between the trial and today. I pointed out the issues with V10 earlier. V9 has similar issues, as he never made mention of any crimes occurring at PSU at the trial. At most, he said he went to one football game with Sandusky when he was 18 years old.
Well what we have, I guess, is crooked cops, fabricated stories, lying witnesses who have been tampered with, lying lawyers, lying prosecutors, incompetent judges, and journalists in PA who are unwilling to provide any oversight.
DeleteThis is so muddled that there is absolutely no confidence in any assessment of what JS actually did. Being that there is absolutely no physical evidence, we are in the Twilight Zone! Perhaps the entire state of Pennsylvania suffers from cognitive dissonance or have some monological belief system where they are incapable of assembling facts, putting them in context, and constructing a self-consistent model to explain what happened. Whether the media suffers from confirmation bias or just doesn't give a damn is problematic since they seem to lack the capability for critical analysis altogether.
You can put all of the information from this case into IBM's Watson, and all you are going to get out is "This Does Not Compute"!
Exactly! And this is what originally piqued my curiosity (in Nov 2011), and what has kept me addicted to studying any new info that may provide some sensical narrative.
DeleteIt's amazing to me that John Ziegler seems to be the only investigative journalist whose curiosity was similarly piqued. How can anyone who by nature, and profession, is compelled to figure out interesting questions NOT be digging into this Sandusky case?
BTW, Ziegler's recent video provides analysis and a different thesis that actually would make sense of much of this story. It begins with the notion that Sandusky is a chaste pedophile. Then continues ten years later with prosecutors manipulating witnesses into believing that Sandusky was having sexual intercourse with boys. Ziegler's case is presented in two videos, at framingpaterno.com, entitled somthing like "Sandusky was Overcharged".
Ziegler's model is imperfect, but it is self consistent. You don't have to explain away anomalies. I have no doubt that Jerry touched some genitals, but what he did wasn't bad enough to stop the boys from returning for overnight stays...lots and lots of over night stays. Do you think that they would, by their own free will, stay overnight with Jerry if bad things were happening to them? 14-18 year old boys are not that compliant. These are not street kids that pimp themselves out. They have their own room and a bed to sleep in and plenty of food to eat. V9 claims that he screamed for help and neither Dottie or the other Sandusky kids or their friends came to help. How many times does he claimed this happened? 30? He just came back for more and more and more??
DeleteRay,
ReplyDeleteThis isn't directly related to the above, and is in no way meant to be making excuses for anyone, but issues with Child Protective Services aren't limited to PA. Arizona is just starting an investigation as to why 6000 (yes, I got the zeroes right!) cases reported to CPS went uninvestigated since 2009. If this is what's being reported I suspect the issue is much worse.
The one thing I thank Corbett for is he's the only person I know who can make our Governor look competent!
Agree. Tennessee is pretty terrible too.
DeleteI believe Ganim was selected over Thompson to be the face of the local media on a national level because she's younger, meaning she's more willing to go along with something that will advance her career; she's more attractive than Thompson, which means networks will be more likely to give her more TV appearances to tell her opinion; and she's a woman, so she will seem more compassionate in a case that involves the abuse of children than an older balding white man with glasses (like Thompson) who some viewers might actually think is more relatable to a perpetrator than a victim.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I think the one thing that would really allow the truth to start coming out is for Corbett to be defeated in next year's Governor's race, which is still another year. This would take him out of power and severely limit his ability to manipulate the media, stonewall a real investigation, and influence the PSU BOT and the judicial process. And I don't say this from any type of political view as I typically vote republican and haven't lived in PA for 15 years.
Just a quick question, but what's everyone's take on Thornburgh endorcing Corbett? I am not a big fan of Thornburgh, as he was pretty ruthless on Bud Dwyer (a friend of my family's when I was a kid), but I thought that Thornburgh's role in the Paterno report was pretty critical, as it added a counter balance to the "Honorable Judge Freeh, former FBI director" fiction. I was very disappointed to see Thornburgh endorce Corbett, on a number of levels. Beyond the Sandusky scandal, he's one of the most viscous politicians I've ever seen.
ReplyDeleteYou're not the only one disappointed to see Dick Thornburgh endorse Corbett for reelection. To me, it's indicative of the overall madness surrounding the Sandusky issue that seems to exist in Pennsylvania in the first place. I mean, to speak up like he did against the Freeh report, and then turn around what seems like only a month later and say, "I support Tom Corbett for Governor" is just insane in my book. It's completely obvious that Corbett underhandedly procured that Freeh report to hide his abandonment of duty as the Attorney General.
DeleteThornburgh is no dummy, he knows full-well Corbett and Freeh go hand in hand like pancakes and syrup. After the Freeh report, you just can't have Corbett without Freeh and vice versa. So why would Thornburgh do this? I'm beginning to see that he's all about the money. That's what got him to come out against the Freeh report. And that's what is likely behind the Corbett endorsement, money. Another money-worshipping clown that the Corbett camp can payoff. Whether it be the media, a cop, a judge, another politician or whatever is needed, Corbett knows there's greed in the hearts of some men that causes them to worship money above morality. It's the way Corbett has built his life, so to him, it's easy to spot others like himself.
