Critics of Gladwell prove that the lies of the November 2011 grand jury presentment and Freeh Report need to be corrected
By
Ray Blehar
February 5, 2020, 12:10 PM EST
When Malcolm Gladwell announced his support for returning the Paterno statue to its rightful place outside Beaver Stadium, he received a hearty round of applause. The audience in the State Theater agreed with Gladwell's assessment that Joe Paterno was not trained to detect a serial pedophile and that the legendary coach followed the rules of his University and was punished unfairly.
Gladwell also received some criticism for his position on Paterno and, as it turns out, the criticism is rooted in the lies of the November 2011 grand jury presentment and the Freeh Report.
Actually, the criticism predated the event at the State Theater.
Back in September 2019, Tom Ley, a reporter for
Deadspin, called Gladwell's argument the "oldest, dumbest defense of Paterno." Then Ley used this nonsense to support his position (
emphasis is mine):
"Gladwell isn’t doing anything here that Joe Posnanski and Sally Jenkins didn’t already do years ago, which is to excuse Paterno’s failure to call the cops...who couldn’t possibly be expected to understand or properly respond to being told that his longtime assistant coach was seen raping a boy in the Penn State showers."
Ley's knowledge of the case seems to be based exclusively on the November 2011 grand jury presentment because he has no idea that the record was corrected at December 2011 preliminary hearing. At that hearing, McQueary testified he never told Joe Paterno about a rape and went even further to stated never used the words rape or sodomy to describe the incident in the showers.
McQueary's early clarification about what he told Paterno didn't make headlines and the
AP placed it near the end of its report. That said, there is no excuse for Ley to be ignorant of the fact that Jerry Sandusky was acquitted of the rape in that episode and/or that McQueary gave multiple versions of the event in question.