Noam Chomsky, Other Renowned Scholars Support the Late Dr. Frederick Crews’ Call for Sandusky Reappraisal (and New Trial)

A few hours before he died last month, Dr. Frederick Cambell Crews emailed me of his imminent passing.

I had emailed him about the publication schedule for a story I wrote for the Daily Mail about Jerry Sandusky, for which he had participated in by granting an interview.

He replied shortly after:

“That sounds promising. But here’s a shock, I’m afraid. My medical situation has deteriorated…”

He explained how his condition, which I was aware of, had deteriorated, informing me that his demise would likely “happen just an hour or so from now.”

A few months before he died, Dr. Crews had provided Frank Report with several essays he wrote concerning Sandusky for future publication. Some essays remain unpublished. This is one of them.  It is actually an introduction to an essay that Frank Report published entitled Saint Sandusky.

Frederick Crews

Several years ago, after reading a formidable but neglected book by Mark Pendergrast called The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort. Sandusky, now 80 years old, has been imprisoned since 2012, but he still insists on his innocence, and––believe it or not––there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone. Indeed, it is now known that he was physically as well as morally incapable of doing so.

Since Sandusky first began to be demonized in the press, 14 months before his trial, no print magazine has published a single word in his defense. I hit the same wall myself when trying to place an essay detailing the many troubling aspects of the case. My luck seemed to change, though, in December 2020 when an editor at the conservative religious magazine First Things solicited my essay, provocatively titled “Saint Sandusky?” Although I am hardly a typical contributor to First Things, I found a tolerant atmosphere among the staff. The article was scheduled for publication on July 9, 2021, in the magazine’s August/September number.

Anticipating outrage and canceled subscriptions, the brave editors asked me to gather favorable opinions that could be posted online to cushion the blow. Easily done. Prominent intellectuals and academics who knew my previous writings read “Saint Sandusky?” and endorsed its argument that Sandusky had been railroaded into prison. But those testimonials didn’t appear, because . . . the article didn’t, either.

First Things is a vehicle of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. At the eleventh hour, as the mortified editors informed me, the institute’s Catholic board canceled publication of my article. Perhaps you can guess the reason: the Church has a pedophilia problem, and Jerry Sandusky is almost universally assumed to be a pedophile. It was thought best to avoid any association, however remote, between Catholicism and his cause.

To my mind, this timidity was sadly ironic. Sweeping sexual abuse under the rug has been routine policy for the Church, and it has only magnified the worldwide scandal of predation and hypocrisy among the anointed. Moreover, we know that some priests have been falsely accused by fortune seekers––an exact parallel to the Sandusky case, as my essay shows. And finally, Jerry Sandusky himself happens to be a devout Methodist. The editors of First Things had supplied their guardians with every reason to believe that a man of faith has been wrongly incarcerated, but that consideration was overruled by image polishing. As I wrote to the editors, “Your board is Catholic, but it isn’t Christian.”

“Saint Sandusky?” can now be read on The Frank Report. As for the eight supporting letters, here they are, with the permission of their authors:

Noam Chomsky

I was very pleased to learn that First Things is publishing Frederick Crews’s fine essay on the Sandusky affair.  Crews’s scrupulous analysis makes a strong case that the severe charges against Sandusky cannot be upheld and that his punishment is unwarranted.  It is of considerable importance for his careful study to appear.

Elizabeth Loftus, PhD

Distinguished Professor

Psychological Science
Criminology, Law & Society
Cognitive Sciences
School of Law

University of California, Irvine

I am more than thrilled to learn that an essay about the Penn State mess by Frederick Crews will be published soon. The essay is brilliant. Crews has long been one of my favorite writers, and this cogent essay has his usual wonderful flair. I hope that your publication can help to draw public attention  to this important piece—real justice needs for this to happen.

Carol Tavris, Ph.D.

Author, with Elliot Aronson, of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

What a relief to read Frederick Crews’s brilliant, measured essay. As a social psychologist and science writer, I fought the onslaught of “recovered memory therapy” in the 1980s and 1990s and the social panics that swept our nation. I watched in despair as unfounded but pernicious psychotherapy beliefs (e.g., that memories are “buried” in the brain, in perfect form, awaiting a therapist to dig them up) were sending hundreds of people to prison and devastating thousands of families. My colleagues in psychological science were producing crucial research on memory, the confirmation bias in interviewing, and trauma (the problem for most victims is not that it is “repressed” but that it is intrusive and unforgettable), thereby providing better methods of convicting the guilty without falsely convicting the innocent.  All too many therapists, prosecutors, and self-righteous crusaders do not care about that difference—especially when the words “children” and “sex” are in the same sentence.

