Testimony Under Pressure: What the Sandusky Trial Reveals About Justice

This is the fourth of a series.

By John Atwell Moody

The Headline That Was Never Said: Media Convicted Sandusky Before Aaron Spoke

In the final trial we get to hear [50] not what is written about the grand jury testimony, but finally we get to hear Aaron’s actual words. When finally Mike McGettigan puts to Aaron  Fisher, “Mr. Sandusky engaged in oral sex,” Aaron answers carefully, and he is still protecting Sandusky. He says these exact words: “He blew on my stomach, yeah.” And Aaron adds “And I did it once to him.”

That exact exchange, verbatim, absolutely does not imply any abuse beyond the T shirt game. It is already enough to explain everything Jonelle Eshbach put in the grand jury presentment, if we believe that in real life the back of Sandusky’s hand had grazed the private area above the clothes on one occasion during the more than 20 times the game had happened to take place over the two years.

It is already enough to keep open the option of a civil settlement without being untruthful.

It was already enough for every journalist who received a copy of the leaked grand jury presentment without the precise wording to publish their news stories stating, whether it were true or not in the usual sense in which these words are interpreted, that the two individuals gave each other oral sex.

Note very carefully, to repeat this point, that what had been reported in the press before the trial, is not the same as what Aaron eventually actually said in court. He actually testified in court that at least 20 times, “He blew on my stomach, yeah,” and that Aaron had done it once.

Myself, I’d think that the clause at the end “yeah,” means that the T shirt game was the whole answer and that nothing further happened.

I did previously describe that Joe McGettigan had been an ethical and admirable prosecutor during his questioning of Jason Simcisko. Here again, interviewing Aaron, he needs to be sure, and we see the wisdom of an ethical prosecutor. McGettigan pushes for details.

This would be enough to get out of a police interview with Aaron free from blame, leaving ambiguous precisely what it was that Aaron doesn’t know, and precisely when his consciousness was lost, exactly, or how he knows that it was lost. McGettigan understands what is going on. McGettigan, is not going to allow a conviction to rest on the jury hearing Aaron’s vague manipulation.

It has to be yes or no. McGettigan tells Aaron, “I have to ask this question.” Then McGettigan spells out an explicit sex act in complete detail and he challenges Aaron to answer. Did this happen or not.

I already said, in all the years before learning of Swisher-Houtz, Aaron had first refused to apply the terminology “oral sex” to the T shirt game, that was Gillum’s domain. Later, he would recite what Gillum wrote for him, using therefore that terminology, but to an explicit question about any sexual act he would always say ‘no’.

The ghostwriter of “Silent no more” describes him saying “no” to the question during one of the grand jury hearings. Aaron really did not want to convict an innocent person. We actually know that the answer he gave throughout this whole time was the true answer, because the same exact question was put to the other Sandusky kids about what happens in and after exactly the same T shirt game, such as Shawn Sinisi on 15/01/18, and always with the answer of ‘no.’

I really hate to infect my article with a persistent porn meme, but I think it makes sense to include this once [51]. This is going to be a conversation that would have been repeated endless times with Aaron, and endless times with each of the 600 children interrogated by the police in their initial investigation. All the repetitions of this one conversation about a non-erasable porn meme if they were written down could fill dozens of lever-arch files.

And of those many thousands of pages, each single one in turn, with absolute consistency, accounting for ‘more than 20’ events, events that happen ‘all the time.’

When Memory Failed, the Media Filled In the Blanks

To be very clear, to reiterate, as far as what Aaron willingly volunteers, even now in this final hearing, Aaron’s actual answer was exactly the same as Sinisi’s answer shown above, “He blew on my stomach, yeah”.

At the crucial point, when forced to answer if anything happened next, not allowed to say he doesn’t remember or that he blacked out, and in the belief that it doesn’t matter because there is another victim proving guilt, Aaron allows that just once he’s going to surrender to the porn meme, and he is going to change the ‘no’ answer that he and the others always consistently give, including to the grand jury, thousands or possibly millions of times in total, to ‘yes.’

Only hours later is Aaron’s first response to learning that there actually was no other victim, which means, no victim at all. Hearing Swisher-Houtz say he’s really sorry for what happened to Aaron and he would have come forward sooner, Aaron’s first response is it’s OK. Aaron had said “yes” to McGettigan, and even though there hadn’t been any sexual attack of anyone at all, it’s still fair because Sandusky had gone crazy.

The Grand Jury presentment doesn’t pull any punches about how Sandusky could go crazy, about how he could shout at people — but the thing is, it didn’t always end badly. Some kids put up with it, some kids stayed with the program and graduated from college — Aaron knew this.

But it is fair to ask, what about kids like Aaron where they maybe weren’t on a trajectory to be college-bound? The film ‘Paterno,’ with Sara Ganim as its advisor, riffs on how neither the Paterno children, nor Paterno himself, ever saw any evidence of abuse, while their response was dour enough and staid enough, with their praying for the victims etc, to set the tone that something is very wrong.

At the end of the film, Paterno envisions himself still wearing a business suit, and he imagines falling into the swimming pool where all the laughing, playing, confusion and accusation is taking place, and what you see beneath the water, is many many Sandusky children swimming, and what you see also is that they are playful, they are pretending, they are imaginative.

The film had also dealt with football injuries, and we can ask about that, about how contact sports and rough-and-tumble play are considered hugely important aspects of child development. But in college football, is it really right that the only one who experiences any rough-and-tumble is the quarterback, who sometimes gets brain damage and concussions from it?

What is consent? Can a child accuse Sandusky, “All I wanted to do was send the ball into the goal, and without my consent, this huge man came and kicked it away into the other goal!” In tickling, or getting kicked by kids, or using pressure points, there is never consent. While a dog is trying to pull a bit of rope out of your hands, prancing and growling, a friend might say “Let go. You are being unfair, clearly that belongs to the dog.”

Instead of ‘tickling’ I almost said ‘tackling’ though the two words always maintained a distinct origin. Tackling shares a proto-indo-european root with the game ‘tag’ and throughout all the years the word can be traced, seven thousand years, it has included a notion of acquisition.

To Be Continued…

1. Transcript, Sandusky trial, 6 June, 2012
2. Lawyer interview with S. Sinisi Exhibit B page 013 in Amended Motion for New Trial CP-14-0002421-2011

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