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Episode Fifty Eight: All In On Iowa · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number fifty eight of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
• 0:04
  is John Ziggler. I am your host and on today's program, what everyone
• 0:08
  is missing about the Donald Trump CNN town hall fiasco. Why the last few
• 0:13
  days have actually sparked some semblance of real hope for Rhonda Santis and the most
• 0:18
  bizarre and telling interview with a mainstream reporter exposing just how broken journalism really is
• 0:25
  that you will probably ever here. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man.
• 0:31
  I'm a digital advertising SEO and EMMO marketing specialist that also happens to be
• 0:36
  a big fan of John Ziggler and the Death of Journalism. Do you need
• 0:41
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  the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com and let me help you tell your story.
• 0:55
  The website is the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com. If you want
• 1:00
  to grow your business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital marketing Man
• 1:04
  dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. We usually release
• 1:10
  two episodes of the Death of Journalism per week. Usually on Tuesday and Thursday
• 1:15
  mornings. This tends to get us covered for everything that happens during the week
• 1:19
  of news, except for things that happen on a Wednesday evening. That would
• 1:25
  be our probably greatest week spot when it comes to events of news being scheduled.
• 1:32
  Well, that's what happened last week with the CNN Donald Trump New Hampshire
• 1:38
  town hall meeting. And I spoke briefly about it in episode fifty seven and
• 1:42
  anticipated that it was going to be a no win situation for CNN, and
• 1:48
  it certainly seemed like it was going to be a win win situation for Donald
• 1:52
  Trump. And I think I underestimated just how clearly obvious that was, partially
• 1:59
  because I didn't fully understand all the details surrounding this event. And while it's
• 2:04
  now been almost a week since that happened and it has generated an enormous amount
• 2:08
  of news coverage and analysis, there are a few things that people are still
• 2:13
  missing and a few things that are really important to at least point out for
• 2:17
  the record, and I will do so in this episode of the podcast.
• 2:21
  First of all, just to review what occurred for over an hour, although
• 2:24
  it was supposed to go longer. Than that, I don't think that got
• 2:28
  nearly enough attention to the thing didn't even go as long as it was supposed
• 2:30
  to go. Donald Trump subjected himself to live questions on CNN for the first
• 2:37
  time since it's twenty sixteen, which is extraordinary when you think about it,
• 2:42
  and obviously CNN has been one of his largest media targets over the preceding seven
• 2:49
  years, and he did so as part of what was supposed to be a
• 2:53
  town hall meeting. That's where you have a reporter or an anchor or host
• 2:59
  with candidate in front of a live studio audience, this time in New Hampshire.
• 3:04
  The audience was supposed to be made up of Republican voters or undeclared voters
• 3:07
  in New Hampshire who were leaning towards voting in the Republican primary coming up in
• 3:13
  twenty twenty four, and Caitlin Collins, a young female reporter anchor for CNN,
• 3:21
  was the host of the town hall meeting and the first sign that there
• 3:25
  was going to be big trouble for CNN or for those who, like myself,
• 3:30
  don't want Donald Trump to be the twenty twenty four Republican nominee was that
• 3:37
  when Trump came out, there was a standing ovation and that was an automatic
• 3:42
  rut row. Okay, this is a small hall. Four hundred people are
• 3:46
  there. It appears as if almost everyone is standing. Of course, if
• 3:51
  you're a Republican and everyone else in the room stands for the former president on
• 3:53
  the stage, I can see where you would feel an obligation to stand yourself.
• 3:58
  But that kind of set the tone for the whole This was obviously a
• 4:00
  home game, very much a home game for Donald Trump, and Caitlin Collins
• 4:06
  was completely in over her head, not really because she did anything wrong or
• 4:12
  that she's bad or she's not smart, but she was in an impossible situation,
• 4:17
  and it was an impossible situation I believe basically two generations of medium malpractice
• 4:24
  in the making, which I'll get to momentarily. But what she tried to
• 4:28
  do was two things. That one was a big mistake strategically, although I
• 4:32
  understand why she had to do it, because she's trying to appeal to CNN's
• 4:36
  audience and to her fellow co workers at CNN, all of whom are very,
• 4:42
  very liberal. And the second was something that I don't think she really
• 4:46
  had any control over and actually tried to do the best that she could under
• 4:48
  the circumstances. The first is that she took the tack of asking questions from
• 4:56
  the left, not from the right. In other words, the topics and
• 5:00
  the questions were all from the perspective of a left wing person like I'm sure
• 5:06
  Caitlin Collins is and almost everybody at CNN is. But this is supposed to
• 5:12
  be a Republican town hall meeting. So immediately when you start asking questions that
• 5:20
  are not of interest, not only are not of interest to most Republican voters,
• 5:25
  but actually turn most Republican voters off and will automatically signal that you're the
• 5:30
  bad guy in this situation where you were already presumed to be a bad guy
• 5:34
  who got bad girl because you're working for CNN, which is understandably presumed to
• 5:41
  be the enemy by any Republican is specifically a Trump supporter. But when you
• 5:46
  go at Trump from the left. And the reason why she did that again
• 5:49
  not just to appeal to her audience, but because there was so much ground
• 5:54
  that Trump has never faced live questioning from CNN on that she had a news
• 6:00
  I think she felt she had a news obligation to cover as much of it
• 6:05
  as possible, specifically January six, the stolen election, everything surrounding that whole's
• 6:14
  fiasco, because that's obviously been a huge story for CNN in the last couple
• 6:18
  of years since it happened, and this was their first chance to get Donald
• 6:23
  Trump one on one, live on camera. But that's not a topic that
• 6:28
  Republicans care about. It's not a topic that's going to determine who the Republican
• 6:31
  nominee is. And it gave Trump really just an opportunity to play to his
• 6:38
  audience and to have on CNN people cheering him for answers that I'm sure the
• 6:46
  CNN core audience hated and thought understandably at times to be out and out lies.
• 6:54
  And so that was a mistake. Now, whether it was a premeditated
• 6:59
  mistake, whether or not, you know, on purpose where they didn't care.
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  Maybe they really wanted this to happen the way that it did, I
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  don't know. But if the goal was to try to create a situation where
• 7:13
  Trump was maybe a little bit off balanced to the people who matter, this
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  was not the way to go. You don't come at him from the left,
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  you come at him from the right. But CNN and Caitlin Collins were
• 7:27
  incapable of that. But the more interesting, and I think the more important
• 7:31
  part of why this failed and why it was universally hailed or condemned, depending
• 7:39
  on your perspective, as a massive victory for Donald Trump over CNN, is
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  that fact checking from a left wing CNN anchor and outlet Donald Trump inherently does
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  not work. It cannot work for a couple of reasons. One, Trump
• 8:01
  is really good at obfuscating. He's really good at giving his audience one liners.
• 8:05
  He never backs down. He can lie with impunity, and when you
• 8:09
  lie with impunity, it's really very difficult to fact check somebody because for the
• 8:15
  fact check to work, they actually have to care about what the facts are,
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  or leaven accept the idea that there are such things things as facts,
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  which Trump doesn't do. And so from a Trump standpoint, this plays right
• 8:30
  into his hands. Because there is no truth. He has already gotten his
• 8:33
  core audience. His Trump called to accept that everything negative about him is fake
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  news, especially if it's coming from someone underneath the CNN umbrella, no matter
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  how factual it was. And in my estimation, most of what Caitlyn Collins
• 8:48
  was trying to do was legitimate from a journalistic standpoint, but the real reason
• 8:54
  it didn't work is that not just CNN, but the entire media industrial complex
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  has now so run out of credibility that with the right, with Republicans,
• 9:11
  with conservatives, that they have nothing left. And the analogy that I make,
• 9:16
  and I tweeted this out, and I think people understood where I was
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  coming from. I think it's a good analogy, even for me, and
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  I consider myself to be pretty good at anathlogies. If I don't say so
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  myself, here's the analogy. In a rational world, in a democratic republic,
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  as America was supposed to be, the news media must always do its
• 9:39
  best to tell the truth, even in times when it doesn't fit their agenda
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  and may even hurt their self interest. And the reason why they must do
• 9:48
  this for a democratic republic to be healthy and survived is that eventually there's going
• 9:54
  to be an emergency and people are going to need to know what the hell
• 9:56
  the truth really is. In that emergency, they need their credibility. The
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  credibility and here's the analogy, is like water to a fireman. The water
• 10:11
  hose for a fireman is the credibility that the news media should have. But
• 10:16
  over time, and this has taken at least two generations over time, the
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  reservoir of that credibility in the eyes of the mainstream Republican base has evaporated.
• 10:30
  It no longer exists. And I would argue that what's left in that reservoir
• 10:35
  is not only not water, it's effectively, when it comes to Donald Trump,
• 10:41
  gasoline on a fire. So instead of having all this extra reservoir of
• 10:48
  credibility to pour on an emergency fire like Donald Trump, that reservoir is gone,
• 10:54
  and instead what they have left is effectively gasoline on that Trump fire.
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  And they poured gasoline on the Trump fire in that town hall meeting in New
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  Hampshire. And Trump loved every minute of it, and he drove the leftist
• 11:13
  crazy because he did not care about what the truth is. He was able
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  to mock January sixth, He was able to mock the civil lawsuit libel verdict
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  against him, which I think the media completely in CNN totally overplayed its hand
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  on in huge ways. I mean every single subject. He was able to
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  get his side of the story out with a crowd that was in from the
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  most part cheering him. Now, it's important to point out with the crowd
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  that when you have a small crowd, some of this place so into Trump's
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  favor. Let's pretend that a hundred of the four hundred, which is not
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  even close to majority, but one hundred of those four hundreds are big Trump
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  fans, which is, by the way, I think probably what the number
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  was. In a small venue like that, one hundred people can totally dominate
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  the perception of how the crowd is reacting. One because they can lead other
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  people to react in the same way, but two because in such a small
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  venue, one hundred people cheering loudly sounds like the whole crowd is doing so.
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  So this was really the perfect venue for Donald Trump, and it really
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  exposed the price that the news media has paid for generations of media malpractice,
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  specifically when it comes to issues related to Republicans and conservatives, and all the
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  stories they have gotten wrong over the decades and specifically during the Trump era,
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  which made anything Caitlin Collins said completely irrelevant to the average Republican. It does
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  not matter. You cannot fact check the former president the United States when he's
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  as good as he is in that situation. And no one trusts you,
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  and you seem like a young lady in over your head against the former president
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  of the United States. And I actually give Caton Conlins some credit. She
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  did the best she could under the circumstances. She was well prepared, she
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  was quick on her feet. But it kind of reminded me, and I
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  made this analogy on Twitter too, kind of reminded me of a battle.
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  You know, I always think of the Revolutionary War where and there's some truth
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  to this historically, where the British forces, you know, were very polite
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  and well trained, and they showed up on time, and they were in
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  single file line, and they were very easy targets because they played by the
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  rules as they were at the time for warfare, while you know, the
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  Patriots, the American revolutionists, they didn't really play by the same rules,
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  and they broke a lot of those rules. And that's partially why America defeated
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  the British in the Left Revolutionary War. Well, it felt very much like
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  Caitlyn Collins was the British military marching in single file going up a hill to
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  where you know, the American revolutionists led by Donald Trump, where we're hiding
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  behind trees and showing up behind their backs and breaking all the rules. And
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  when you're able to lie with impunity, you know the rules don't matter.
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  And Caitlyn Collins is still pretending that we're playing by the old rules, and
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  she got massacred even though she really didn't do anything wrong based upon what the
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  rules used to be. But those rules are gone, and those rules are
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  gone for a lot of reasons. Lack of credibility in the part of the
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  news media, the changing dynamic of the way the media is looked at in
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  this fragmented age and this social media age, and then of course what Donald
• 14:56
  Trump has done to the news media. And while I loathe Donald Trump,
• 15:01
  I loathe him in so many different ways, I've always gained him, given
• 15:05
  him credit for understanding and being able to manipulate the media to his advantage in
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  almost not every didn't do something with COVID, that's for damn sure, but
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  in almost every situation he is a master at this. He is a savant
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  at this, and he got exactly what he wanted. And I think the
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  most frustrating part for me watching all this actually occurred in what I would call
• 15:30
  the postgame show, which I was lasted I think longer than the actual interview,
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  because the interview went shorter than expected, and the CNN panels were basically
• 15:41
  in mourning. I mean they were in mourning because I think all of them
• 15:45
  pretty much knew what had happened and they but none of them understood why it
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  happened. I was like screaming at my television, almost thinking, my gosh,
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  how can these people have such little, so little self awareness, a
• 16:03
  complete lack of self awareness. I realize people in the media are clueless and
• 16:08
  egotistical, and you know, they don't want to see anything negative about themselves,
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  but how can nobody see what happened there and go, you know what?
