The “Penn State Scandal” is based on an event that didn’t happen.
For two years, the case against Jerry Sandusky rested on Aaron Fisher’s shifting claims about oral sex between him and Sandusky that allegedly occurred when he was 13-15 years old, which the 16-year-old forgot and then remembered with the help of hundreds of sessions with a therapist, who in almost anybody’s book is a quack.
Mike Gillum, the therapist, wanted fame and prestige, so he implanted suggestions of false memories in the heads of his victims/patients.
Though a grand jury would normally indict a ham sandwich, the prosecutors did not want to indict Sandusky based on Fisher alone. Two grand juries heard the sniveling teen deny and cry, fall on the floor, and vomit.
Aaron Fisher
Yes, Fisher knew he was being pressured by his greedy mother and therapist, the latter who attended his police and prosecutors’ interviews and sat in on and influenced his grand jury testimony.
Dawn Renee Fisher Daniels Hennessey, mother of Aaron Fisher.
Mama Had Big Dreams
His mother told neighbors that she would wind up owning Sandusky’s home. She did get her liar of a son $7.5 million from Penn State for his deceptions, a sum it will not surprise those who know him and his mother that they blew through and are back to being broke, like they were when Dawn Fisher Daniels Hennessey first dreamed of living large off a lawsuit involving Jerry Sandusky.
From poverty to wealth and back to poverty, Fisher and Hennessey are classic examples of Collodi’s remark in Pinocchio that stolen fruit does not fructify.
Sue the Therapist Gillum
Mike Gillum violated so many professional rules that Fisher and his mother have a road back to wealth: sue Mike Gillum for planting false memories in Aaron Fisher’s head that created a national calamity.
A good civil lawyer would take the case on a fee-splitting arrangement and restore the Fishers to millionaire status, and this time the right way through honesty.
Gillum took this young man’s life and future away from him by conning him into “remembering” things that never happened to him. He violated almost every ethical rule in the book for therapists, and undoubtedly has ample insurance.
Fisher ought not to wait until the statute of limitations runs out. (Brett Swisher-Houtz, who also saw Gillum for memory therapy, might also have a lawsuit. Both of these men know Sandusky did not abuse them, but Gillum, an authority figure, told them he did.)
Jerry Sandusky
The Quack
Fisher’s therapist, Mike Gillum, played a triple role: therapist, aid to prosecutors (revealing confidential disclosures and strategizing with prosecutors to get Fisher to say what they both wanted), and an ambitious man seeking to get a book deal (he did get one), a movie deal (he did not get one), and recognition for cracking the big case by reputedly restoring or, more accurately, implanting memories of abuse that supposedly happened to a sexually active, porn-loving heterosexual teen, (Fisher) who had returned to Sandusky’s house more than 100 times where he allegedly gave and got fellatio in the basement and forgot all about it – till therapist Gillum peeled back “the layers of the onion” of the mind and brought it out to the teen who had been widely known as a pathological liar in his school, among friends, teachers and neighbors.
Like Kit Carson said in The Time of Your Life, for Fisher, Gillum “was the first man ever to believe my stories.”
Not Even a Ham Sandwich
Ethically challenged prosecutor Jonelle Eschbach
Though eager to have a case against Sandusky, Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach could not find anyone else Sandusky had abused, and Fisher was a poor witness.
He was so bad that she and Gillum considered invoking a law where Fisher could be declared incompetent and Gillum, as his therapist, could testify for Fisher as if he were speaking for him.
They decided against it and instead got the feeble-minded lad to say what they wanted. Still, even after Eshbach, collaborating with Gillum, got Fisher’s testimony shored up enough to write the indictment against Sandusky, her boss, Deputy Attorney General, the porn-loving Frank Fina, who had a close personal connection to the supervising judge of the grand jury, the blockhead Barry Feudale (removed from supervising the grand jury for corruption involving his buddy Fina in the Sandusky case) told her that without more victims, do not indict.
Frank Fina, whose ethics are among the most dubious of the entire cast of corrupt actors in the Sandusky case, knew Aaron Fisher was not enough to convict Sandusky.
A Word About the Bad Actors
Fina’s law license was suspended for a year for his corruption in the Sandusky case. He was later fired for his role in Porn Gate, which took down several judges.
In other words, in the Sandusky case, the good guys were the villains, and vice versa. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing insightful can come of the story I will relate.
