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By Mark Pendergrast
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By Mark Pendergrastfor BigTrial.net
The Jerry Sandusky case continues to make news and ruin lives and careers. It is so toxic that even the most blatantly fraudulent hearsay becomes national headline news. Now Greg Schiano, Ohio State's defense coordinator, has been vilified without any justification whatsoever and has become a pariah.
Schiano had been selected as the next head football coach at the University of Tennessee. His hiring was to be announced on Sunday night, Nov. 26, 2017. Instead, after a series of rumor-mongering tweets and political grandstanding, and a graffiti-covered rock on campus proclaiming “SCHIANO COVERED UP CHILD RAPE AT PENN STATE,” he was abruptly dropped like a hot potato.
Why? Because of Mike McQueary, who changed his memory from hearing slapping sounds in a shower (of Sandusky snapping towels with a 13-year-old boy) to witnessing sexual abuse, ten years after the event. And because McQueary then massaged his memory yet again two years ago in a deposition for a civil case, and recalled someone else (assistant coach Tom Bradley) allegedly telling him that Schiano, who was an assistant coach at Penn State from 1990 to 1995, had supposedly said that he saw Sandusky doing something bad to a boy in a shower.
So this is 25 years ago he said he said he said he saw something. Both Bradley and Schiano deny ever having heard anything about Sandusky abusing anyone.
That’s because Schiano never said such a thing to Bradley, and Bradley said no such thing to McQueary.
And Sandusky did no such thing. The real story here is too much for the mass media to acknowledge. The media are invested in the narrative of Jerry Sandusky the serial pedophile, the Monster. But guess what? The imprisoned former Penn State football coach may be an innocent man, a victim of a moral panic fed by the sensationalistic media, police trawling, memory-warping psychotherapy, and greed, as I document in my book, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment.
It is a fascinating, complex case that richly deserves this book-length treatment. Thus, I am unlikely to convince anyone in an article. (But see this link to a good summary article already available on this website.) Nonetheless, I can’t keep silent when yet another career is being ruined through slanderous triple-hearsay about crimes that never occurred in the first place.
In the hothouse atmosphere of college football, politics, money, and moral panics, the mere mention of the named Sandusky is enough to tarnish anyone. Tennessee bigwigs fell all over themselves condemning Schiano with zero evidence but plenty of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy. One state representative said, “We don’t need a man who has that type of potential reproach in their life as the football coach. It’s egregious to the people.” On the contrary, his statement is what is egregious. Three gubernatorial candidates hastened to condemn Schiano as well, while another politico tweeted that “a Greg Schiano hire would be anathema to all that our University and our community stand for.”
And what does the University stand for? Freedom of expression? Innocent until proven guilty? Or avoiding any controversy like the plague? The latter seems to be the current academic approach. Penn State University threw in excess of $100 million at virtually anyone who claimed to be a Sandusky victim, without any investigation, in the same sort of mad rush to keep up appearances.
We could all be accused via triple-hearsay of a non-existent crime, especially if we ever had anything to do with Jerry Sandusky – or Mike McQueary, it appears.
--Mark Pendergrast is the author of The Most Hated Man in America and many other books. You can write to him via his website, www.markpendergrast.com.