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  We needed to take some responsibility for why this was allowed to happen.
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  Not because we invited Donald Trump on for a live interview in front of a
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  pro Republican crowd, a pro Trump crowd of four hundred people in New Hampshire.
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  That was maybe a mistake, But in the bigger picture, why is
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  it that no Republicans trust us? Why is it that our fact checks are
• 16:41
  powerless? Why have we lost all of our credibility with these people? I
• 16:48
  don't think any of them even thought about this and that's the core issue,
• 16:52
  and it's really a large part of why we have this podcast, the Death
• 16:56
  of journalism. This has been a long time in coming, and that chickens
• 17:00
  came home to roost in that CNN town hall meeting, and you know,
• 17:06
  there was very little that was said that I thought was even close to,
• 17:11
  at least on CNN, was even close to explaining what really transpired here.
• 17:17
  I will make one exception. I thought that Van Jones, who is very
• 17:22
  far left CNN commentator, He's a black man who is very smart, and
• 17:30
  occasionally he's one of those guys who, you know, four out of five
• 17:33
  or maybe nine out of ten things he says are just off the wall lefty
• 17:38
  liberal that I would vehemently disagree with. But then he says one thing that
• 17:44
  is borderline genius, because I think Van Jones at least has some self awareness
• 17:49
  and some ability to be introspective, and I think he gets out at least
• 17:55
  a little bit into the real world, at least that's my theory. And
• 17:59
  he made a really interesting point that I had not thought about when the panel
• 18:03
  was in mourning on CNN about what this means for the coming election, and
• 18:08
  basically contemplating the idea of oh my god, what we just saw was a
• 18:11
  repeat of twenty sixteen on steroids, and this guy could not only win the
• 18:15
  nomination, but he could win the presidency because they all know how weak Joe
• 18:19
  Biden is. And Van Jones made the point I thought he put in a
• 18:23
  really interesting way. He said, you know, I'm fearful of one thing
• 18:27
  about this matchup between Biden and Trump, which it looks like we're going to
• 18:32
  have, and that is that Trump is owning the past nostalgia for the past,
• 18:38
  meaning I guess the pre COVID past when he was president, and what
• 18:42
  the economy was like then, and what America was like then. So he
• 18:47
  owns the past, and he's doing a really good job of trying to own
• 18:52
  the future because of what he says he can do to fix things, leaving
• 18:56
  Biden to own the president and the president, which I think is interesting.
• 19:02
  He's effectively acknowledging sucks. So if you think about it in those terms,
• 19:07
  that is an interesting arguing. I think it's more complicated than that, obviously,
• 19:11
  especially when you're dealing with Trump, But that was I thought maybe the
• 19:15
  most cogent thing that was said on CNN all night long, which was,
• 19:19
  hey, look, you know, Trump maybe playing an interesting game of chess
• 19:23
  here, even if he isn't intending to, by owning both the past and
• 19:27
  the future while Biden is stuck with the president, which sucks. Now,
• 19:33
  it wasn't just on CNN that the media hyperventilated about what happened. The next
• 19:41
  morning on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough, of all people, and this is really
• 19:45
  rich and talk about lacking incredibility and wholly hypocrisy batman. And this is hardly
• 19:51
  the first time this has happened. This is probably the hundredth time this has
• 19:53
  happened, but it might be the most dramatic time that it has occurred.
• 19:57
  Where Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman, morning show host on MSNBC. Guy,
• 20:03
  I know a little bit. I've I've been interviewed by him several times.
• 20:07
  I think I've interviewed him at least once in person. So, I
• 20:11
  mean I was on his TV show a lot during the Sarah Palin days.
• 20:15
  I mean, so we know each other pretty darn well. And I think
• 20:18
  he's a smart guy. But he is a complete fraud. And it is
• 20:22
  a miracle he still has a show in MSNBC, considering the fact that in
• 20:26
  twenty sixteen, he and his co host Mika Brazinski, with whom I think
• 20:33
  they were already romantically involved at that time but not telling anybody, We're slavering
• 20:38
  not all over each other, but also over Donald Trump. From twenty fifteen
• 20:44
  through twenty sixteen, including through the actual winning of the election, Joe Scarborough
• 20:49
  Show played an incredibly important role in how and why Donald Trump won the Republican
• 20:56
  nomination and maybe even the general election. Now did he do it single handedly,
• 21:02
  know, but he played an important role in creating this narrative that normalized
• 21:07
  Trump, made him into a big star, and gave him all this free
• 21:11
  publicity, gave him magic, played into the whole celebrity situation that made him
• 21:18
  bigger than anybody else on the Republican side. And Scarborough, of course,
• 21:22
  being a former Republican congressman, had at least some level of credibility at that
• 21:26
  point. And I mean, they slobbered all over him, and it was
• 21:30
  only after he became president, and I guess they decided that, you know,
• 21:36
  their audience just wasn't gonna gonna put up with being anything close to pro
• 21:41
  Trump at MSNBC that Scarborough went the other direction, and so here he is
• 21:45
  talked about lack of self awareness. Here he is for a couple minutes going
• 21:51
  on and on about how horrendous what he saw in the CNN town hall meeting
• 21:56
  was. And really, I think speaking for a lot of people in the
• 22:02
  media, but coming from Scarborough, given his past support effectively for Donald Trump,
• 22:07
  this was really rich and I think indicative of what a fraud, not
• 22:11
  just he is, but what the entire media industrial complex is. And here's
• 22:17
  what that sounded like on MSNBC. It was just it was a disgraceful performance.
• 22:22
  Yes, um, I'm constantly telling people not to catastrophize over Trump,
• 22:29
  that he's actually going to lose because he keeps drilling down deeper and deeper into
• 22:37
  his base, but it is. It is. I can't believe I'm I'm
• 22:44
  going to use catastrophizing language here, but it was. It was just,
• 22:48
  it was disgraceful on every level. It showed I wouldn't say it's dangerous for
• 22:56
  democracy because we passed that a long time ago, but it showed the corrosive
• 23:03
  effects of Trump is m over eight years and I've got to say the most
• 23:14
  shocking part was an audience who cheered on a president who tried to overturn an
• 23:21
  American democracy. The audience that mocked and ridiculed a woman who a jury of
• 23:29
  her peers, Donald Trump's peers found had been sexually assaulted. Those Americans there
• 23:36
  last night turned that into a punchline, laughed and dismissed cops getting the ship
• 23:44
  kicked out of him on January sixth, beaten up over and over again,
• 23:52
  calling a cop a thug who actually was trying to stop people from the house
• 24:00
  floor from being killed. I could go I just could go on and on,
• 24:07
  basically saying he would turn over Ukraine to vladm It just it was on
• 24:17
  John Meetchell on every front. You could go piece by piece by piece to
• 24:22
  talk about how breathtakingly dangerous what we saw was last night, this virus of
• 24:30
  lies that's been loosened on the American people. But what we saw last night
• 24:37
  was it was a propagandist, and it was a propagandist viewing lies repeatedly over
• 24:44
  and over and over and over and over again, and an audience, an
• 24:47
  American audience, lapping it up. This isn't Putin's Russia. This is Trump's
• 24:52
  slice of America. And what I saw last night at least was as chilling
• 24:59
  as anything I've seen on television since January the sixth. Yeah, we're looking
• 25:07
  at is that his reality has become. Of course, Scarborough, like everyone
• 25:12
  else, knows that the only thing keeping Trump from being president again is an
• 25:18
  eighty plus year old Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as a VP option, and
• 25:26
  that's a very precarious situation. So I think people are starting to realize,
• 25:30
  Wow, we are really in a serious set of circumstances here. We could
• 25:37
  really see Joe Biden lose to Donald Trump and go through this nightmare all over
• 25:42
  again, only this time it could be worse because this time Trump is seeking
• 25:49
  very publicly retribution and we have no idea who would even be working in his
• 25:53
  administration. So if you thought the original movie was scary, the equal is
• 26:00
  going to be way, way more frightening. Of course, that assumes that
• 26:04
  they even give a crap about the country they pretend to. That's what they're
• 26:10
  acting is all about there, and that's what Joe Scarborough was doing largely in
• 26:15
  that clip that I just played for you. There's a lot of acting there's
• 26:18
  a lot of virtue signaling involved in that, but I would like to believe
• 26:21
  that at some level they too realize how dangerous the situation is and that they
• 26:29
  care about that a little bit. Of course, you know, from a
• 26:30
  rating standpoint, Scarborough would probably be thrilled to have Donald Trump not just be
• 26:37
  the nominee but be President of United States again, because it worked very well
• 26:40
  for him the first time around. But it wasn't just Scarborough. Even on
• 26:45
  CNN itself, Anderson Cooper, who's basically the star of the network now,
• 26:49
  especially in prime time. He went on his show the next night and effectively
• 26:55
  apologized, although in a weird roundabout way, for having put Donald Trump on.
• 27:02
  I mean, that might be too strong a way of describing it,
• 27:03
  but he certainly says in this clip you're about to hear that he can understand
• 27:10
  if some CNN audience members never want to watch them again, which is an
• 27:15
  interesting admission on a number of levels, including the fact that, oh,
• 27:18
  so you're acknowledging that your consumer base is mostly liberal, anti Trump, and
• 27:26
  that you are there, at least in part to placate them. That's an
• 27:30
  extraordinary admission that you're about to hear, but it's also wrapped up in a
• 27:33
  lot of virtue signaling and a lot of concern trolling, which is what Anderson
• 27:38
  Cooper did with the CNN audience the next night. Many of you have expressed
• 27:42
  deep anger and disappointment. Many of you are upset to someone who attempted to
• 27:47
  destroy our democracy. He was invited to sit on a stage in front of
• 27:49
  a crowd of Republican voters to answer questions and predictably continued to spew lie after
• 27:55
  lie after lie, and I get it. It was disturbing. It was
• 28:00
  disturbing to see and hear that person refer to a black law enforcement officer as
• 28:03
  a thug, an adjective he used many times to describe black men and call
• 28:07
  Calin Collins the moderator nasty, which is what he calls any woman who stands
• 28:11
  up to him. It was disturbing to hear him speak so highly of QAnon
• 28:15
  conspirators and insurrectionists who assaulted police officers and our democracy on January six, And
• 28:21
  it was awful to hear him spread ridiculous lies about the election. And it
• 28:25
  was certainly disturbing to hear that audience, young and old, Our fellow citizens,
• 28:29
  people who loved their kids and go to church laugh and applaud his lies
• 28:33
  and his continued defamation of a woman who, according to a jury of his
• 28:37
  peers, he sexually views and defamed. As good a job as Caalen Collins
• 28:41
  did trying to fact check him, it is impossible to fact check fully because
• 28:45
  he lies so shamelessly. Now, many of you think see and shouldn't have
• 28:48
  given him any platform to speak. And I understand the anger about that giving
• 28:52
  him the audience the time. I get that, But this is what I
• 28:56
  also get. The man you were so disturbed to see and hear from last
• 29:00
  night. That man is the front runner for the Republican nomination for president,
• 29:04
  and according to polling, no other Republican is even close. That man you
• 29:08
  were so upset to hear from last night, he may be president of the
• 29:11
  United States in less than two years. And that audience that upset you,
• 29:17
  that's a sampling of about half the country. They are your family members,
• 29:21
  your neighbors, and they are voting, and many said they're voting for him.
• 29:26
  Now, maybe you haven't been paying attention to him since he left office.
• 29:29
  Maybe you've been enjoying not hearing from him. Thinking it can't happen again,
• 29:33
  some investigation is going to stop him. Well it hasn't so far.
• 29:37
  So if last night showed anything, it showed it can happen again. It
• 29:41
  is happening again. He hasn't changed, and he is running hard. You
• 29:48
  have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watched this network again.
• 29:51
  But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you
• 29:55
  agree with is going to make that person go away? So that's really extraordinary.
• 30:00
  And you know, I am not one hundred percent sure I know what
• 30:06
  is going on at CNN, and I'm going to be very straightforward and honest
• 30:08
  as I always am. I'm incredibly transparent about every aspect of my life.
• 30:14
  And I have been hearing some things for a long time about what's going on
• 30:18
  really at CNN, and I have heard some things about what was really intended
• 30:23
  with regard to this Trumps CNN town hall meeting and whether it actually may have
• 30:27
  gone exactly as those that are really in charge at CNN wanted it to go.