It seems like people are overestimating Thornburgh’s involvement in this case. Dick Thornburgh was hired by the Paternos to evaluate the Freeh Report. That was the extent of his involvement. He didn’t investigate the overall case, he didn’t seem to dig deeper beyond what was in the Freeh Report to understand why the report had been written that way and who was behind it. He was employed and paid to evaluate the merits of the Freeh Report given his background as a former attorney general. He brought credibility to the arguments that anyone who had actually read the report were already making. It’s that level of impartiality and lack of connection to the case that made his report more powerful. He can’t be accused of being a “Joebot” and he has just as much clout as Freeh (but none of the baggage related to a history of shoddy investigations). Now people seem to think he is "on our side” and I don’t think that has ever been the case.
DeleteI actually heard him being interviewed by Mike Francesa right after the Paterno report was released. It was clear Thornburgh didn’t know anything beyond the contents of the Freeh Report. Francesa was trying to challenge him in the typical media manner by throwing out bogus facts about the case (for example one that stuck in my mind was when Francesa stated that the security guards working at the Lasch Building knew about the 1998 incident – what? Where did that gem come from??) and Thornburg had no idea . He couldn’t refute any of Francesa’s statements because he simply didn’t know the case beyond the Freeh Report. I don’t like that he’s endorsing Corbett either but it really isn’t surprising.
Good, other perspective. Thank you!
Deletesarajmk: I guess you're right, it really isn't that surprising that Thornburgh decided to endorse Corbett for Governor. But I guess what I'm expecting, or hoping for, is something surprising. That one of these officials that has the power to help right the unethical and illegal assault on Paterno and PSU will just speak up for what's right without the big paycheck. Do any of our elected officials stand up for what's right anymore simply because it feels good? Why does everyone in PA seem to be so afraid of corrupt authority? We can make Pennsylvania the decent honest place that it used to be. If we would just speak up against all of this government corruption that has snowballed to the point that it is actually turning against the citizens.
DeleteDon't get me wrong, there's always been corruption in PA politics. But it was far more isolated and pertained mostly to skimming money or donations. But now, this deliberate and organized destruction of innocent people to cover state government neglect is frightening. It should worry everyone of us, because it is totalitarian in nature. It is the state turning on its people. This simply cannot be tolerated in a free society.
Could it be simpler, though certainly no less sinister?
DeleteRather than destroying people and institutional reputations to cover state negligence, could all of this stem from personal grievances... the Surmas out to take down Joe Paterno, and Corbett out to take down Graham Spanier??
The facts that two men happened to have positions of power from which to accomplish this; several opportunities existed for key players to benefit financially; Jerry Sandusky was an easy-to-make fall guy; and the mainstream media is easily directed away from deep investigation all come together to make this entire mess possible.
The only confounder to this otherwise simple plan is the refusal of certain PSU alum and other investigative types to accept such a damaging narrative that made no sense whatsoever, from the beginning.
To answer your question, "could all this stem from personal grievaces...?", of course. But when you are the Governor, or the Attorney General, you represent the state, you are the face of the government. You do not engage in personal vendettas without it representing the state. Corbett is so provincial and unenlightened that he believes he has a right to abuse the power of his elected office to engage in personal grudges. And that is what is at the heart of this extraordinary mess, Corbett's abuse of power for personal reasons.
DeleteHas anyone considered that Corbett most likely called for the entrapment of his own former son-in-law, Gerald Gibson? Corbett crafted a plan to get the "dirty" son-in-law out of the way to vindicate his daughter. It would have been easy to do, just a phone call or two to put it in action. I can only speculate, but too many people around Corbett seem to experience a major fall from grace. So yes, it would indicate that Corbett is a very backward, vindictive, and cowardly individual that has now severely tarnished the reputation of his own government and a beloved university to satisfy personal grudges.
We are all waiting patiently for Kane to "clean house". But I believe she needs to grow a pair, because I've seen nothing to indicate any courage on her part. All the talk to get elected to this position of Attorney General appears to be just that, talk. And sadly, she has to hire a pair of testicles in Geoff Moulton to do what she herself could be doing. It's long overdue Kane, long overdue.
Wow. It could come down to simply that.
DeleteThank you, Truthseeker, for your explicit and relentless outrage! For this to still be happening in the 21st century, in the USA is seriously scary... and wrong.
I personally don't think patience is warranted any longer in the Sandusky/ Penn State case. What of some parallel actions to Kane's work like initiating impeachment of Corbett and class action against the PSU BoT?
The point is: if Kane knows of any exculpatory evidence regarding Curley, Schultz and Spanier, She should drop the charges. No matter if Moulton is finished with his investigation or not. Me thinks, she is still a politician and we know where their ratings are <10%. Blehar and Ziegler have given her enough to lead to many unanswered question that should be answerable by now!!
ReplyDelete