Remember that as a steady and general principle that will help you navigate the Jerry Sandusky case and the so-called Penn State scandal.
From Ham to Bologna
Mike McQueary
Everything changed in November 2010, when John McQueary II told Penn State football fan Christopher Houser that his younger brother, Mike, then an assistant coach under Joe Paterno, had, about a decade earlier, walked in on Sandusky and a boy naked in the Penn State locker room showers and witnessed something inappropriate.
On Nov. 3, 2010, Houser sent an anonymous email to Centre County District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller (who later lost her law license for prosecutorial cheating [this is Pennsylvania]), which read: “Someone should contact and interview Penn State Assistant Football Coach Michael McQueary reference the Sandusky Investigation.”
Parks Miller forwarded the email to a state police trooper and an investigator who had previously worked on the Sandusky investigation.
At 7 p.m. on Nov. 10, 2010, Rossman and Anthony Sassano, a narcotics agent never known to work on a sex abuse case, made an unannounced visit to McQueary’s home.
They knew that surprise visits at odd and unexpected hours would put people they wanted to interview in fear, which is an excellent way to get them to say what you want.
(One Second Mile alum, Chad Rexroad, told me that the State Police arrived unexpectedly at 5:30 am to interview him about Sandusky, which alarmed him and his wife. Despite the police’s eager insistence that Sandusky abused him, and the intimation by a pre-dawn visit that he better “remember,” Chad refused to lie. If he had lied, he would have made millions. But Sandusky never abused him.)
When police came by surprise to McQueary’s home, he was working late at the Lasch Building at Penn State. His wife Barbara called him and handed the phone to one of the investigators.
A startled McQueary did not initially know the purpose of their visit or was or whether they were there to investigate him, possibly for his illegal gambling.
What ran through his head is hard to know.
What we do know is that McQueary was not a good gambler, and like many afflicted with the mental illness that exhibits itself as gambling addiction, he lost far more than he won.
This was not a new habit. Even as a player for Penn State, he illegally gambled and lost.
So keep in mind that the man responsible for the credibility behind the entire Penn State scandal was a degenerate gambler for most or all of his adult life.
McQueary’s gambling would rise to a criminal offense, since he bet not only on poker and pro football, but also on the Nittany Lions, which he had played for and now coached, where he could influence the results.
McQueary illegally bet and lost in a November 1996 game against Michigan State at Beaver Stadium. With McQueary as a backup quarterback, he could not influence the game from the sidelines. Penn State won by three points, but didn’t cover the eight-point spread.
McQueary lost money he could not afford to lose.
Cheating Comes Natural
In 1995, when McQueary was still the second-string quarterback, Penn State was ahead of Rutgers 51-34 with only a minute left.
They call it “garbage time.” The game is a foregone conclusion, and the usual college and pro football policy is to run out the clock.
It is often a time to let the second-string players in for some live field experience. McQueary was sent in to run out the clock.
The 16-point lead, however, was less than the 20-point spread oddsmakers gave people who bet on the games. McQueary had a choice and did what he usually did when it came to a conflict between his self-interest and the right thing to do.
With Rutgers expecting McQueary would be running the clock out by either handing the ball to a runner or taking the ball himself and kneeling down, he instead called a play in the huddle to throw a touchdown pass.
Rutgers would not expect this, so it could work. In this way, he could add six points to the score, get past the 20-point spread, and win the bet.
It worked.
Afterward, Rutgers coach Doug Graber and Joe Paterno got into a shouting match because Graber thought Paterno was running up the score.
Joe Paterno.
Paterno did not know that his devious liar – the man who ultimately destroyed his reputation through his lies – was behind it.
The innocent-looking McQueary acted dumb and said he was proud to show his coach he had the stuff to throw touchdown passes.
Dubious Season
Joe Pa believed the kid (who pocketed a sum from his bookie) and let him start as quarterback in his senior year. The team played a disappointing 9-3 season.
McQueary’s role in the three losses could stand a little scrutiny, if McQueary, as a quarterback with a lot of control over the game, had a hand in the losses.
But if McQueary had thrown a game, he might have been under pressure.
Bookie’s Play Not Nice
William ‘Big Billy’ D’Elia
He was often in debt to bookies. At one time, he owed thousands to a certain bookie in the area, widely reputed to work with Big Billy D’Elia and the Buffalino Family, and who, after giving McQueary ample time to pay, apparently said he was losing patience.
Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran
The Irishman’s name was also mentioned, as well as a not so subtle allusion to some Russians known to help D’Elia in the quiet movement of gambling money, whose collection methods were described as most unpredictable.
McQueary ran to his father, confessed. Dad, understanding at once the importance of prompt payments, paid the bookie off at once.
The Police at His Door
So it was now 2011. McQueary has state police at his door.
He had another vulnerability; some might call it an amiable failing. But either way, it was a good reason for him not to meet the police at his home.
Mike McQueary liked to send naked pictures of himself to women who were not his wife in the hopes he might be able to bed them, and because he was proud as a peacock and wanted women to share in his narcissistic delight.
This sending of pics is not illegal with consenting adults, and though he reportedly did sometimes send the pics without an invitation, he only sent them to women over 18.
The vulnerability was not in the sending of his pics, often featuring closeups of his genitals in pornographic pose, but in the fact that he sent them on his Penn State-provided phone. If not criminal, it was an offense that would lead to his summary discharge as a coach at Penn State – mainly since he worked for the very moral Joe Paterno.
As an aside, it appears, thanks to the work of John Ziegler, McQueary sent at least one of his indecorous photos to the wife of Joe Amendola, Sandusky’s incompetent defense attorney.
Mike McQueary
So McQueary was not only a gambling addict but apparently a sex addict, which he did his best to keep from his wife, Paterno, and everyone else other than random women and his bookies.
McQueary told the police he would agree to meet them but not at his home, certainly not, not with his wife there.
At 7:45 p.m., McQueary sat down with the two investigators in the dark on a bench in Holmes-Foster Park.
Curious Investigators
It remains to be seen how narcotics agent Anthony Sassano got on the case at all. (Internal labor agreements in the AG’s office forbid use of narcotics agents for investigations other than those involving narcotics.)
As for Scott Rossman, he became notorious for an accidentally leaked tape, where he conspired with civil lawyer Ben Andreozzi to lie to Brett Swisher Houtz that police had nine victims of Sandusky who claimed they had oral sex (when they only had the dubious Aaron Fisher) to suborn perjury.
Meet and Greet
When the police explained the purpose of their investigation was not him, but Sandusky, and what he was rumored to have seen a decade ago, McQueary relaxed and resumed his old calculating self.
“McQueary related that he was willing to cooperate,” Rossman wrote in a police memo.
“However, due to the severity of the incident, he wanted to consult with legal counsel prior to and during the interview.”
McQueary said later that he knew before he met the investigators that they wanted to speak about Sandusky, because there had been rumors of an investigation in State College for nearly two years.
Onward and Forward
Allan Myers with Jerry Sandusky
In our next post on the Three Liars Destroy Joe Paterno: Fisher, McQueary, and Sergeant Allan Myers USMC, we will discuss McQueary’s seven different versions of what he saw or heard in the locker room, and how prosecutors used this fool to embellish his story, ultimately throwing the ass clown under the bus, and destroying his reputation.
The governor Tom Corbett and even Barack Obama smacked him down for cowardice.
We will examine McQueary’s provably false story and how his calculating backfired on him with some never-before-revealed details.
We will however not mock him for his stupidity. For example, we will not laugh at a typical McQueary statement, such as “I am 100% sure, but not 1000% sure, that what I saw in the shower room was ‘over the line.'”
We will prove that he was not even 10 percent sure, and that his efforts to curry favor with investigators and throw his mentor and best friend in life, Joe Paterno, under the bus destroyed his reputation, causing a scandal where there was none. Sending four innocent men to prison was not done so much by malice, but cowardice.
As readers will see in our next post, the “Penn State Scandal” that ruined the legacy of a man who should be revered as a national treasure is based on an event that didn’t happen, and three men were at the heart of it – all three inveterate liars.
Two of them, the drunkard Myers and Fisher, are obscure rascals nobody cares about. But McQueary, but for his greed and avarice, might otherwise have had a great career.
He might have succeeded Paterno as head coach or got a position with another top-flight football college.
He is now regarded as buffoon and untrustworthy, and he will likely never coach again, not even little league.
Who would ever trust his judgment?
As the years pass and Sandusky is exonerated and Paterno’s statue is restored to his rightful place, McQueary will stand small but conspicuous for his despicable character.