• 30:33
  And I would like to go further down that path, but I can't,
• 30:37
  not just because of my sourcing, but because I may have a pretty
• 30:41
  significant conflict of interest when it comes to this whole situation. And I don't
• 30:47
  mean to be cryptic, and hopefully I can talk more freely about this sometime
• 30:51
  in the near future. I really don't know, but I do sense that
• 30:56
  there's a lot going on behind the scenes at CNN. There's a lot of
• 31:02
  different battles going on. It's not clear cut, and we have not seen
• 31:07
  the end of the changes at CNN. That's as far as I think I
• 31:11
  can go at this point. And I don't know how Anderson Cooper's statement there
• 31:18
  fits into all that, because you know, I gotta say one of the
• 31:22
  things that was most confusing to me about the way that the CNN on air
• 31:27
  personalities responded at all this was that it could not be more clear from the
• 31:34
  higher ups. And this is very public. This is not, you know,
• 31:37
  insider knowledge on my part. The CNN has been trying to get away
• 31:42
  from the MSNBC liberal propaganda outlet model. And if your bosses are signaling that,
• 31:53
  don't you think it would be a good idea when Donald Trump makes his
• 31:56
  first appearance on the network in seven years, that you at least try to
• 32:01
  be a little bit fair. But they didn't try at all. And the
• 32:06
  two issues where I think they were most wrong, and this was Anderson Cooper.
• 32:10
  You just heard him reference both of these things. Jake Tapper did the
• 32:15
  same thing. Others on the network did it as well. The two subjects
• 32:19
  where that got them most upset were one the mocking of Egene Carol over her
• 32:27
  victory in the civil suit against him for sex abuse and defamation. And they
• 32:31
  just could not understand how Donald Trump could call her a whack job and how
• 32:36
  the audience could laugh. And this is completely and totally a great example of
• 32:40
  how out of touch and how a total lack of self awareness overcomes everybody in
• 32:49
  the mainstream news media on the left. They live in a world where somehow
• 32:53
  that jury verdict in a civil case in New York City, where at least
• 32:59
  eight rolls with a fifty one percent evidence threshold with no defense put on by
• 33:04
  Donald Trump, decided that a allegation we don't even know what year it was,
• 33:09
  from the mid nineteen nineties, that has all sorts of problems and holes
• 33:14
  in it, somehow is legitimate because a jury of his peers spoke and decided
• 33:21
  that she was right. What a bunch of garbage that is. I mean,
• 33:24
  I don't know, honestly if they really believe that or if they're just
• 33:29
  using that as an attack point against Trump now that they have a theoretical verdict
• 33:34
  proving that he's a sex abuser, which I don't think that verdict does at
• 33:37
  all. And my guess is he's never really going to pay a dime of
• 33:40
  that judgment against him unless forced at gunpoint somehow years from now. But that
• 33:46
  that, and most conservatives and polling has already shown this, don't buy that
• 33:52
  verdict at all. They give it that. They give that verdict the same
• 33:54
  kind of credibility they give fact checking from Caitlin Collins, my only for much
• 34:00
  better reasons. Caitlyn Collins was actually telling the truth most of the time.
• 34:05
  That verdict was a joke and it ought to be laughed at. You're not
• 34:08
  laughing at a sex abuse victim if you don't believe there's any evidence there was
• 34:14
  any sex abuse that ever happened. So that's number one. But maybe the
• 34:19
  one example that gets me even more upset, and it's more obvious, is
• 34:22
  this issue of Trump calling the black police officer on January six who shot and
• 34:29
  killed Ashley Babbitt, the pro Trump protester, who was the only person who
• 34:34
  was killed that day. That's a fact. The only person we know that
• 34:37
  was killed that day was Ashley Babbitt, and we have video of what happened,
• 34:43
  and it was the black police officer that shot her. Now, I
• 34:46
  am generally very much on the side of police officers, and it was a
• 34:52
  very scary situation. I can understand that. But all I would ask anyone
• 34:55
  to do, and if I had somehow been on this panel, I would
• 34:59
  have I would have blown it up by asking people to consider this one question
• 35:05
  I would like everybody in the liberal media to consider, and specifically at CNN,
• 35:10
  I want you to reverse the races of Ashley Babbitt and the black police
• 35:15
  officers. So the police officer is white, and Ashley Babbitt is black,
• 35:22
  and let's keep her gender to say, and that'll make it even better.
• 35:24
  And Ashley Babbitt is a black woman. Police officer is a white male,
• 35:30
  and let's reverse the politics of what was going on. Let's say the protest
• 35:34
  was an anti Trump protest and somehow under the exact same circumstances, with nobody
• 35:43
  in any apparent grave danger, the police officer shoots and kills the black woman.
• 35:51
  I gotta tell you, at CNN, the nicest thing, the nicest
• 35:55
  thing they would call that police officer is a thug. That would be the
• 36:00
  nicest thing that they would ever say about that police officer if everything was exactly
• 36:06
  the same. And to anybody with half a brain knows it. And so
• 36:09
  it's it's again. I don't know for sure that they really believe that or
• 36:14
  is this just something that they think sounds good to their liberal audience as their
• 36:19
  virtue signaling. Oh, he called a black police officer a thug. Reverse
• 36:24
  the situation, and that would be a presumed racist criminal act by the police
• 36:32
  officer. And that's a fact. That's an absolute, flat out fact.
• 36:37
  Now, in the bigger picture of all this, the ratings that CNN god
• 36:44
  were not that great. They were basically a good, normal Tucker Carlson show
• 36:51
  before he got fired, a little over three million people, and that is
• 36:57
  way below, you know, some of the numb that similar events Trump was
• 37:01
  getting in twenty sixteen. And so I found that to be actually kind of
• 37:06
  a good sign as far as how popular Trump really is and whether or not
• 37:13
  he still drives the needle as much as he did in twenty sixteen. Are
• 37:19
  there people who are just getting tired of him? I was surprised that it
• 37:22
  was not a bigger number than that, because you've got a you know,
• 37:27
  a very got a gladiator in the coliseum situation here, you've got a live
• 37:32
  event where you don't know what the hell's going to happen. A lot of
• 37:36
  it was highly entertaining, and it was something we hadn't seen in a long
• 37:40
  time, so I would have expected the numbers to be bigger. Also,
• 37:45
  the focus group that CNN did, and I do not necessarily buy into these
• 37:52
  post town hall or post debate, live on television focus groups. I hate
• 38:00
  because one the sample size is obviously minuscule, and two because people are not
• 38:06
  going to respond naturally when they know they're on television. You know, it's
• 38:10
  like it's like the reality TV show phenomenon, only probably more exaggerated because of
• 38:16
  the nature of the subject matter and the fact that these people that are on
• 38:20
  television generally I have never been on television that I want that I want to
• 38:23
  be on television, and and so it distorts what people are gonna say in
• 38:30
  these kind of situations. But for whatever it's worth. The focus group showed
• 38:36
  no movement towards Trump at all based upon the town hall meeting. So I
• 38:40
  thought that was some pretty you know, okay, given the crap show that
• 38:45
  it appeared to be, and you know, looking for any sign of optimism
• 38:50
  whatsoever, it did seem as if maybe, just maybe this wasn't a total
• 38:55
  disaster when it comes to the issue of who's going to be the twenty twenty
• 38:59
  four Republican nominee. Now, I've been very much in the camp that Trump
• 39:02
  is a very heavy favorite. Things are all going in his direction, and
• 39:06
  I would certainly acknowledge that even the civil suit verdict against him as well as
• 39:12
  the town hall fiasco would also both work in his favor. Now, as
• 39:16
  of this taping, we don't have any polling data that either supports or contradicts
• 39:23
  that, because we don't have a poll that was done after both of those
• 39:28
  events. But Trump continues to dominate in the polls, especially the national polls.
• 39:31
  There's a Morning Consult poll that continues to go in Donald Trump's direction nationally
• 39:37
  where he's now leading by forty one points. Forty one points, which is
• 39:45
  just you know, a blood bath nationally. But of course this is all
• 39:50
  going to come down to Iowa and New Hampshire as far as whether or not
• 39:53
  we have an actual primary race, assuming that Trump isn't able to shut the
• 39:58
  whole thing down before then by completely avoiding the debates and drying up, the
• 40:02
  SANTIS is fundraising and continuing to lead national polls by forty points, and everyone
• 40:09
  just gives up, which is a possible scenario that I've already outlined and I'm
• 40:14
  very concerned about, but we're not there yet now. On the positive side,
• 40:20
  because Iowa and New Hampshire are really where this thing is going to be
• 40:23
  decided, and whether or not the Santis is viable or not, whether we
• 40:28
  have a long slog to the nomination, or whether or not this is an
• 40:30
  early blowout and Trump is the nominee. Those seemed to be the two most
• 40:36
  likely scenarios at this point. Some interesting things happen in Iowa this weekend this
• 40:40
  past weekend, specifically on Saturday, and frankly, with one very small exception,
• 40:46
  things could not have gone better for Rhnda Santis in Iowa this past weekend.
• 40:52
  So Trump was supposed to have one of his big outdoor rallies in Iowa
• 40:58
  on Saturday, well, the Santis was also holding an indoor event. Well,
• 41:01
  there apparently was a tornado watch in Iowa, which this time of year,
• 41:07
  there's almost always a tornado watch in Iowa, and Trump canceled his event
• 41:14
  at the last minute. Now, there was some speculation online that this may
• 41:19
  have been because the crowd wasn't showing up, because there were pictures before the
• 41:23
  event was canceled that was indicated or that were indicating or seemed to indicate that
• 41:30
  this was not going to be a normal Trump rally crowd. That's always very
• 41:34
  difficult to discern from pictures to people post online, right because if you if
• 41:37
  you have a particular agenda, you can make the pictures look almost like anything
• 41:42
  you want when it comes to crowd size. But the pictures I saw certainly
• 41:45
  did indicate that very early, much earlier than this event was scheduled to happen,
• 41:52
  it did not appear as if there was a crowd coming. And I
• 41:54
  am told, although this is not super reliably, but this is more than
• 42:00
  a rumor from people that are close to the Trump camp that in fact,
• 42:06
  the lack of the crowd did have a major impact on the decision to not
• 42:10
  do the rally. Do not even come to Iowa. But whether it was
• 42:15
  because of a tornado watch that never materialized. There were no flights that were
• 42:20
  canceled at the local airport that you know, nobody got hurt, nothing happened.
• 42:24
  It was just a tornado watch. You know. Whether it was because
• 42:29
  of that, or whether that was just an excuse for Trump to avoid the
• 42:31
  embarrassment of not having a large crowd in the first caucus stage, I'm not
• 42:37
  sure. Maybe it was a combination of both. But because that happened,
• 42:42
  Desantists had the state to himself. Fox News Channel carried his speech instead of
• 42:47
  Trump speech, which they were scheduled to carry from Iowa. De Santists did
• 42:52
  a great job when given that opportunity, and almost all of the accounts of
• 42:58
  his events in Iowa or very very positive, except you know, the Trumpers
• 43:02
  thought that they got Desantists because apparently there was video of De Santists laughing too
• 43:08
  demonstratively with some people who were close to him, and you know, the
• 43:13
  meet and greet section, So I guess they thought that looked unpresidential, kind
• 43:16
  of like the Howard Dean famous scream. That to me is just classic nitpicking.
• 43:22
  And if that's the best you've got, then you know Desantists and is
• 43:25
  in great shape. Interestingly, the coverage of what the Santists did in Iowa
• 43:32
  has been shockingly good compared in comparison to the coverage that he has getting has
• 43:37
  been getting recently, including the Associated Press, which originally reported that the Santists
• 43:44
  did little to interact with the crowds one on one, and people responded with
• 43:51
  so many videos which completely proved that that allegation or headline to be wrong that
• 43:58
  the Associated Press actually had to change their story and updated to correct it.
• 44:04
  So the Associated Press corrected itself when it came to this notion that somehow de
• 44:09
  Santis was aloof for not interacting with the crowd, which was obviously bullshit based
• 44:14
  upon numerous pictures and videos. But it wasn't just the Associated Press correcting itself.
• 44:21
  NBC News did a very positive story about the Santis' trip to Iowa.
• 44:27
  The New York Times did a very positive piece on Rohn De Santis' trip to
• 44:32
  Iowa. The Des Moines Register, which is obviously the most important newspaper in
• 44:38
  Iowa, they ran a column from the head of both chambers of the Iowa
• 44:45
  Legislature. Both of whom are Republicans who announced in the column they are endorsing
• 44:52
  Rohn de Santis for president, and they did so emphatically. So you have
• 44:59
  this remarkable a weekend where where Trump is afraid to come into Iowa, either
• 45:05
  because of tornadoes or because his crowd wasn't going to be large enough. De
• 45:08
  Santis is there all alone, gets all sorts of really positive media coverage and
• 45:15
  endorsements from people who matter. Now normally I don't think endorsements make much difference,
• 45:20
  but I was still a bit of a different place. This is a
• 45:22
  place where people know these people, they trust them, they trust their judgment.
