How Public Opinion Was Engineered Before the First Witness Testified in Sandusky and Letby Cases

This is the second of a series.

By John Atwell Moody

Pulitzers and Premonitions: Journalism Helped Build Myth, Not Test the Facts

For deeper analysis we turn away from the similarities, and turn now instead to the contrast, between the Sandusky and Letby cases. In both cases a wise decision was formulated: let us ask now, why had the culprit never been caught earlier? In the USA the question came from cub journalist Sara Ganim. Another journalist at her newspaper was Charles Thompson.

She asked why hadn’t the University president been arrested, and he duly was. She asked, is the state governor who’d started the investigation as AG culpable? This resulted in the Moulton report with terms of reference to decide culpability of the state governor, and young Ganim won a Pulitzer prize [19].

And talk about a kaleidoscope, Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son Matt was on Oprah, and in a film called “Happy Valley” he said he’d thought that all the accusers would just be proven to be lying. Elsewhere he admits, their accounts match his own experiences. I believe this.

Like we’ve seen for Jason Simcisko, none of the witnesses were making any actual accusation and yet for some reason the jury still convicted. But Matt Sandusky did something which confuses me a lot.

The police report by Trooper Rossman had said “M.S. flatly denied that Sandusky had ever touched him inappropriately.” Over time, though, if a TV interviewer asked, “Did Sandusky do X and Y and Z?” Matt would adopt a sad dumb expression and retort “You can only imagine it.”

The news would play the interview adding a comment to the effect “what a shame,” but then the next day, once media is running with the story, Matt would be jubilant, “Wow, look! Sandusky did X and Y and Z to me! It’s right here in the newspapers!”

For a specific example, Matt had always said he’d been adopted by Sandusky to escape an abusive step-parent.

Telling the story of being in hospital after a suicide attempt, he said something like “My abuser visited me and said he wishes I’d finished the job.” News reports ran with stories saying Sandusky wished his son had died, Matt was jubilant. It is not Matt’s fault, but he seemed actually proud about how Sandusky acquired a new tagline, “My abuser, Jerry Sandusky!” [20]

The opposite was the journalist John Ziegler, a freewheeling conservative talk-show host whose methods had already come to the attention of the philosopher David Foster Wallace. Ziegler realized, uncharacteristically for him, that the battle of vague meta-concepts which had always been his forté would be, here, cruel to Dottie and Jerry Sandusky who had sobbed in disbelief [21] when Ziegler asked, when did you realize you might not be found innocent? Up until the moment of the verdict they never even imagined the jury system could let them down.

A juror had written, the first time he was sure Sandusky is really guilty is when the verdict was read. There was no emotion and that must imply he knew he deserved the verdict [22].

Letby Silenced, Sandusky Framed: Two Systems, One Presumption—Guilty

Of the three, Ziegler, Matt, and Ganim, any two were like electrical wires of incompatible potential. Ziegler said Ganim didn’t deserve her Pulitzer [23]. Ziegler said Matt should burn in hell for what he said on “Happy Valley” [24]. Matt had Ziegler arrested and jailed when Ziegler showed up at one of Matt’s lectures [25] .

In the absence of any clear archive of evidence, Ziegler created “Framing Paterno” and began collecting many hundreds of hours of testimony in his “benefit of hindsight” podcast with Liz Habib.

The testimony was of such relevance and such high quality that a hundred pages or so were transcribed by the Forensic Psychiatrist Dr. R. Chris Barden and submitted to Pennsylvania court [26], but to no avail.

In the Letby case, the same terms of reference which had come from a gentle cub reporter here originate right at the top, from Lady Justice Dame Thirlwall: we’re not going to re-try the Lucy Letby criminal case, protestations of innocence are just noise, but why were these events allowed to take place at the beginning? Of course, assuming guilt is a good way to gather evidence of innocence, but it is demoralizing to see that unconscious bias based on gender remains so stubborn.

Letby’s grievance had been filed not by her individually but by the Royal College of Nursing. After Dr’s. Brearey and Jayaram had been asked to apologize to her when she’d requested phrases like ‘angel of death’ not be used in public areas, Jayaram pulled her aside and let her know that in his opinion she is just being manipulated [27].

Men who testify at Thirlwall (but never women) often begin by apologizing for what she (Letby) did. Her main defender in Parliament, the conservative Right Honourable Sir David Davis wrote pleading with Lady Thirlwall to keep “at least an opening in her mind that Letby may not be guilty.” He described her answer in cricketing terminology as “a dead bat answer” [28].

References.

1. Pulitzer organization, local reporting prize 2012
2. Bleacher Report, March 3, 2015, My perpetrator walked into my room the next day, and the very first thing he said to me was, ‘You can’t even kill yourself right.’” versus Syracuse.com 1 April 2016 “He woke up in a hospital bed to find Jerry Sandusky there. ‘You couldn’t even kill yourself right,’ Matt Sandusky remembers his abuser saying.”
3. Framing Paterno website
4. “ The look on his face… no real emotion, just kind of accepting…you know, because he knew it was true,”, juror Josh Harper, NBC interview June 2012, and “ He knew it was true, it made me confident that we made the right decision ”, NY Times, June 23, 2012
5. Framing Paterno website.
6. same
7. same
8. Jerry Sandusky appeal filed March 2023
9. Thirlwall inquiry, Jayaram’s testimony.
10. Shoo Lee press conference 2024

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