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Sandusky Guilty: The Story of Jerry, Dottie and Matt
A haunting, and telling, piece of testimony in the trial of Jerry Sandusky came after the eighteen-year-old known as Victim 1 talked about how, when he was about thirteen, Sandusky groped him and then performed oral sex on him when he stayed over at his house. Mike Dawson, for McClatchy, described Victim 1’s account of what happened next, one summer night at bedtime:
“It’s your turn”: in that phrase, there’s a glimpse of a particularly cruel means of compulsion that seems to have been used on the boys he is accused of sexually abusing or raping. Sandusky told them, again and again, that they owed him. All of the boys had family situations that left them vulnerable; a number of them were coming from or headed for foster homes, and were supposedly being helped by Sandusky, a Penn State defensive coach, and his Second Mile foundation. That includes Matt Sandusky, the youngest of six children Sandusky adopted, who now, at the age of thirty-three, has joined his accusers. Sandusky has pleaded not guilty, and the jury is deliberating now. The jurors were sequestered before Matt, through his lawyers, let it be known that he would have testified against his adoptive father.
...The story of how Matt ended up in the Sandusky house—laid out in detail by Sara Ganim, of the Patriot-News—sounds more like a tragedy than a soap opera, or, given how many warning signs seem to have been missed, a cautionary tale. The boy started a fire that burned down a barn; Sandusky, who knew him and had spent time with him through Second Mile, asked the juvenile court that Matt be sent to live with him. Did Sandusky consider that a boy who had done that might not be believed if he turned to other adults for help? His mother, who was on her own with three children, objected, and said that she didn’t think her son would be safe; sometimes he would hide when Sandusky came to see him. The placement was made anyway. A few months after he moved in, Matt and a girl who was also a foster child in the Sandusky home tried to kill themselves. “The night of the suicide attempt,” Ganim reports, Matt wrote a letter to the child-welfare officer saying that he wanted to stay with the Sanduskys: “I feel that they have supported me even when I have messed up.” One hears, in that, a child who has been told that he was bad, and ought to be grateful.
“He sat there and looked at me and said something along the lines of ‘it’s your turn’ and he made me,” he stopped, covering his face with his hands, “he made me put my mouth on his privates.”
“It’s your turn”: in that phrase, there’s a glimpse of a particularly cruel means of compulsion that seems to have been used on the boys he is accused of sexually abusing or raping. Sandusky told them, again and again, that they owed him. All of the boys had family situations that left them vulnerable; a number of them were coming from or headed for foster homes, and were supposedly being helped by Sandusky, a Penn State defensive coach, and his Second Mile foundation. That includes Matt Sandusky, the youngest of six children Sandusky adopted, who now, at the age of thirty-three, has joined his accusers. Sandusky has pleaded not guilty, and the jury is deliberating now. The jurors were sequestered before Matt, through his lawyers, let it be known that he would have testified against his adoptive father.
...The story of how Matt ended up in the Sandusky house—laid out in detail by Sara Ganim, of the Patriot-News—sounds more like a tragedy than a soap opera, or, given how many warning signs seem to have been missed, a cautionary tale. The boy started a fire that burned down a barn; Sandusky, who knew him and had spent time with him through Second Mile, asked the juvenile court that Matt be sent to live with him. Did Sandusky consider that a boy who had done that might not be believed if he turned to other adults for help? His mother, who was on her own with three children, objected, and said that she didn’t think her son would be safe; sometimes he would hide when Sandusky came to see him. The placement was made anyway. A few months after he moved in, Matt and a girl who was also a foster child in the Sandusky home tried to kill themselves. “The night of the suicide attempt,” Ganim reports, Matt wrote a letter to the child-welfare officer saying that he wanted to stay with the Sanduskys: “I feel that they have supported me even when I have messed up.” One hears, in that, a child who has been told that he was bad, and ought to be grateful.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/06/jerry-dottie-and-matt-sandusky.html#ixzz1yaD5uCXP