• 45:28
  It's not going to determine their votes, but it gets them at least
• 45:30
  thinking in a certain direction. It gives credibility to those who are already into
• 45:35
  the Santis camp. It's a bit more old school in Iowa. You know,
• 45:38
  they're still obviously doing it in the caucus, which is seemingly an antiquated
• 45:44
  way of doing an election, which I normally don't like. And I think
• 45:46
  there are advantages to the caucus, which I have said previously for Donald Trump,
• 45:52
  but I have become completely convinced that it's Iowa or nothing. When it
• 45:57
  comes to the Rhonda Santa's campaign, I've reversed myself completely, not because I
• 46:02
  think that it's going to be easy in Iowa. The caucus situation still plays
• 46:07
  very very much into Donald Trump's hands. However, it's the only shot the
• 46:14
  Santis has because unless the Santis wins Iowa, this is going to be a
• 46:20
  juggernaut that cannot be stopped. There's too many disadvantages, in my opinion,
• 46:23
  in New Hampshire. If Trump comes out of there with a head of steam
• 46:28
  after beating the Santas, especially if it's by a good margin, that this
• 46:32
  thing is over, even if all the other candidates drop out, it's you're
• 46:37
  just not gonna be able to catch him. There's just gonna be too much
• 46:39
  momentum. But if you draw blood, and you draw blood in Iowa.
• 46:45
  Now, granted, part of the problem here is, even if this works,
• 46:50
  the history of Iowa winners on the Republican side is terrible. But it's
• 46:53
  you have no choice. So you gotta go with the state where organization matters,
• 47:00
  where people take the process very very very seriously, and where a relatively
• 47:07
  small number of people are going to determine the outcome, and where it should
• 47:13
  be pointed out Donald Trump did not win in twenty sixteen. Now, granted,
• 47:16
  he wasn't really Donald Trump yet, he hadn't win the nomination, he
• 47:20
  hadn't beaten Hillary Clinton, he hadn't been president for four years. But you
• 47:24
  know, he did not win Iowa in twenty sixteen. His turnout in twenty
• 47:29
  twenty, even though he was really unopposed, was underwhelming. In Iowa.
• 47:32
  I was not a place that seems to really at least caucus goers really really
• 47:38
  like Donald Trump. And I had to say, well, it's not a
• 47:42
  perfect situation because again, I hate the caucus system, and that plays to
• 47:45
  a cult, which is what Trump has. If there's gonna be one place
• 47:51
  where you're gonna put all your chips down and you have to rely on the
• 47:54
  goodness of the people there, you can do a lot worse than Iowa Republicans,
• 48:01
  a lot worse. I'm okay with that if they if they're the ones
• 48:05
  that are going to decide this, you know, you know, I realize
• 48:08
  you can romanticize the culture of a particular place, you know, But anybody
• 48:14
  who seemed Field of Dreams, the Kevin Coster movie, and who's ever followed
• 48:19
  the history of Iowa, or even just watch the the NCAA Women's basketball Championship
• 48:22
  recently. I have a lot of affection and affinity for the people of Iowa.
• 48:28
  So if I'm Runda Santis, I'm gonna put all my chips on Iowa.
• 48:34
  At this point, I have an organization. I have traction. There's
• 48:37
  a pull out by a pro Trump organization, all pro Trump organization that is
• 48:45
  bragging that it is showing Trump blowing the doors off the Santis that only as
• 48:50
  him leading to Santist by eighteen points, and he's well below fifty percent Trump
• 48:54
  is and this is before the Santis is even declared himself a candidate eight So
• 49:00
  I'm sorry, even with the blood bath that has been the polling lately,
• 49:07
  Trump ain't blown the doors off in Iowa. This has got to be the
• 49:10
  only shot. This is got to be the place you make the play.
• 49:14
  There has to be a victory there, or at the very very least,
• 49:16
  it's got to basically be a tie to be able to even have a shot
• 49:21
  at keeping this thing alive to South Carolina, Super Tuesday, Florida and all
• 49:27
  that kind of business. You gotta win the first one first. You have
• 49:30
  no choice, and it's got to be Ittawa, It's got to be Iowa.
• 49:35
  And this was a very good weekend for Rhn de Santas in Iowa and
• 49:38
  theoretically a very bad one for Donald Trump. Now, I want to mention
• 49:44
  with regard to the mainstream hoose media giving this sudden push seemingly to Rohn de
• 49:50
  Santas, which I would just call fair media coverage. I mean, it
• 49:52
  was nothing inaccurate. There was nothing that was overly pro to Santas. It
• 49:58
  was just shockingly fair on NBC in the New York Times. And for the
• 50:01
  Nemine Register to do what they did, and for the AP to correct itself,
• 50:06
  what's going on here? Well, you know, I am as cynical
• 50:09
  as anyone when it comes to the media. It is possible, possible that
• 50:14
  maybe some of them were jarred by the CNN town hall and realized, holy
• 50:19
  shit, this really is our last chance here. Ronda Santis is the last
• 50:23
  chance other than an eighty year old Joe Biden to stop Trump from being president
• 50:29
  again. So maybe maybe we don't need cap the guy just yet. But
• 50:32
  the selfish part of this is maybe we don't want to blow all this great
• 50:37
  content that comes along with the Republican primary process. I think they may have
• 50:42
  also realized that they were very close to losing that. It was just something
• 50:45
  I've mentioned previously on this podcast. I can't believe that the media is going
• 50:49
  to give up months of content of debates and primary coverage, which is manna
• 50:53
  from heaven for them, the easiest thing they do every four years. They're
• 50:59
  just going to give that up. So I do think that they are somewhat
• 51:01
  incentivized, either because of fear for the country or more likely fear for their
• 51:07
  own self interest, to at least start giving the Santis a fair shake.
• 51:12
  Does that matter to Republican primary voters? Not very much anymore. But I'll
• 51:15
  tell you where it does matter. Those who are donating to the Santis's campaign
• 51:21
  and his political Action committee. Those people still get impressed when you send a
• 51:24
  clip from NBC News which is incredibly positive about your trip to Iowa, or
• 51:30
  the New York Times article which is incredibly positive about your trip to Iowa.
• 51:35
  Those people are still going to be impacted by that. And I am told
• 51:38
  pretty reliably that so far De santis Is fundraising is holding strong, and I
• 51:45
  don't think this weekend is going to hurt that at all and probably will help
• 51:47
  it. So it's basically Iowa or bust at this point. One other thing
• 51:52
  about the race. In our last episode, episode number fifty seven, if
• 51:57
  you have not yet heard it, I urge you to listen to the interview
• 52:00
  that I did with Steve Cortez, who was a former very close Trump advisor
• 52:06
  who has become a good friend of mine. We became friends because he started
• 52:09
  listening to my previous podcast with the Benefit of Hindsight. He went to Georgetown,
• 52:15
  which is where I went. He was a football player there, and
• 52:17
  I guess was partially why he got interested in with the Benefit of Hindsight about
• 52:22
  the whole Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky scandal. And he just announced last
• 52:28
  week when he did the interview with me on this podcast, that he is
• 52:30
  joining Never Back Down, the Rhonda Santis Political Action Committee. And Mike Agavino,
• 52:37
  our producer, told me he thought it was maybe the best interview we've
• 52:42
  ever done, and he hopes that everyone takes a listen to this, and
• 52:45
  a lot of people seem to agree with him. To me, it was
• 52:50
  just two friends talking very honestly about the situation that they've been talking privately about
• 52:54
  for quite some time in a way that hopefully it was interesting to people.
• 52:59
  I mean, we're both very transparent, very honest. I mean Steve was
• 53:01
  even willing to fully acknowledge that his Newsweek column announcing his transition from Trump to
• 53:07
  de Santis was basically inspired by my campaign strategy for the RHN de Santis campaign,
• 53:15
  which hopefully he can communicate to people who will get this at least as
• 53:20
  part, if not the primary, part of the Santis announcement and messaging campaign.
• 53:27
  But I think it's important to point out not just that this was a
• 53:30
  great interview that you should listen to if you haven't already, but the reaction
• 53:35
  that Steve Gott for coming out as being pro to Santis tells you so much
• 53:42
  about where we are in our society and where we are as a party,
• 53:45
  the Republican Party, and the whole Trump movement, and how corrosive it is.
• 53:52
  I mean, Steve expected it to be bad, but he told me,
• 53:55
  and I've spoken to him pretty extensively since, you know, his announcement
• 54:00
  and all the reaction to it, it's been worse than he even thought.
• 54:05
  And his very good friend Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor who used to have
• 54:09
  Steve on his show, Steve Cortes on his show on a daily basis,
• 54:14
  completely threw him under the bus, called him Judas, attacked him, you
• 54:20
  know, in no uncertain terms on his show, wouldn't respond to his messages,
• 54:24
  Steve's messages, Cortez's messages for him trying to explain what was really going
• 54:30
  on. And the funniest and maybe the most telling explanation that Bannon and the
• 54:37
  Trumpers have come up with for why Steve Cortez has has left the Trump world
• 54:45
  to join the Santis camp. Is it somehow Steve Cortez is being paid a
• 54:52
  lot of money to do so that that's where the whole Judas thing comes in
• 54:55
  this thirty pieces of sof and Steve or Des and I were just laughing on
• 55:01
  the phone about that, because while Steve is being paid as someone who now
• 55:07
  works for Never back Down, it is in no way, shape or form,
• 55:10
  life changing money. It is less money probably than he would have made
• 55:15
  if he had stayed with a Trump campaign. I don't know that for sure,
• 55:17
  but it certainly is not a salary increase. There's a much much,
• 55:23
  much better chance that Trump is going to be the nominee and therefore paying people
• 55:29
  for a lot longer period of time than the Santis is going to be the
• 55:32
  nominee. So this could be a very short term gig even if the Sanders
• 55:37
  people do nothing wrong. So it's exactly the opposite of a money play.
• 55:43
  And Steve knows that I know this allegation better than anybody, because there are
• 55:46
  still people to this day that think I took the position I did on the
• 55:51
  Chop a Turtle Penn State Cherry Sadski story because of getting paid money, that
• 55:55
  it was somehow a grift. What are you fucking of your minds? How
• 56:00
  can people? There are? Seriously people? I could somewhat understand that when
• 56:06
  I was defending Joe Paterno, because there worth Joe Paterno supporters, but that
• 56:09
  was no money making venture. I lost a lot of money on purpose when
• 56:14
  it was just about Joe Paterno. But when it turned into defending Jerry Sadoski,
• 56:17
  I could assure you there was not a dime to be had, even
• 56:22
  if I wanted there to be a dyme to be had when it came to
• 56:25
  defending the most hated man in America. I mean people are really stupid when
• 56:30
  it comes to these allegations. And my guess is it's something that makes them
• 56:35
  feel better about themselves, right, because if they can discount a Steve Cortez
• 56:40
  leaving the Trump camp because he was a sellout as opposed to he made a
• 56:45
  principal decision, then they don't have to be introspective about whether or not they
• 56:52
  themselves have been wrong about supporting Trump all this time. And I guess that's
• 56:57
  the part that is not just hilarious but also simultaneously infuriating to me because I
• 57:01
  see this in my own situation. Happened so often where an act of principle
• 57:07
  in this day and age is so unusual. We are living in a world
• 57:10
  where an active principle is so unusual that people presume that it must not be
• 57:16
  an active principle, that it must be a grift, that it must be
• 57:21
  a sellout, that it must be for money. It's just not the case
• 57:25
  when it comes to Steve Cortez, and it's clearly not the case when it
• 57:29
  comes to me when I do anything. Just ask my wife, or ask
• 57:32
  Steve Cortes. As a wife, I'm sure she would agree. So what
• 57:36
  Steve is doing is a remarkable act of principle. By the way, against
• 57:42
  my advice. I lowed Trump more than any conservative on the planet, and
• 57:47
  I tried my best to the last minute, to the even after the last
• 57:54
  minute, to convince Steve not to do this, because I did not think
• 58:00
  it would be good for him personally, also because I wanted someone to be
• 58:05
  able to tell Trump when he was wrong, and Steve was one of the
• 58:09
  only people, if not the only people, who was in a position and
• 58:13
  was willing to actually do that. So, I mean, people have this
• 58:19
  completely wrong. It's not shocking to me at all that the Trumpers would react
• 58:22
  this way, or that they would be not just a little bit wrong,
• 58:24
  but one hundred and eighty degrees from the truth, because they are part of
• 58:28
  a cult. They have a mental illness, so they are not capable of
• 58:32
  perceiving reality in a logical fashion, and then they just make up fantasies to
• 58:39
  make themselves feel better, and that's what they've done with regarding Steve protest.