As I read Crews’s account of the Sandusky case, I felt I was back in time, reading the first critical assessments of what was actually going on in the many hundreds of cases in which daycare workers were being accused of committing unspeakably heinous (and also utterly preposterous) acts against the children in their care: making them eat frogs or taking them on planes for purposes of torture. Did no one ask how a daycare teacher could afford to take 20 children on a plane? What plane? Did no one think to look for physical evidence of torture? (There wasn’t any.) So convinced were prosecutors and the public that they were putting horrible pedophiles in prison that they put their critical faculties to sleep.

Crews’s article on Sandusky wakes us up. How many of us convicted him in our minds—thanks to the usual breathless media coverage—because we believed that Sandusky had been seen sodomizing a 10-year-old boy in the showers? We were wrong. How many of us considered the influence of the tens of millions of dollars in a Penn State settlement that the attorneys and some victims anticipated eagerly? How many of us knew that once again the allegations depended on “recovered memories” being generated by therapists? How many of us knew about Sandusky’s poor health and his vestigial testicles, evidence that would have made claims of his priapic adventures nonsensical? Why were none of the ten alleged victims asked whether they noticed anything unusual about his genitals? When we think we know the truth, asking about such pesky details just gets in the way.

Crews’s meticulous assessment of this tragic story is long overdue, and I commend First Things for having the guts to publish it.

Stewart Justman

Professor Emeritus of Humanities

University of Montana

In his dissection of the “evidence” of pedophilia marshaled against former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, Frederick Crews demonstrates to all readers of conscience that the entire case amounts to nothing more or less than a witch-hunt.  Prof. Crews does this not by declamation but by evaluating the balance of probabilities at every point of the sorry saga.  In every instance without exception, it is a moral certainty that the crimes alleged against Sandusky never occurred.  In some instances they could not possibly have occurred.  All the evidence against Sandusky, it turns out, rests on the spurious foundation of memories suggested or demanded by a psychotherapist.  So it is that the Sandusky case represents a recurrence of the recovered-memory horrors of the 1980s and 1990s, whose lessons were never learned.

Sandusky was prosecuted in the name of decency.  Reviewing the facts put forward by Prof. Crews, readers will come to see that the prosecution of Sandusky was itself an obscenity.  Sandusky emerges as a charitable man who has been virtually martyred by a consortium of profiteers and politicians, all citing the work of a psychotherapist who inducted patients into his own lewd belief-system.

It speaks well of First Things that it has undertaken to publish Prof. Crews’s exposé of what is not only a terrible miscarriage of justice but a debauching of public sentiment.

Jerry Coyne

Dept. Ecology and Evolutio

The University of Chicago

Although Jerry Sandusky’s conviction for pedophilia is universally accepted, until I read Frederick Crews’s “Saint Sandusky” I had no idea how thin the evidence for that verdict is.  The legal conviction, as well as the public’s firm view of Sandusky’s guilt, now appear to be based on a mixed bag of evidence—all of it questionable.  Much of the testimony from accusers rests on the discredited technique of recovered memory therapy, in which psychologists or psychiatrists, whose diagnoses are predetermined, induce people to remember things that didn’t happen by planting suggestions in their minds. Further, the evidence of Sandusky’s accusers was inconsistent, with some even asserting that Sandusky never engaged in a pedophilic act, but later changing their minds under pressure. The inconsistency extends to the timeline itself, with discrepancies of nearly a year in when Sandusky’s acts are said to have occurred. Some testimony was retracted but the retractions were ignored. And there were pecuniary motives, with some accusers deciding to testify only after a huge payday from Penn State was in view. Further, police questioning of accusers was hardly “neutral,” with the police telling them beforehand that Sandusky had been ascertained to be a pedophile.

Crews’s narrative shows that the conviction of Sandusky was a put-up job, prompted by the desire of police, prosecutors, therapists, and Penn State itself to get Sandusky into prison as soon as possible.

