quote:

I thought about arguing it, but it was all victim testimony with one witness that saw rhythmic slapping in a shower but wouldn't say it was sex.

Guy is a pedophile and a groomer and tons of victims said so, but if his point was there was no physical evidence, I guess that's true?

There's a man named John Ziegler who made a podcast where he really digs into all of the evidence.

John starts by taking apart the timeline of the Mike McQueary story. McQueary included details that can be analyzed: he says he was watching a broadcast of Rudy before he went to the field house, and that the campus was empty that evening.

Ziegler figured out when Rudy was on, when various activities would have made that part of the campus busy, when McQueary was known to have been elsewhere, and so on. (And I can believe McQueary was simply mistaken about Rudy, but Ziegler's timeline holds up without that bit.)

Under this timeline, McQueary waited several weeks after the incident, at which point he wanted to talk to Paterno about a position coach job that'd just then opened up. At that point he felt compelled to mention the "slapping sounds" incident to Paterno, because he had reason to believe Paterno had heard about it secondhand. (There's no doubt McQueary found the incident notably strange and told people that.)

We know McQueary did not intervene to stop the supposed assault. Ziegler's timeline further implies he didn't feel hurried to mention it to any authority figure, and might not have mentioned it at all were there not suddenly a job opening on Paterno's staff. None of this is consistent with the notion that McQueary thought he'd witnessed a rape, and he's never emphatically said he did.

So many casual observers rely on the sheer number of accusers as evidence. "One of those kids must have been telling the truth." Ziegler therefore goes on to examine each supposed victim in great depth.

Realize that the vast majority of them did not testify in Sandusky's criminal trial. Many of them were only subjected to perfunctory depositions focused on allocating the money Penn State had already earmarked to pay damages.

Most of the victims are not credible at all. There's the guy who admitted to his wife that he made it all up. There's the guy who said Sandusky diddled him in a silver convertible, a type of vehicle nothing else connects Sandusky to. There's the guy who said he knocked Sandusky's two front teeth out; Sandusky has dental records and he was on TV throughout the relevant time period, and yet nothing corroborates this claim.

There are other aspects of Sandusky's behavior that just don't add up, if he's a molester. His marriage has held up. He's never "come clean" but tried to portray himself as "ill" and "in need of help." The cops never found any pornography at all in Sandusky's house or anywhere else. These things are almost unheard of among actual pedophiles. I'm not even sure the "almost" is necessary there.

Sandusky's medical records indicate that he had extremely low testosterone during times when we are supposed to believe that he was sodomizing dozens of people, demanding fellatio across the street from Joe Paterno's own house, etc.

That supposedly brilliant reporter who broke the whole story, and won a Pulitzer... where's her book? Seems like she'd have been able to easily score a #1 bestseller out of this. What's she doing now?

There's a whole subplot about power strugles on the Penn State board, the simmering desire of many to usher Paterno out, etc., but I've gone on enough. I encourage people to look into this for themselves, and particularly the "so many victims" canard. Look at the McQueary claim, but also look at who actually said what at the trial. And once you've done that, ask yourself, "which of these victims do I actually still believe?"

ETA: I forgot to get into just how much of the case here rests on "repressed memories." I don't believe in repressed memories. I'd remember blowing the defensive coordinator at Penn State. Maybe I'm just weird like that