It was my understanding that the point you made in the post I quoted was that McQueary might have been witnessing one of Sandusky’s infamous hugs and not something worse. I think hearing rhythmic slapping noises before witnessing two people in an embrace adds an important context and is quite relevant to McQueary’s conclusion of what he saw.
I agree that it could have been relevant to McQueary’s conclusion. But it doesn’t make it a definite case of rape, which was Huerta’s claim.
He said:
In responding to this, the fact that Sandusky had the boy in virtually the same position as the other kids who were not subjected to anal intercourse was highly relevant. The fact that there was also something else suggestive of some sort of sexual activity does not detract from this. Maybe it does make it more likely it was a rape, maybe it doesn’t*. But it’s still very possible that this “naked man standing cheek and jowl (as it were) behind a naked boy, in a shower” was in fact “something other than anal intercourse”. Much as it was the other times when the same naked man stood cheek to jowl behind other naked boys in the same shower.
IMHO. YMMV.
[*On that topic, I’ll cop to not being a rhythmic slapping sound expert, as earlier in this thread, but how conclusive could 2 or 3 slaps have been that it was sexual activity (let alone rape)? I don’t know what to think about that.]
I still don’t understand why Sandusky was allowed to shower with 10 year olds in the team’s locker room to begin with. Didn’t anyone think that was weird?
Starving Artist doesn’t think it’s weird.
Except that regardless of whether penetration took place, a naked man standing cheek by jowl behind a naked boy in a shower is grossly inappropriate and highly suspicious behavior in and of itself. Unless Sandusky was trying to save the boy from dying of hypothermia, there is no innocent reason for him to do that.
I agree with this.
What point are you trying to make?
From my experience as a youth, a men’s locker room has a communal shower that is used at the end of a day of physical activity. During my time as a wanna be athlete (1980s) it was normal for coaches and student athletes to walk in and out, using the shower as they felt proper, wang hanging out to everyone in attendance.
Now, I’m not saying it’s not suspicious that ONLY Sandusky and the boy were in there. Yes, McQueary saw the boy up against the wall with Sandusky behind him, etc. It’s highly probable that something bad was going on. But, again from my experience, it wouldn’t be unusual if the boy was the last one out of the shower and Sandusky was heading into the shower after doing some paperwork.
This idea that the very fact that Sandusky was showering in a men’s locker room with students at the camp is per se molestation is a foreign thing to me.
You correctly note that the mano a mano, late night nature of the showers was very different than the post-practice situation you describe for, probably, a whole team.
More than that, a lot’s changed since the 1980s. Basically, most of what we know about pedophilia has unfolded in a series of scandals starting right about then. There’s much more popular awareness that pedophiles intentionally seek out positions that put them in contact with kids. There’s a much better understanding of repetitive patterns of grooming victims, of the problems coaching positions for kids can lead to (repeated swim coach/gymnastics coach scandals), of the reasons it’s weird for an adult to have special one on one relationships with individual kids, travel, presents, sleepovers. We know because we learned the hard way. A friend volunteers at a Catholic church teaching CCD. There are extensive policies about adults and kids being alone in any closed-door setting. There’s a bunch of signage saying no adults and kids using the restoom facilities at the same time. It’s a shame they have to do that, but they’ve (hopefully) learned their lesson.
By the 2000s, Paterno (invariably described as a “devout Catholic”) had every opportunity to be acutely aware of the patterns and problems that emerged in the trainwreck of the decades-long Catholic priest scandal. But he acted as though he’d learned nothing about the suspiciousness of, say, an adult and an unrelated young boy sharing a hotel room.
To your point – I don’t know, but I would be very curious as to whether any school, Pop Warner league, etc. would, today, allow the situation you describe (adult coaches wandering among pre-adolescent or adolescent boys with wangs a flopping everywhere). I have to think at least some, maybe most, institutions would have curtailed this out of liability concerns alone.
Or rather he doesn’t think there’s any way to know if it’s weird or not, the nuances are too fine, so it’s not really worth the effort, and any police investigation would be doomed from the outset, at least till more of the facts come out (of where I don’t know).
This is kind of interesting:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/former-2nd-mile-board-members-needed-know-080719703–spt.html
Former board members of the Second Mile say they were never informed of the the sexual nature of the Sandusky’s activities and investigation in 2002. It looks like the director was covering up for Sandusky.
Board members can be sued and Second Mile has been sued. Of course, everyone is heading for cover.
Things can get very corrupt in a closed community. There is a current controversy in New York about hiding the identity of child molesters in the Hassidic community. It’s looking more and more that there was a culture of cover-up in Happy Valley. Now the scab has been ripped off the wound and it’s a very serious, festering wound.
This wasn’t at the camp. This was a university football locker room. The victim was not a university student, he was a child. Men’s locker room culture aside, did no one think it odd that Sandusky was taking a child into the shower of a university football team?