• 58:44
  But he does not regret his decision at least as of now, and he
• 58:47
  is still guardedly optimistic about what the future holds for him and the De Santists
• 58:53
  campaign. Now, that's an interesting way of transitioning into our interview for today's
• 59:00
  episode. And while it doesn't have anything to do really with what's going on
• 59:05
  in the news, I urge you to listen to every bit of the interview
• 59:12
  we are about to play for you. There's a big difference in life between
• 59:19
  telling someone about a reality and showing them that reality. I think with kids,
• 59:28
  that's probably a much more effective way of educating. It's so much better
• 59:31
  to be able to have your kid experience for themselves a reality so they kind
• 59:37
  of get it, as opposed to just telling them and saying, trust me,
• 59:40
  this is the way it is. Well, that's really the essence of
• 59:43
  what this interview is about, and it deals with the subject of the Penn
• 59:47
  State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky quote unquote scandal that I have been embroiled in now
• 59:53
  for over eleven years and is the source of our epic podcast with the benefit
• 59:59
  of hindsight. And if you know anything about my crusade for truth in that
• 1:00:04
  absolute fiasco where the news media got it one hundred percent wrong in almost every
• 1:00:12
  way it was possible to be wrong, you know that there have been numerous
• 1:00:17
  efforts and attempts to get the real truth out into the mainstream news media,
• 1:00:22
  but every single one has failed. That We've gotten close a few times.
• 1:00:28
  Malcolm Gladwell wrote a chapter in his book Talking to Strangers, which focused on
• 1:00:31
  this topic and seemed like it was going to go right up to the prefaces
• 1:00:37
  precipice of the truth, and then backed away and then he disappeared. There
• 1:00:43
  was a Newsweek cover story that a reporter from former reporter of the La Times
• 1:00:47
  and the Philadelphi inquired. Ralph Cipriano and myself were going to co write this
• 1:00:52
  cover story that made it to within basically thirty six hours of publication before Newsweek
• 1:00:59
  pulled the plug. Mark Pendergrass wrote a book, The Most Hated Man in
• 1:01:04
  America, which he was sure was going to be published by a major publisher
• 1:01:07
  because every other book he'd written had been published by a major publisher and had
• 1:01:12
  been reviewed by The New York Times, And that, as just as I
• 1:01:15
  told him, did not happen, and he basically had to self publish because
• 1:01:20
  of the nature of the subject matter. There have been other situations that were
• 1:01:23
  close USA today. A reporter by the name of A. J. Perez
• 1:01:29
  had been working with me on a story about this. It wasn't going to
• 1:01:31
  be groundbreaking because USA today is basically limited to four hundred words these days,
• 1:01:37
  but there was going to be a story with some semblance of the other side
• 1:01:42
  of this, and he quit his job literally on the day he was supposed
• 1:01:45
  to submit the story. I've never fully understood what happened there, but that
• 1:01:49
  was another situation that occurred that was close to getting the alternative side of the
• 1:01:53
  story into the mainstream. I myself have blown it on numerous occasions, went
• 1:01:59
  on The Today Show with Matt Lower twice, and both situations didn't turn out
• 1:02:02
  the way that they could ever should have if I had done a better job,
• 1:02:06
  or if Dottie Sandusky, who was on me with me the second time
• 1:02:09
  when Matt Lower, had done a better job, or if I had done
• 1:02:13
  a better job preparing her. So every single time we have been close to
• 1:02:17
  telling the real story here, which is just a remarkable The real story is
• 1:02:22
  the most amazing story never told, and that's not an exaggeration, at least
• 1:02:27
  not in modern times. But every single time we've gotten close, something has
• 1:02:31
  happened, and it keeps getting more and more bizarre. Well, I have
• 1:02:36
  referenced previously that there was an effort that ended late last year that was maybe
• 1:02:45
  the most promising of all of the efforts to tell the real story of the
• 1:02:49
  Penn Stage, Jerry Sandusky Joe Paterno scandal, and that was occurring at a
• 1:02:54
  place called The Insider. Used to be called The Business Insider, changed the
• 1:03:00
  name to The Insider, and there are reputable they have some major cutbacks recently,
• 1:03:06
  but a reputable news organization with an investigative unit. There's certainly mainstream,
• 1:03:13
  and for a couple of years they were investigating this case from the perspective really
• 1:03:19
  of Mark Pendergrass's book, and I have been in contact with the main reporter
• 1:03:25
  who was working on this for several years. I don't even know for sure.
• 1:03:30
  It's at least two or three years on and off, and sometimes very
• 1:03:32
  very extensively. And you may have sensed, if you're someone who's deeply interested
• 1:03:39
  in this story that in the last few months I have not talked much about
• 1:03:45
  it, partially because there's not much happening. Although Jerry Sindoski does have an
• 1:03:50
  appeal hearing schedule for I believe next week later in this month of May.
• 1:03:54
  Unfortunately, it's in state court, not federal court, which is I think
• 1:03:57
  a major mistake. But I have not been speaking about it as much,
• 1:04:00
  mainly because at a certain level I've given up. Now. I've been in
• 1:04:04
  the autopsy phase of this story for a long time, but there was still
• 1:04:09
  part of me that you never give up. There's still some semblance of hope.
• 1:04:13
  And several things have happened recently that ended that one, Jerry not going
• 1:04:18
  into federal court as I thought I had convinced him to do, where I
• 1:04:21
  think he actually still has a legitimate chance. He has no chance in state
• 1:04:25
  court, where the entire state of Pennsylvania is deeply invested against him. But
• 1:04:29
  we had the Sarah Ganum, who won the Pulitzer Prize in this whole case
• 1:04:34
  with her fraudulent reporting the Sarah Ganum podcast, which was a complete and total
• 1:04:39
  fraud, a joke of epic proportions that went unrepudiated. She got away with
• 1:04:45
  that, So that was kind of depressing. Graham Spaniard put out a book
• 1:04:49
  which mentions my work fairly extensively. I know the former president offense State very
• 1:04:55
  very well, and I know that Graham knows that Jerry Zonduski is innocent,
• 1:04:58
  but he never comes close to that in the book or in any of his
• 1:05:01
  interviews about the book, including his interview with me and Liza bib for this
• 1:05:05
  particular podcast. And it's obvious from anyone who reads that book with an open
• 1:05:12
  mind that he does believe Jerry Sandusky is innocent. I know for sure he
• 1:05:16
  knows him to be innocent, but him not being willing to say that was
• 1:05:21
  another very depressing data point. Maybe the most depressing of all was the death
• 1:05:27
  of Franco Harris, Penn State and Pittsburgh Steeler legend, just a couple of
• 1:05:31
  days before the fiftieth anniversary of his Immaculate Reception, where his heart just gave
• 1:05:35
  out at the absolute worst possible time. And I was very very close to
• 1:05:40
  Franco, think about him every day to this day and probably will for a
• 1:05:44
  very long time. And without Franco around, not only was our chances of
• 1:05:47
  success diminished, but even if we were there was somehow a success, even
• 1:05:51
  on the joke Joe Paterno front, that it really diminished, you know how
• 1:05:57
  valuable that was going to be to me. And then there was this issue
• 1:06:01
  of what happened with the insider, which you're about to hear about. So
• 1:06:06
  all these things are occurring, and late last year, finally it becomes very
• 1:06:13
  clear that the insider is bailing on this story and you're about to hear an
• 1:06:17
  interview with the main reporter, guy with the name of Keenan Trotter. And
• 1:06:23
  it's an extraordinary interview because again it's gonna show you just how utterly broken the
• 1:06:29
  news media is, not just on this story but in general. But to
• 1:06:35
  set that up, I want to play for you a voicemail message because this
• 1:06:40
  is going to be I think gonna give you some context for this interview.
• 1:06:44
  This is a voicemail message that John Cook, who was Keenan Trotter, the
• 1:06:49
  person we're about to interview here, that was his boss, his editor he's
• 1:06:55
  referred to in the interview that you're about to hear with Keenan and John Cook.
• 1:07:00
  This is in the fall of twenty twenty two, drops me a voicemail
• 1:07:03
  message, remarkably transparent voicemail message where he's basically saying, Hey, look,
• 1:07:10
  I don't know if you know for sure, but we're not doing the Sandowsky
• 1:07:13
  story anymore, and please don't direct message the other reporter on this case a
• 1:07:19
  woman by the name of Nicole. And I'm going to get later to the
• 1:07:23
  direct messages that he's referring to, but I want to play this clip because
• 1:07:28
  it's one. It's kind of give you a better understanding of where this whole
• 1:07:31
  thing is headed. With the interview with Keenan. Trotter also gives it some
• 1:07:34
  credibility because this is not something that Keenan or I are just making up.
• 1:07:40
  This is the editor and an editor at at Insider acknowledging that they've been working
• 1:07:45
  on a Jerry Zandowsky story. I would later call him and I'll tell you
• 1:07:49
  in a moment how that conversation went. But here he is leaving a voicemail
• 1:07:54
  message for a guy he thinks is named Rhyme. He refers to me twice
• 1:08:00
  is Rod, which I hope says more about him than about me. But
• 1:08:03
  this is John Cook from The Insider in the fall of twenty twenty two,
• 1:08:08
  leaving me a voicemail message. All right, this is a message is for
• 1:08:13
  Ron. This is John Cook from Insider. I hope you're well, Colin,
• 1:08:16
  because um you d m. Nicole Einbinder, one of my reporters a
• 1:08:21
  while back regarding the Sandusky story, UM that you spoke to her about a
• 1:08:30
  number of times over the over, of course, but a year or more.
• 1:08:34
  UM. We discussed that story a while back, and as you know,
• 1:08:41
  uh, Keenan. UM. I don't know if you know that Keenan
• 1:08:44
  has left the company. UM. I know we discussed his role in the
• 1:08:47
  story, UM the last time we spoke, but as I mentioned back then,
• 1:08:54
  we we're no longer pursuing the story. UM. I know that's a
• 1:08:57
  disappointment to you. And if you ever wanted to say us that, I'm
• 1:09:00
  happy to talk to you about it at any time. But if you could
• 1:09:02
  refrain from mentioning it's Nicole, I'd appreciate it. Again, you can talk
• 1:09:11
  to me about it anytime. You can DM me, can text me and
• 1:09:14
  call me. Nicole's had a rough time with that story. I understand that
• 1:09:20
  you're frustrated, but if you could express those frustrations to me, I really
• 1:09:25
  appreciate that. Now. I did call John Cook as he requested, and
• 1:09:30
  he fully acknowledged that they were dropping the story, not because of any journalistic
• 1:09:34
  reason, but because of fear of risk. It was just your risky,
• 1:09:39
  that was it. Nothing wrong with the reporting, not that we were wrong.
• 1:09:43
  I was wrong, Mark Pendergrass was wrong, or Keenan Trotter was wrong,
• 1:09:46
  or Nicole was wrong. Even implies there that Nicole was having a difficult
• 1:09:50
  time with this decision being made to kill the Sandowsky story well because it just
• 1:09:57
  wasn't worth the risk, which is something I didn't rise me at all.
• 1:10:00
  And as you listen to this interview that we're about to play, it's going
• 1:10:03
  to be obvious that I knew long before I got this message that this thing
• 1:10:09
  was doomed for very good and clear reasons. As far as those direct messages
• 1:10:15
  that I sent to Nicole, I'm going to address that after you listen to
• 1:10:17
  this interview, but I'll just say right now they were remarkably benign and maybe
• 1:10:24
  an indication of just how unbelievably whoosified the younger generation of news media reporters are,
• 1:10:31
  which I think plays a role in all of this, which you're going
• 1:10:33
  to hear in this interview, but I want to save that for the end.
• 1:10:38
  So without further ado, this is an interview we did with Keenan Trotter.
• 1:10:41
  It's actually the second interview that I did of an extraordinarily extensive length Keenan
• 1:10:49
  did not like the first interview, so we did a second one. Now,
• 1:10:53
  I'm not sure the second one was any better, because what you're about
• 1:10:56
  to hear is bizarre. At times, it is incredibly frustrating, but I
• 1:11:00
  think overall it is enlightening. Regardless of your level of interest in the Penn
• 1:11:06
  State Paterno Sandusky case, if you care at all about why journalism is broken,
• 1:11:12
  you've got to listen to this interview, the second that I did with
• 1:11:15
  Keenan Trotter, the main reporter who was working on this investigation for several years.