While Sandusky may be guilty of the crimes of which he’s accused, it’s clear that the investigation of his alleged pedophilia was motivated not by a desire to find the truth but to convict him. As for a fair trial, forget it. While one can’t judge Sandusky’s guilt or innocence from Crews’s article alone, it makes a compelling case that Sandusky didn’t receive justice in any meaningful sense. Real justice can be dispensed only via a retrial or a hard-nosed appellate-court review of the record. Unless that happens, Sandusky will sit in prison until he dies.

Mark Pendergrast

Frederick Crews has produced a persuasive argument that Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State defensive coach, is probably innocent. Delving into the details of the case, he reveals that a combination of recovered memory therapy, leading police tactics, and a moral panic promoted by the media resulted in one of the most remarkable miscarriages of justice of the 21st century. Crews mined much of my book, The Most Hated Man in America, for many of the facts of the case.

William M. Chace

President, Wesleyan University (1988-1994)

President Emeritus, Emory University (1994-2003)

Frederick Crews’ magisterial study of the ways in which, over time, the memories of many people in an American college town were distorted, magnified, and perhaps manipulated is deeply disturbing. The human costs of such distortion—virtually tribal in its intensity—center on its chief victim, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. He was alleged to have subjected scores of boys, over many years, to repeated sexual exploitation of every kind, including forcible anal intercourse.

With lucidity, patience and exacting detail, Crews shows not just that this monumental tale of coercion is implausible but that it was impossible. Sandusky, happily married, childless and perhaps physically incapable of even ordinary sexual expression, could not have done all he was said to have done. For years, no blemish or scandal touched his name. He was loved and admired. He was devoted to his church and to football.

But the memories of the victims who had been brought forward in court proceedings said otherwise. In fact, those memories were shown to be one thing at one time and quite another at a later time. Young men who had once movingly praised Sandusky as the leading moral force in their lives, as a kind teacher, and as a benevolent father-figure later testified to his horrific violations of their bodies.

What changed? Memories changed. No matter how precious and sustaining our memories may be, they are never free of our need to be gratified. Sometimes we alone supply the gratifications, glorifying this or that in our lives while suppressing our shortcomings. But we often happily turn to others offering their own kind of gratification, this to magnify our virtues or, as in the case of Sandusky, to show forth the degree to which we have so painfully yet stoically suffered. Crews shows how professional experts in so-called “recovered memory” prompted Sandusky’s “victims” to “remember” what “truly” had happened. He also suggests that once large settlement funds were available, the “victims” tailored their memories to suit the fiscal opportunity.

Were this only a story like so many others of its kind, it could be filed away as one more instance of “mistaken eye-witness testimony.” But it is a story of a former coach, likely blameless, who will spend the rest of his life in prison fortified and sustained only by his profound religious faith, the love of his wife, and letters from friends.

Richard A. Leo, Ph.D., J.D.

Hamill Family Chair and

Professor of Law and Psychology

University of San Francisco

I am the Hamill Family Professor of Law and Psychology at the University of San Francisco, and formerly a tenured professor of both Criminology, Law and Society and Psychology and Social Behavior at U.C. Irvine. For 30 years, I have been researching, writing and teaching about the wrongful conviction of the innocent in the American criminal justice system, police interrogation, false confessions and psychological coercion.  Like Mark Pendergrast’s 2017 book, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, Frederick Crews’s article “Saint Sandusky?” asks fundamentally important questions about one of the most high-profile and troubling cases of the 21st century: If Jerry Sandusky is the monster that the media and courts have made him out to be, then why is the evidence of his guilt so full of holes? Why is all the evidence against him entirely testimonial (the most fallible and malleable of all types of evidence), and why was so much of it excavated through the dangerous practice of recovered memory therapy that was scientifically discredited more than two decades ago after leading to hundreds, if not thousands (or tens of thousands), of false accusations?  Why is so much of the alleged evidence against Sandusky so contradictory, so inconsistent and so shape-shifting over time? With characteristic rigor and clarity, Professor Frederick Crews asks the hard questions that the American media––which were collectively asleep at the wheel in their reporting on this case––have altogether missed.  In a country in which wrongful convictions are such a common occurrence, the Jerry Sandusky case deserves a critical eye and careful reexamination.  Mark Pendergrast and Frederick Crews have led the way.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

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