I can understand a kid getting a tour of the facility, but I just can’t imagine a tour including a shower!
It was my understanding that this was part of a youth camp. The young kids doing drills on the field with PSU coaches and players instructing them, making them feel a part of the team, etc. These include regular workouts and day long activities which would require a shower at the end.
If I’m wrong about that, I am ready to be corrected. I don’t think that this was a simple tour of the PSU facilities where Sandusky picked off one of the tour participants to have a look at the shower with him..
Where did you get that understanding? There’s nothing in the indictment to suggest that Victim #2 (the one involved in the shower incident) was there as part of a youth camp. And, to my knowledge, Victim #2 hasn’t come forward or made any public statement, so I don’t know how anyone would know why he was there except for Sandusky. Has he said anything about it?
All this talk of men’s locker room culture…and we are forgetting one very important, very telling fact.
McQueary knew men’s locker room culture; he knew the culture at PSU specifically.
He was an athlete. He was PSU’s quarterback for several years and remained within the organization since, as a football coach. He knew locker room culture because he was part of locker room culture. He knew/knows exactly what is and isn’t normal. He knows what “horsing around” and towel snapping and chirping at each other is, because he’s done it for years. He knew under what sort of circumstances a coach is likely to be in the locker room and/or shower because he’s had coaches around him his whole life, and because he was a coach himself.
Paterno, as McQueary’s coach and coworker, knew what locker room culture is, and knew that McQueary knew it too…because they were both part of it and had been a part of it for many decades.
Yet what McQueary saw - Sandusky and the approximately 10 year old boy - was enough to shock him, to leave him shaken up and saying that it was very, very wrong and to do something, although not nearly enough, in response. What he saw was far enough out of his world for him to react to.
Does anyone really believe that McQueary might have seen something that was normal for a men’s locker room and overreacted to it?
No, actually they wouldn’t require a shower at the end. Why would they? No one’s going to die if they wait to get home to take a shower. My son attended sports camps and played on a team in high school. No showers at the end of a long day at camp, or after practice or after a game. You mention coaches and athletes walking in or out as they saw fit. I’m guessing you were at least in high school , if not college at the time because even in the '80s ten year olds didn’t commonly have the freedom to walk in and out of locker rooms or showers (or anywhere else at a camp or school) as they saw fit.
My husband and I were in high school a little over thirty years ago, and while I did shower when I had swimming classes and my husband the athlete showered after games and practices, the coaches/teachers were not showering at the same time. They were present in the area to provide supervision, but they were *fully clothed* and there was a group of students/athletes all there at the same time. Not one adult and one teenager- and certainly not one adult and one preteen. And that was in the days *before* nearly every organization involving children had rules prohibiting an adult from being alone with any child not his or her own.**Huerta88 ** mentioned CCD- but its not just CCD. It's Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, all sort of Little League type teams, high school teams, etc.
If Sandusky had been in the shower area, fully clothed with a whole group of kids I might believe that he and Paterno just had the poor judgment to believe that what was acceptable in the '60s or '70s was still acceptable. However, there is no possible way that they didn’t know that Sandusky being naked in a shower with a 10 year old boy was not just unacceptable in the late '90s , but so unusual as to be suspicious in itself.
Forgive me here, but when exactly did you say this previously? What other incidents? Have you already provided cites where 10 pedo “victims” colluded against an individual, falsely accusing him? Is that what you are saying here? That Sandusky is being railroaded by 10 others who are colluding?
Locker room culture. You people make locker rooms sound like a wet dream gay porn movie. Oh hee hee, all the towel snapping and horsing around that we did back in varsity soccer.
Locker rooms, especially for kids, is not some swinging dick fest. It’s the same bullshitting you do with each other in the hallway except you say fuck a lot more and throw out mentions of girls tits. And yes, I remember the coaches showering with the team … with the team. Not one team member, who was only ten, at night, alone. That would have raised more eyebrows than Mr C.'s fat ass waddling into the shower room with the rest of us.
And I guaran-goddamned-tee you there is no effing way “including showering lessons at the end of the day” is included in the Second Mile brochure, so really:
- is a gigantic load of fresh rationalized bullshit.
I think he was alluding to the one other instance where Sandusky was caught in the shower touching a boy and someone (maybe that weirdly disappeared DA?) investigated but could not find enough to indict for rape (the circumstances of who decided what in that incident are murky).
Your larger point is of course correct – the GJ contains plenty of other allegations of penetrative rape on multiple occasions. Just because he didn’t (or couldn’t be proved to have) raped the other victim he was caught in the shower with (at the time he was caught) does not mean that a man clearly inclined to have anal intercourse with boys would have some sort of compunction about doing it in a shower as opposed to a car or bedroom. His specific MO was not shower rape but rape, and his other MO was showering with his victim, so I find it far from hard to believe he wouldn mash the two up for an extra frisson.
