More and more, intelligent people who study the Jerry Sandusky case realize a grave injustice occurred and an innocent man was convicted. Frank Report obtained a copy of an email from Sanford G. Thatcher, Director Emeritus, Penn State University Press, to Dottie Sandusky, the wife of Jerry Sandusky. The email included a copy of another email Thatcher sent to News Nation, to encourage the media outlet to look into the wrongful conviction of Jerry Sandusky.

Thatcher has a long history in publishing. He spent 22 years at Princeton University Press (MS Editor, Social Science Editor, Assistant Director, Editor-in-Chief), 1967-1989; then 20 years as the Director of Penn State University Press (Director), 1989-2009.

Email from Sanford G. Thatcher to Dottie Sandusky, wife of Jerry Sandusky 

April 12, 2024

I have become a regular viewer of the shows on News Nation hosted in sequence by Dan Abrams and Ashleigh Banfield, and I have come to have great respect for the acuity of their legal analyses and comments on political ramifications of criminal court cases, and yesterday they each did a brilliant job of dissecting the OJ Simpson trial, which Dan had himself attended every day for nine months early in his career. OJ, of course, got a free pass despite mountains of incriminating evidence, whereas Jeff and Jerry each got railroaded on the basis of weak evidence.  So, I have been inspired to send the following message to the News Nation team that produces the shows, including Dan and Ashleigh themselves. Let’s hope they pick up the ball and run with it.  https://www.newsnationnow.com/meet-the-team/

Dan Abrams

Ashleigh Banfield

Subject: Jeffrey MacDonald and Jerry Sandusky

Email from Thatcher to News Nation

April 12, 2024

O J Simpson

Dan and Ashleigh have both brilliantly commented on the (in)famous OJ Simpson case in the wake of Simpson’s demise, noting how that case got national attention in a way no other case has ever done. But their insights made me yearn for their take on two other cases that also got massive media attention nationwide in which I have had close personal involvement: the trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Army doctor accused of murdering his wife and two daughters in 1970, and Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State associate head football coach under Joe Paterno, accused of abusing multiple teenage boys. Unfortunately for these two men, whom I believe to be innocent, the outcomes of their trials did not have the happy ending that OJ’s criminal trial did for him.

Jeffrey MacDonald was my freshman roommate at Princeton in the academic year 1961-1962. I got to know him very well that year, sharing a bedroom with about two feet distance between our beds. I later got to know his wife as well when they married while Jeff was still in college.  One of Jeff’s chief legal counsels, first during the initial Army investigation and later during his trial in North Carolina, was our classmate Michael Malley, who was Jeff’s roommate during his sophomore year and became my best friend during our junior and senior years when we lived in adjoining dorm rooms.  Michael has given me special insights into the case from his firsthand viewpoint and, like me, believes Jeff to be innocent. The case was appealed to the US Supreme Court more times than any other criminal case in history, but his appeals have now been exhausted, and Jeff faces the certainty of spending the rest of his life in federal prison. I still communicate with him by mail.

Jeffrey Robert MacDonald (born October 12, 1943) is an American former medical doctor and United States Army captain. He was convicted in 1979 of murdering his pregnant wife and two daughters in February 1970, while serving as an Army Special Forces physician. MacDonald has always proclaimed his innocence of the murders, which he claims were committed by four intruders—three male and one female—who had entered the unlocked rear door of his apartment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and attacked him, his wife, and his children with instruments such as knives, clubs and ice picks. Prosecutors and appellate courts have pointed to physical evidence indicating his guilt. He is currently incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.

This was the first of two monumental miscarriages of justice I have witnessed at close hand during my life. The other involved Sandusky, who suffered the fate of being railroaded through his trial on the basis of a discredited theory of recovered memory.  I was not a close friend of Sandusky during the twenty years I worked at Penn State as an administrator, but knew him as a fellow church member and casual acquaintance. I did know two of the administrators  whose own lives and careers also became enmeshed in the legal proceedings, president Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley, very well and considered them friends and also had some dealings with Penn State’s CFO, Gary Schultz, likewise accused of criminal negligence.  Sandusky is trying to get a new trial, and I get regular email updates from his wife Dottie.

In both cases the defendants suffered the misfortune of a narrative created by others for their own purposes that captured the public’s mind and made it difficult for them to overcome.  MacDonald’s case was exhaustively covered in national media, nut was biased from the start by Joe McGinnis, who portrayed Jeff as a psychopath in his best-selling book Fatal Vision (1983), on which a TV miniseries was based to cement that point of view.  Sandusky’s story was first told by a cub reporter for a Harrisburg newspaper named Sara Ganim, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the case, again cementing in the public mind a view of Sandusky as a serial sexual abuser.  These were both very much false narratives but were bought by the public and carry great influence to this day.

When lies are spoken as truth, the media of America shines.

There were, by contrast, two other cases, each involving rape, which demonstrated to me that the judicial system can work to bring criminals to justice.  I also was involved with both of these cases, which did not receive as much national attention but were unique in their own ways. I helped each of the victims to tell her story in a book, and they both became good friends.  I mention these in a letter I sent to Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer shortly after he was found guilty in his trial in New York….

Dan and Ashleigh are both such smart analysts of the criminal justice system that I would be thrilled for them to dig into these two other high-profile cases that did not work out well for their defendants, whom I know to be honorable and decent men whose lives have forever been changed by the creation and spread of false narratives.

Jerry Sandusky

Editor’s note: I have heard it said that what a man is is written on his brow. For a look at the face of Jerry Sandusky as he is paraded in cuffs and shackles in and out of court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBb3SV6hpCE