• 1:11:23
  Keenan Trotter, Welcome to the Death of Journalism podcast. Hey John,
• 1:11:28
  thanks having me on now. As I've already explained to our listeners, you
• 1:11:32
  and I have quite a long history when it comes to the story of Jerry
• 1:11:38
  Sandusky, and you have never publicly told your involvement in this entire saga,
• 1:11:45
  which is both significant and extraordinary in a lot of ways. And you and
• 1:11:49
  I for years now have been discussing eventually there being a public component to you
• 1:11:58
  telling your story, and I want to I want to go through the timeline
• 1:12:01
  of that. But before we get into your involvement in the Sandosky story as
• 1:12:05
  a reporter. Give us a sense of your career leading up to the Sandosky
• 1:12:14
  story. You're currently thirty four years old, and you've worked for some some
• 1:12:17
  liberal news outlets in the past. So give us a kind of a thumbnail
• 1:12:23
  sketch of your career leading up to where we are with this story. Sure,
• 1:12:31
  so, thumbnail sketch of my media career. I started, you know,
• 1:12:36
  had worked a little bit in my college newspaper. Eventually made my way
• 1:12:41
  to New York City, where I was an intern at the Atlantic Wire for
• 1:12:45
  about six months, and then after that I became a gossip slash media reporter
• 1:12:51
  at Gawker dot Com in about twenty thirteen. I did that for about three
• 1:12:57
  years until Gawker got exploded due to the Hulk Hogan lawsuits. After that,
• 1:13:02
  I spent two years as an investigative reporter at Gawker's successor company, which was
• 1:13:08
  called Gizmotomedia. And then after that I became an investigative editor at Business Insider
• 1:13:14
  in late twenty eighteen, where I would spend the next four years until I
• 1:13:19
  was fired in twenty twenty two. Last year, and we'll get to your
• 1:13:26
  your firing and how that related to the Sandusky story and the Sandusky story impact
• 1:13:32
  on you personally and your life with regard to your own personal challenges. But
• 1:13:40
  again, I want to try to do this in chronological order as much as
• 1:13:43
  possible before you got involved with the Sandowsky story, just to kind of give
• 1:13:47
  context, because everybody looks at the media now through the lens of conservative versus
• 1:13:53
  liberal. The the experience you just outline, especially being in New York,
• 1:14:00
  I think it's pretty fair to say that you would be coming from a liberal
• 1:14:04
  perspective. Is that? Is that a fair assessment of your of most of
• 1:14:08
  your work? Yeah? I, um, you know that comes from my
• 1:14:13
  upbringing. Both my parents were Democrats. Uh, my dad was a public
• 1:14:15
  school teacher. Um, you know, I was inculcated with liberal values.
• 1:14:19
  I worked at Gawker, very progressive websites, and when I came to Insider
• 1:14:26
  a lot of the people that I worked with were Gawker alumni. And yeah,
• 1:14:30
  so I you're you're absolutely right. I think, you know, my
• 1:14:32
  outlook on life and my journalism is infused with, yeah, an mistakable degree
• 1:14:39
  of you know, progressive you know, you know politics, or you know,
• 1:14:42
  just like motivation. So yes, and as part of that, although
• 1:14:46
  this doesn't necessarily have to be part of that, but in some people's perceptions
• 1:14:50
  it is. It's also important for context, I think, for many reasons,
• 1:14:55
  which we'll get into later in this interview, but it should be known
• 1:14:58
  that you happen to be a correct Yes, I am gay, right again,
• 1:15:03
  nothing wrong with that, but it's I do, and you and I
• 1:15:06
  have talked extensively about, and we will in this interview extensively about how that
• 1:15:12
  might be significant in your perceptions of the Sandowsky story and why I actually think
• 1:15:16
  it gives you far more credibility than it would some other reporters who would be
• 1:15:23
  looking at this story, and also might give you some better insight than other
• 1:15:27
  reporters that would be looking into the story. But I think from a big
• 1:15:30
  picture standpoint here we have somebody who has worked in the New York mainstream liberal
• 1:15:34
  media, who is clearly a liberal themselves, and who happens to be gay.
• 1:15:39
  Is that all fair? Is that a fair assessment of Keenan Trotter.
• 1:15:42
  Yes, that is a fair assessment of Keenan Trotter. Okay, So so
• 1:15:45
  take me through and now you are not a sports fan, which is which
• 1:15:49
  is right right, all right, And this has been a this has been
• 1:15:56
  a point of contention between you and me for quite a while because they think
• 1:16:00
  while being gay gives you some special insight, I think not being a sports
• 1:16:03
  fan kind of handicapped you a little bit when it came to your perceptions of
• 1:16:09
  the Sandusky story. And we can get into that during the interview. But
• 1:16:13
  so you're you're not a sports fan. So how is it and when was
• 1:16:16
  it that you first got an interest in the Jerry Sandusky Penn State story?
• 1:16:25
  Sure? So, I um, this was early twenty eighteen, about March
• 1:16:30
  or so, and I was working at the time as an investigative reporter at
• 1:16:33
  Gizmoto Media and at the time I was looking for story ideas. I had
• 1:16:43
  a completely unrelated story in the hopper. Another story that I was working on
• 1:16:47
  involving gun violence was kind of slowly collapsing because I couldn't find anyone to talk
• 1:16:53
  to and I was looking, and I you know, it was just you
• 1:16:58
  know, as part of research, you know, sometimes every books to see
• 1:17:00
  if their story ideas in there or you know, I try to read widely
• 1:17:04
  that and read in books can be one source of you know, story generation.
• 1:17:11
  And I came across this book called The Most Hated Man in America.
• 1:17:15
  In the subtitle was Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment and this book.
• 1:17:23
  I downloaded the book in March twenty eighteen. I don't precisely remember how I
• 1:17:28
  came across it, but it was on Amazon. It was, you know,
• 1:17:31
  well reviewed or sorry, it had no editorial reviews, but it had
• 1:17:36
  blurbs by several professors, you know, at a University of California university,
• 1:17:43
  I think one of Johns Hopkins another one. The foreword was written by a
• 1:17:45
  Penn State professor, so it seemed, you know, and it was also
• 1:17:49
  published by a legitimate publisher. And the author himself was a legitimate author who
• 1:17:56
  had published New York Times bestsellers at major New York City public houses. So
• 1:18:00
  about Mark, you're talking about Mark Pendergrass, right, Just Mark Pendergrass,
• 1:18:04
  who's an important character in all this. Uh. He wrote the book The
• 1:18:09
  Most Hated Man in America. There's a chapter in there about me, by
• 1:18:13
  the way, as I'm sure you know, UM, it's important for context
• 1:18:17
  on a number of levels which we're going to get into. Um. But
• 1:18:20
  but so you so you, but before you read Mark's book. What was
• 1:18:26
  Did you have any knowledge or perception or did you care at all about the
• 1:18:30
  Sandusky story. I had. I had a perception of it, and my
• 1:18:33
  perception of it was that in two thousand and eleven, twenty and twelve,
• 1:18:39
  there was, um, you know, an incident at Penn State driven by
• 1:18:45
  or you know that was covered by a local reporter UM named Sarah Gannum,
• 1:18:49
  who you know was a young woman who you know was very enterprising and uh
• 1:18:56
  seemed to have you know, exposed a huge scandal at Penn States in which
• 1:19:00
  the university was m protecting and covering up sort of serial child abuse perpetrated by
• 1:19:05
  Jerry Sandusky. UM and that she won a Pulitzer Prize for it, which
• 1:19:12
  is, you know, the most prestigious award in journalism. And that was
• 1:19:16
  kind of it, you know, I like, you know, you know,
• 1:19:20
  as you mentioned, I have no connection to Penn State. I have
• 1:19:25
  no you know, natural interest in football or college football. I but I,
• 1:19:30
  you know, I was aware of it to the extent I was aware
• 1:19:32
  of sort of the media angle in which this uh you know, the entire
• 1:19:36
  thing was sort of framed as investigative journalists investigative journalism at its you know best,
• 1:19:43
  or you know, at its you know most useful in which you know
• 1:19:46
  this, Um, you know, lowly young reporter sort of took on a
• 1:19:51
  massive institution to which she belonged and won a Pulitzer for it. So that
• 1:19:56
  was my prior perception of it. But you would, you would at that
• 1:19:59
  time you no reason to be skeptical of the conventional wisdom story, correct,
• 1:20:03
  Absolutely not? I um, uh, you know I think the yeah,
• 1:20:09
  I had no reason to be skeptical beyond I think like the one you know
• 1:20:14
  thing is that I've always maintained like some degree of suspicion around the journalism prizes
• 1:20:18
  in general. But you know, I but to be frank, like the
• 1:20:24
  Blitzers always did seem like the most prestigious, and it would seem crazy if,
• 1:20:29
  um, you know, there was you know, something they missed or
• 1:20:31
  something like that. Um, but yeah, like uh yeah otherwise to answer
• 1:20:35
  a question, yeah, all right. So with that is the backdrop,
• 1:20:39
  and you read Mark Pendergrad's book, The Most Aided Man in America. What
• 1:20:45
  was your impression of it? What happened when you read the book? Well,
• 1:20:48
  it took me about I would say a year maybe a year and a
• 1:20:53
  half to finish it. UM. I found the book excruciating. UM on
• 1:21:00
  sort of like a number of different axes. UM. It was excruciating in
• 1:21:04
  the sense that it was, you know, it delved into the into the
• 1:21:08
  topic of the sexual abuse of children or you know, accusations thereof which I,
• 1:21:14
  you know, I just find to be an inherently upsetting topic. UM,
• 1:21:16
  you know, no matter the context. UM. The and then the
• 1:21:21
  second you know thing was um, you know sort of like just sort of
• 1:21:29
  the the story itself in which you know, am you know, the story
• 1:21:33
  depicted in which this community in State College, Pennsylvania came came to believe that
• 1:21:39
  they were in the midst of you know, a supernaturally you know, aggressive
• 1:21:44
  sexual predator who was not only you know, who wasn't only just you know,
• 1:21:50
  the sexual predator, but was in fact one of the um, you
• 1:21:56
  know, most prominent and most beloved people in State College and Penn State in
• 1:22:02
  particular. And then sort of you know, the third access, which I
• 1:22:06
  found to be the most upsetting, is the role that journalists played in this.
• 1:22:10
  Because the key implication of that entire book, and virtually on every page,
• 1:22:15
  is that investigative journalists conducting investigative journalism according to what they believed to be
• 1:22:24
  the right way to do investigative journalism could have published a story that preceded you
• 1:22:30
  know, Jerry Sanduski's conviction. And if the entire implication of the book is
• 1:22:35
  that Jerry Sinduski is innocent, that would suggest that you could be an investigative
• 1:22:41
  journalist and do every single thing right. You could be an investigative editor and
• 1:22:45
  do every single thing right. You could be a you know, local newspaper
• 1:22:49
  in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and do everything right, just you know, straightforwardly reporting
• 1:22:54
  the facts, and still lead to a situation in which you helped put an
• 1:22:57
  innocent person in prison. And to me, more than anything else, I
• 1:23:00
  think, you know, slowly chipped and shipped away at my you know,
• 1:23:04
  faith in journalism and investigative investigative journalism in particular, because what the book was
• 1:23:12
  not describing. What the book wasn't describing for the lack of a term medium
• 1:23:16
  mail practice at least not like severe mediumail practice. It was depicting investigative journalism
• 1:23:24
  being conducted as it usually is, and it's still leading to this situation.
• 1:23:30
  And so to answer your question. The experience was brutal. I would you
• 1:23:34
  know, I had to take month month long breaks from reading it. I
• 1:23:41
  I you know, just like reading it on the subway at my apartments.
• 1:23:45
  You know. It was it's a very haunting book, and it haunted me
• 1:23:49
  certainly. And and I'm you know, I'm a fairly fast reader, and
• 1:23:55
  still that book took me a while to get through because of how brutal and
• 1:23:59
  excrucia and all of its implications are. All Right, so you had a
• 1:24:01
  difficult experience reading the book, and it was obviously persuasive to you. Well,
• 1:24:08
  what was it that convinced you that something was very, very wrong with
• 1:24:12
  what the media was telling us about the Jerry Sandowski story. Um. One,
• 1:24:17
  there were a couple of things, you know, obviously, you know,
• 1:24:21
  I was reading the book and it was it wasn't It's not like it
• 1:24:26
  was just this guy talking. He was he has multiple citations on every single
• 1:24:31
  page and those and they are you know, extensively documented in the back of
• 1:24:38
  the book, like what exactly he's referring to, what he's quoting from.
• 1:24:41
  It's a very like every single statement in his book is supported by primary you
• 1:24:45
  know, source material. Um. The other thing that was that, you
• 1:24:50
  know, as I read it. When I read it in March twenty eighteen,
• 1:24:55
  it had been um sort of on the market, you know, available
• 1:24:59
  to per for several months. I think it came out in late October of
• 1:25:01
  twenty seventeen or so. But what struck me is that, you know,
• 1:25:06
  despite sort of the content of what I was reading and you know, the
• 1:25:11
  key implications of you know, this book, there were no mainstream reviews of
• 1:25:15
  this book. There no organ of book reviews had you know, published a
• 1:25:25
  review on it, even even just to you know, criticize it. There
• 1:25:28
  was absolutely no discussion of this book whatsoever in the media industry, not in
• 1:25:32
  the New York meding industry, not in you know, the West Coast media
• 1:25:35
  industry, not in mainstream media, not in book media, not in you
• 1:25:41
  know, random blogs, not in you know, not on really Twitter.