I can tell you right now, from my experience as an educator in the 21st century: it IS explicitly illegal now for coaches to shower with minor boys. There is no “system” to handle it outside the legal system.
I agree that I could have been more specific in my wording. In the context of the parade, the parents are present. The naked men are not alone with the children, and they are not touching the children. Surely you can see the vast difference.
There is no situation in which it is legal for a man to be naked in a shower with a young boy, alone, who is not his relative, and what makes it 100% for sure illegal is, as both McQueary and Paterno stated, for “fondling of a sexual nature,” bodies slapping together etc., to go on during said naked, one on one shower. Surely you can agree with that?
Let me break this down for you so you can understand why your opposition is growing increasingly red-faced and spittle-flecked with you.
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McQueary saw Sandusky fondling a 10 year old boy in a sexual manner, naked in the shower alone. The only truly moral response to this is to forcibly intervene and rescue the boy. The fact that McQueary didn’t do this is a MAJOR MORAL FAILING, and I hope he has the decency to feel horrible about it for the rest of his life. If you lack the moral courage to intervene, the next best option is to call the police. McQueary didn’t do this either. He went to his equivalent of God, Joe Paterno. I’m sure he believe Paterno would do the right thing.
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Upon hearing from McQueary (as has been established) that Sandusky was naked in the shower with a 10 year old boy, fondling him in a sexual way, the only truly moral response would be to call the police immediately. I’m sorry, but there is no way to dispute this on a moral basis. Everyone, everyone, EVERYONE has a moral obligation to protect the children who put their trust in them. I’m sure Joe Paterno would agree with me on that. Considering that McQueary’s assessment of the situation was 100% accurate, and Paterno admits hearing it, it is a MAJOR MORAL FAILING that he did not make this call.
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Paterno kicked these allegations up the ladder to Curley and Schultz. I don’t think I have to tell you what I think of them and their decision. They have basically called McQueary a liar, but I believe McQueary accurately represented what happened mostly because Paterno backs him up.
SO… here you go: anything short of calling the police is a MAJOR MORAL FAILING. I can understand, even sympathize, with the denial a person would experience when someone they believe they know, who has been a friend for years, and who they thought was a good person, is a sexual predator. This, however, it what separates the men from the boys, morally speaking. If you can do the right thing even when it scares you, even when you have a lot to lose, even when it would be easier and more convenient not to, that is what makes you a truly morally excellent person. Based on this, I cannot believe that Joe Paterno is a truly morally excellent person. I think he is just about average, because I think many, many people would do what he did. I don’t think he is a sinkhole of festering evil (that would be Sandusky), or a lying shitbag who doesn’t care about kids (Curley and Shultz). No, I think he is a moral coward when push comes to shove.
What you are doing and what Paterno did are very similar. You are both creating rationalizations on behalf of someone you like and admire. While normally I would laud you both for your personal loyalty, it is trumped a thousand times over by the moral failing of putting your loyalty above the welfare of children. I hope you can take what I am saying in the spirit it is intended. I am not calling you name or trying to belittle you. I am saying, rationalizing and quibbling and equivocating on behalf of a pedophile is morally abhorrent. That’s what Paterno did, and it is a stain on his reputation that should be there. It is totally deserved. Your defense of him is NOT a defense of Sandusky (I hope) and therefore much less morally offensive to me, but it does bug me.
You know why? Because it’s that very sort of equivocating that has led to decades of unpunished pedophilia. It’s not your intention, but it’s a systemic denial that has led to scandals in the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, schools, and sports programs. I dearly wish decent people like Joe Paterno had the moral courage to do the right thing. I also wish you could admit that Paterno made a horrible mistake.
He cannot admit the “sexual nature.” The little-girl game he’s playing right now is (as far as I can tell) focusing on the phrase “fondling or sexual contact” in Paterno’s GJ testimony, using the disjunctive “or” to suggest that Paterno had two very different things in mind, “fondling” OR “sexual content,” then rejecting the second and saying, yeah, it must have been “fondling,” not the very different “sexual contact,” and there are forms of “fondling” that aren’t necessarily sexual.
It’s moronic, it’s the act of a liar, but it’s all he has to fall back on. It doesn’t work, even on his full-retard “logic,” because elsewhere Paterno clarifies that the contact he was told of “was sexual in nature.” (Not to mention McQueary’s new amplified testimony that he made it clear to Paterno that there was “extreme” sexual contact that he thought was some kind of intercourse).
I don’t know what this guy’s organic mental problem is, but it’s coupled with a strong predeliction towar lying and making up fables and ignoring evidence he doesn’t like. Fairly ugly when you think about it.