• 1:25:45
  There was just sort of this you know, kind of silence around the subject,
• 1:25:49
  which I found you know, concerning, you know, in part because
• 1:25:54
  I myself was participating in that silence. I was afraid, let me,
• 1:25:58
  let let me, let me stop there, because this is an important point
• 1:26:02
  on a couple of different levels. And as you know, I've had a
• 1:26:08
  very complicated and contentious relationship with almost everybody in the story, but specifically Mark
• 1:26:14
  Pendergrass because when when Mark was writing his book, I told Mark that there
• 1:26:21
  were only two options for him. That either he would be completely ignored.
• 1:26:27
  First of all, I told him he was never going to get a major
• 1:26:29
  publisher to publish it. He didn't believe me, and I was right,
• 1:26:32
  and I told him there's only two options to what's going to happen given the
• 1:26:35
  toxicity of the topic, and that is you will either be ignored completely.
• 1:26:43
  That would be the best case scenario. The other sario the other scenarios,
• 1:26:46
  you will be destroyed. Because part of why Mark has such passion for this
• 1:26:54
  story is the aspect, or the alleged as aspect of repressed memory therapy,
• 1:27:00
  which he believes is the reason that his two daughters have disowned him, because
• 1:27:06
  they believe to this day that Mark sexually abused them. Now, to be
• 1:27:12
  clear, there's no actual evidence of that, but that's what they believe,
• 1:27:15
  and Mark believes very strongly that it's because they went through repressed memory therapy,
• 1:27:21
  which had them come up with these false memories of him abusing them as children.
• 1:27:28
  And I knew that that made him uniquely unqualified to be writing this book,
• 1:27:33
  because that's all the news media would need to destroy him. You can't.
• 1:27:41
  You can't defend Jerry Sadoski when your own children believe that they were sexually
• 1:27:45
  abused by you, regardless of what the truth is. Now, this would
• 1:27:48
  become I don't want to. I don't want to get fully into it right
• 1:27:51
  now because this would become a major issue in your work as we move forward.
• 1:27:57
  But I want to put that marker now for context as to how this
• 1:28:02
  whole thing turns out from the standpoint of your interest in Mark Pendergrass's book.
• 1:28:10
  And so with regard to the now you didn't know, it would be clear
• 1:28:15
  at this point you did not know about his issue with his daughters, correct
• 1:28:19
  Um, when I was reading the book, he talks about it in the
• 1:28:23
  book, which I mean, I guess sort of, you know. In
• 1:28:27
  contrast to your point, I thought the fact that he was so open about
• 1:28:30
  it was a mark of his you know, forthcomingness in you know, Canada,
• 1:28:34
  which I thought, which I thought was a point in his favor.
• 1:28:36
  But I mean, well, to be clear, I urged him very strongly
• 1:28:42
  to be open about it, because that was the only option. But yeah,
• 1:28:45
  is it is it possible that you're confusing his openness in that book with
• 1:28:49
  his openness about it in a different book that he wrote. He wrote an
• 1:28:55
  entire book about it called Victims of Memory, right right, that which he
• 1:29:00
  talked about the uh, you know, his daughters. He's also given former
• 1:29:03
  press interviews where he discusses it. So it's not like this like huge secret
• 1:29:09
  of his life. And whereas in the Sandusky book he he doesn't dwell on
• 1:29:15
  it a ton, but he does mention it pretty early on it a book,
• 1:29:18
  all right, But so you so you are aware of this issue and
• 1:29:23
  yet and that apparently is not having I'm interested in the fact that you know,
• 1:29:27
  you're reading a book that you're you know, has not gotten any mainstream
• 1:29:30
  media credibility. It's not getting any reviews, it's being ignored. You know
• 1:29:34
  that the author has this history with allegations of sexual abuse against them in their
• 1:29:40
  past as a media reporter. I would think that that would be like three
• 1:29:44
  strikes against the book right away, that you would that you would automatically discount
• 1:29:47
  anything that's in it. But clearly that didn't happen. So how was it
• 1:29:53
  that what's in Mark's book was able to overcome what would be natural biases from
• 1:29:59
  someone like yourself against believing anything that's in this book. Um, well,
• 1:30:06
  to let's see, so I there were eight I'm not totally sure how to
• 1:30:15
  answer that question, but I can tell you what happened sort of like next,
• 1:30:18
  like the that was convincing about the book you obviously were let me let
• 1:30:24
  me get back up a second. So how convinced were you after reading Mark
• 1:30:27
  Pendergras's book that something was very rotten in this story involving Jerry Sandusky. I
• 1:30:33
  was about eighty to ninety percent convinced, but that obviously, well, how
• 1:30:38
  do I put this? I found the book persuasive, you know, in
• 1:30:42
  a vacuum. I did find it deeply alarming that no one else seems to
• 1:30:48
  have seemed to have, you know, encountered or absorbed or discussed this book
• 1:30:55
  in the months in now years since it's been published, which to me suggested
• 1:31:00
  that I, you know, which to me suggested that I potentially had a
• 1:31:04
  gigantic blind spot and that there was something about this book or some missing context
• 1:31:10
  that I didn't understand, and that once I had that context, it would
• 1:31:14
  fundimently transform the way I looked at the book, um, and that would
• 1:31:17
  you know, sort of like solve the problem, like because like the thing
• 1:31:20
  is, like, after reading this book, it's not like I wanted.
• 1:31:27
  It's not it's not like my attitude was, Oh my god, I need,
• 1:31:31
  you know, to save Jerry Sandusky or I need to save journalism.
• 1:31:34
  My attitude was, why the fuck does this book you know, exist and
• 1:31:39
  why have I not found a flaw with it? Because you know this,
• 1:31:44
  you know, the Jerry Sanduski was imprisoned on dozens of counts of you know,
• 1:31:49
  sexual abuse. Um. You know at the time six years prior,
• 1:31:54
  in twenty and twelve, and you know, a famous journalist had one up
• 1:32:00
  Alitzer for covering the case. And you know, and not just covering the
• 1:32:03
  case, but covering the investigation um into Sandusky, someone who's deeply entwined in
• 1:32:09
  the in the process leading up to the trial, you know, like,
• 1:32:13
  and there was no whiff of the idea that Jerry Sandusky could be innocent in
• 1:32:16
  any of this stuff. So so I like my attitude was like I need
• 1:32:23
  to figure like I need to like find the flaw in this book, or
• 1:32:29
  you know, uh, you know, keep investigating to figure out to you
• 1:32:33
  know, or get in in front of someone else to see what they think.
• 1:32:36
  Um, and that's and that's actually what led me to, you know,
• 1:32:40
  bring the book to my colleague, um at Insider and have her,
• 1:32:44
  you know, read it for herself. So so you had a colleague,
• 1:32:47
  her name is Nicole, who you brought the book to that you're at you're
• 1:32:53
  now at. At the time, I think it was called Business Insider,
• 1:32:56
  right, I mean people and then they change the name to the Inside.
• 1:33:00
  And you're an investigative reporter and your fellow investigative reporter in the cole you bring
• 1:33:04
  I was I was an editor at the time. Um, she was a
• 1:33:09
  reporter. Um. But yeah, going, okay, all right, so
• 1:33:12
  you're all right, so you give her the book regardless of what your title
• 1:33:15
  was there Admittedly there wasn't much of a decision. Okay. So so you're
• 1:33:21
  you're both at the same media outlet, which is which, by the way,
• 1:33:26
  is a is a major media outlet. Um. You know, they've
• 1:33:28
  had some cutbacks recently, but um, you know it's a it's it's you
• 1:33:32
  know, very well funded or was very well funded and has a good reputation
• 1:33:36
  and it's a it's a mainstream, major media outlet in case you haven't heard
• 1:33:42
  of Business Insider or The Insider as they would rebrand themselves. And so you
• 1:33:46
  give the call the book, And what is her reaction to Mark Vandergrat's book.
• 1:33:51
  You know, I don't uh, you know, I can't quote it
• 1:33:55
  verbating, but she after she finished it, she you know, expressed similar
• 1:33:58
  amounts of alarm. Um. She you know, said, uh, this
• 1:34:02
  book, she found it convincing. You know, she found it um,
• 1:34:08
  you know, worthy of investigation, um, and worthy of doing something about
• 1:34:13
  even if we weren't totally sure what we were going to do about it.
• 1:34:16
  But I because like my instructions for her were, you know, can take
• 1:34:23
  this book and can you just find out what like, figure out what's wrong
• 1:34:25
  with it because it's it's saying that Jerry Sanduski is innocence and he can't be
• 1:34:29
  innocent because that would suggest much larger structural problems in the industry for which we
• 1:34:34
  work. And that like, because like I was saying, it wasn't it
• 1:34:41
  would have been so much easier, I think for everyone if the book described
• 1:34:45
  media malpractice like doing journalism wrong and uh, you know, leading to this
• 1:34:50
  situation. But that's not what the book described. This. This described or
• 1:34:54
  a reporter and her editors and a newspaper doing everything right, you know,
• 1:34:59
  being enterprising, being aggressives, but you know, the you know taking their
• 1:35:02
  time, not you know, you know, just like publishing whatever they you
• 1:35:08
  know, want to, but like really like you know, doing investigative journalism.
• 1:35:11
  But if Jerry Sandowski was innocent, that would suggest that there were flaws
• 1:35:14
  in like the very structure of the practice of investigative journalism, um and and
• 1:35:20
  so yeah, that that was sort of you know how interesting. You know,
• 1:35:25
  that's a very similar experience to my own at one stage in this saga,
• 1:35:30
  where I was hoping someone would convince me that Jerry Sandowski is actually guilty,
• 1:35:34
  I know, so that so that I wouldn't have to go through this.
• 1:35:39
  And it feels like you might have been going through the same thing.
• 1:35:42
  You're you're basically trying to you You're saying to your colleague Nicole, hey,
• 1:35:45
  look, I have suspicions based upon this book. Can you please convinced me
• 1:35:48
  that those suspicions aren't real so I don't have to worry about that. Is
• 1:35:53
  that a fair assessment of where you are yes that it's like I wanted to
• 1:35:57
  sleep well at night, like like I you know, I wanted. I
• 1:36:05
  sometimes regret that the fact that I ever read the book, because it like
• 1:36:10
  it's like the fucking you know, Tree of Knowledge or something like, you
• 1:36:14
  know that I forgot who said it. Maybe it was like Carl Popper or
• 1:36:17
  something like that. Who's like, once you have eaten from the tree,
• 1:36:19
  from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, all innocence is lost. I
• 1:36:24
  felt like this book like robbed me of my innocence, um like in a
• 1:36:30
  maybe in a good way, but like you know, after this, after
• 1:36:32
  you read a book like this, you can't like forget about it. At
• 1:36:36
  least I couldn't. And that's why I brought it to you know, my
• 1:36:40
  colleague, all right, so so you wouldn't call both agree that the book
• 1:36:44
  is credible, that there's something rotten in Denmark with regard to the Sandowski case,
• 1:36:49
  and what do you guys decide to do from there? We so we
• 1:36:56
  go back and forth on it um and what I what we settled on.
• 1:37:01
  I think I proposed it, but it might have might have come to sort
• 1:37:06
  of like an agreement on it was that we were going to embark on fact
• 1:37:10
  checking it. So we were going to extract all the end notes that are
• 1:37:14
  about eight hundred of them. It's about you know, eight hundred individual citations
• 1:37:18
  over this about five hundred page book, and we were going to make sure
• 1:37:25
  that every single sentence in this fucking book is you know, accurate and accounted
• 1:37:30
  for, because like because if we and in the hopes that in the process
• 1:37:38
  of fact checking, we would uncover the fatal flaw of the book, and
• 1:37:43
  if we didn't uncover the fatal flaw of the book, then to announce the
• 1:37:46
  world that we fact checked this book and we haven't found anything wrong with it.
• 1:37:51
  Now, now, did were you doing this for the purpose of writing
• 1:37:56
  a story for the Insider? Did you get approval from a superior? Did
• 1:38:00
  you do this on your own? At what level? At this point?
• 1:38:03
  At what level? Um? Did you go with the with your plans?
• 1:38:09
  Um? We talked for our editor, John Um and he are you talking
• 1:38:14
  about John Cook? Correct? John Cook? Yeah? Yeah? I think
• 1:38:18
  if I if Um he approved it, then I uh then yeah, his
• 1:38:23
  editor, Nick Carlson, who is the editor in chief of Insider, also
• 1:38:27
  approved it. Okay, So so you went to your editors these are big
• 1:38:30
  time people at an insider John Cook, who I've already mentioned in my commentary
• 1:38:36
  leading up to this interview, he approves what exactly an investigation into whether or
• 1:38:43
  not this book is credible? Yeah, just a fact check, um,
• 1:38:46
  you know at that point, I uh we So this was, um.
• 1:38:54
  One component of this I forgot to mention is that Mark Pendergrast donated, had
• 1:38:58
  donated all of his research materials to this institute called the Center for Inquiry in
• 1:39:02
  Amherston, New York, which is just outside of Buffalo. So the so
• 1:39:08
  basically what we were going the ideas that we were going to fly up to
• 1:39:12
  Buffalo, um you know, make reproductions or you know, just copy all
• 1:39:16
  the stuff um in the archive that he gave to them, and uh you
• 1:39:21
  know, fly back and you know just uh you know start crossed a Francine
• 1:39:26
  in fact checking it. And this was and to be clear, like this
• 1:39:30
  was sort of like, um, you know, at any this was even
• 1:39:34
  at the time, I think it was sort of considered something of like you
• 1:39:38
  know, a long shot. Is like, it wasn't something that we were
• 1:39:40
  going to finish within you know, one or two or three months. This
• 1:39:45
  was something that you know, had a longer time horizon, and we were
• 1:39:48
  going to be working on other things in the meantime. Right now now,
• 1:39:51
  this is now. It's important to point out that, especially in this media
• 1:39:56
  age, this is extraordinary. What's your you know doing here? Because generally,
• 1:40:02
  because the business model has broken in the media, two reporters who are
• 1:40:08
  full time employees are not given the time and the resources to do a story
• 1:40:13
  that may not come to fruition that is going to take months of manpower on
• 1:40:17
  a story that's not even popular to begin with. It's it's really rather old
• 1:40:23
  at this point because what we're talking that we're in twenty nineteen now, aren't
• 1:40:26
  we? I think we are. So when we I think Nicole and I
• 1:40:32
  we got I think we formally embarked on it in early twenty twenty. Okay,
• 1:40:36
  all right, well that okay, same same basic difference. And of
• 1:40:41
  course we're about to hit COVID, uh you know, momentarily, which is
• 1:40:44
  which is a whole other part of this. But um but it's my recollection
• 1:40:48
  that you and I and Nicole all spoke before well before COVID. So you
• 1:40:53
  you were, you were on this, you were on this well before COVID
• 1:40:57
  in my recollection. But it's just an extraordinary thing that has been approved by
• 1:41:02
  your editors to allow you to spend this much time on a story that may
• 1:41:08
  not come to anything, and unfortunately eventually did not come to anything from a
• 1:41:13
  standpoint of a publication. And so you embark on this and you start to
• 1:41:19
  do a lot of interviews. A lot of interviews give us a sense of
• 1:41:27
  who you specifically, and I guess Nicole as well at some points, who
• 1:41:31
  you spoke to during what would end up being a multi year investigation of the
• 1:41:39
  Sandusky story through the prism of Mark Pendergrass's book, The Most Hated Man in
• 1:41:44
  America. Let me get that for you. Let's see. Well, I
• 1:41:55
  know you spoke to me for sure, because and I'm curious. I'm curious,
• 1:42:00
  do you remember what do you remember of our first conversation? Do you
• 1:42:04
  remember anything? I'm sure you've had so many interviews that probably blurs your memory.
• 1:42:09
  Do you have any recollection? Okay, well here this is relevant.
• 1:42:14
  I'm just not me just talking about myself, because what I told you,
• 1:42:18
  guys, you and Nicole in our first conversation, I said, in my
• 1:42:23
  memory, I said, look, it's great that you guys are doing this,
• 1:42:27
  but I think it's very dangerous what you're doing by narrowing this down to
• 1:42:31
  Mark Pendergrass's book. And I said, I'm sure you're gonna think it's out
• 1:42:35
  of professional jealousy, because you know, Mark and I have this rivalry over
• 1:42:42
  our visions of the story. I mean, I'm very much in the camp
• 1:42:45
  that this was a scam by and large, and Mark, who's a naive
• 1:42:50
  liberal who lives in an ivory tower and has an agenda on the issue of
• 1:42:56
  repressed memory therapy, he thinks this was all about, you know, earnest
• 1:43:00
  people being sincerely duped into thinking that they were sexually abused by Jerry Sandusky.
• 1:43:06
  And I said to you, guys, here's the problem. If you do
• 1:43:12
  this with Mark Pendergrast's book, you are setting yourselves up for disaster because of
• 1:43:18
  the issue related to his daughters believing to this day that he sexually abused them.
• 1:43:25
  That's game, set match. And I don't I don't know what you're
• 1:43:30
  I don't remember specifically what your I think your reaction was mostly silence. But
• 1:43:38
  as as this interview goes along, I think I'm going to be vindicated in
• 1:43:43
  that view that I, uh, that I presented to you. By the
• 1:43:45
  way, I'm curious, does that does that jive at all with your recollection?
• 1:43:49
  Does it provoke any memories refresh your recollection? Does that sound right to
• 1:43:55
  you? As far as conversation was, I think you've expressed sort of skepticism
• 1:44:00
  him about sort of like the structural basis of the story from the get go.
• 1:44:03
  Um okay, all right, so who so who did you speak to
• 1:44:06
  other than me? Um? So we uh And just to clarify, we
• 1:44:13
  probably to not begin doing like formal interviews until until like late twenty twenty um,
• 1:44:18
  but the ones that we did were um. And this is just a
• 1:44:21
  shortlist where Michael Gillimum Mark Michael Gillim is the hold on. Let's go,
• 1:44:28
  let's go through these people. Michael Gillim is the therapist for Aaron Fisher,
• 1:44:31
  victim number one. He also would be the therapist for victim number four,
• 1:44:34
  who turned out to be the star witness at the trial. So Michael Gillim,
• 1:44:39
  go ahead. Dick Anderson, Um, he's a Jarry Sandusky supporter.
• 1:44:45
  Former Penn State football coach Debt. Dottie Sandusky Rum, the wifej aj Dillon.
• 1:44:53
  Aj Dillon is our our secret uh uh secret agent man from our podcast
• 1:45:00
  with the benefit of Hindsight. He's the guy who did a three year sting
• 1:45:03
  operation which we documented greatly in with the Benefit of Hindsight. Okay, so
• 1:45:09
  go ahead. Kara Sandusky his daughter, UM, Elaine Steinbacher, who is
• 1:45:17
  sort of Sandusky supporter. UM. She testified at trial. Yeah, in
• 1:45:24
  a significant way. We talked to al Lindsay UM, Jerry's lawyer. UM.
• 1:45:30
  We talked to Dottie Sandusky again. We talked to John Sandusky, his
• 1:45:34
  son, UM. And then we also spoke with the seventh accuser or victim
• 1:45:41
  number seven, which is Dustin Strubel Um. And Okay, so I want
• 1:45:45
  to talk to you. Are those the major interviews that you did? Is
• 1:45:48
  that a pretty complete Okay, So I want to talk to you about two
• 1:45:53
  of those interviews. UM. Let's start at the top of the list,
• 1:45:58
  and then we'll go to the bottom of the list. Mike Gillum. Uh.
• 1:46:01
  You know, it's extraordinary to me that Mike Gillham spoke to you.
• 1:46:04
  He has refused to speak to me. I've tried many times to speak to
• 1:46:09
  him, and I think he is a key element of this case. As
• 1:46:14
  I said, he was the therapist for the two most prominent accusers at trial,
• 1:46:18
  Victim number one and victim number four. And so tell me how that
• 1:46:24
  interview happened and how it went and what your takeaways were from Mike Gillham.
• 1:46:29
  Well, we, uh, this was October twenty twenty. We Um,
• 1:46:34
  so this was you know, sort of in the midst of we have been
• 1:46:39
  we have been wanting to go to Stay College for a long time. UM.
• 1:46:42
  Both you know, scope out the place into you know, meet Dottie,
• 1:46:45
  conduct interviews. Um. And uh. While we were there, or
• 1:46:50
  leading up to that, we were we you know, tried to schedule something
• 1:46:54
  with Mike. UM. And you know from the get go, I think
• 1:46:57
  he was pretty suspicious of us. Um. You know, I he had
• 1:47:01
  I think he had said that or he had I think he had talked about
• 1:47:08
  how like people had tried to interview him under false premising or you know,
• 1:47:13
  false circumstances. So he was just and how he I think at one point
• 1:47:17
  I kicked someone out of his office. Um and Uh. So he was
• 1:47:24
  I think like what you might call a reluctant interview subject. Um. And
• 1:47:29
  uh. But we got to say college he actually lived. He does not
• 1:47:33
  live or have. His office is not in u Psay College. I forgot
• 1:47:36
  where it was. I want to say it's in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania or something
• 1:47:40
  like that, but it might be elsewhere. UM. But we were so
• 1:47:45
  we drove there super you know, nervous because we're kind of like expecting to
• 1:47:50
  be like sort of dramatically kicked out of his office. And his office is
• 1:47:57
  in this sort of remodeled city hall of where whatever city was in. UM,
• 1:48:02
  super nice office, and we kind of, um, you know,
• 1:48:09
  I'm hoping to figure out a way to publish the transcript or at least you
• 1:48:13
  know, excerpts of it. Um. But the you know, as for
• 1:48:16
  how the interview went, he was you know, he answered all of our
• 1:48:18
  questions. Um. The and in some of those questions were you know,
• 1:48:26
  admittedly you know, confrontational. UM. I think what I remember probably most
• 1:48:31
  about that is him discussing how he used dolls um to help his clients sort
• 1:48:43
  of like articulate and visualize um uh, sort of sexual abuse that they may
• 1:48:48
  have experienced, which is, if I recall quickly, something of a controversial
• 1:48:53
  tactic in therapy with children. UM. So that was one point that I
• 1:48:59
  remember. Another points that I remember was, you know, we talked about
• 1:49:05
  the book that he had co written with one of the accusers, in which
• 1:49:12
  he Yea Beans, the co author of Aaron Fisher's book along with Aaron Fisher's
• 1:49:15
  mother. He would then lose his state contract with the state of Pennsylvania because
• 1:49:20
  of an ethical violation of a therapist writing a book about about their work in
• 1:49:26
  this particular case. So um, but he is one of the authors of
• 1:49:30
  Silent No More, Aaron Fisher's book, which was really reading that book was
• 1:49:35
  the final nail on the coffin for me in realizing that Jerry Sandusky was innocent,
• 1:49:40
  which is how bad that book is, how how avertly completely lacking incredibility
• 1:49:45
  that book is. So that's why Mike Gillham is a very important figure here,
• 1:49:49
  and so what we so go ahead and give us here. Yeah.
• 1:49:53
  I think another thing that stuck out was when you know, we you know,
• 1:49:57
  we probed him on you know, okay, so what you know he's
• 1:50:00
  describing essentially recovered memory therapy, if I recall correctly, you know, just
• 1:50:04
  kind of uh, you know, helping his clients quote unquote recover memories that
• 1:50:13
  they had you know, repressed or disassociated from um, which was you know,
• 1:50:17
  like clearly he believes in it based on silent no more um and uh
• 1:50:21
  you know, I you know, straight up asking him, so you I
• 1:50:25
  remember asking him something like you know, so you you know, have this
• 1:50:29
  practice of helping you know, these children, you know, recover or resurrect
• 1:50:33
  these memories, like you know what is sort of like you know, the
• 1:50:35
  scientific basis for them. And he just said, oh, it's Freud.
• 1:50:39
  So his like clinical practice, at least according to him, was on the
• 1:50:44
  basis of the teachings of Sigmund Freud, which you know, I there is
• 1:50:49
  an ongoing and very uh you know, active debates across the world about you
• 1:50:57
  know, the precise legacy of Sigmund Freud it and you know, maybe like
• 1:51:00
  the personal utility of psychoanalysis. But like he was, it is not like
• 1:51:08
  Freudianism is not like a scientific discipline at least not in the sense that you
• 1:51:13
  know, biology or chemistry is there's no you know, articulated you know,
• 1:51:17
  mechanism by which you memories are repressed, you know, by maintaining in like
• 1:51:25
  continue to be buried and then can be um sort of you know, retrieved
• 1:51:29
  as if retrieving a floppy disc from a um, you know, like a
• 1:51:31
  cabinet or something like that. And I think the stronger and I think the
• 1:51:34
  stronger point here is getting away from Freud for a second. The stronger point
• 1:51:40
  is that repressed memory therapy in our court system has been completely discredited. It's
• 1:51:45
  not even allowed and in most state courts. Elizabeth Loftist, who is the
• 1:51:49
  foremost expert on on on memory in the world, if not just America,
• 1:51:57
  actually testified on Jerry Zandowski's behalf and believe that this is agrees with Mark Pendergrass
• 1:52:01
  that that this is a situation where repressed memory therapy was abused to try to
• 1:52:08
  create false stories of abuse. But I think I'm more interested when it comes
• 1:52:13
  to gillim on what your general takeaway of him as a as a person and
• 1:52:18
  as a character was, because you've You've told me previously that you kind of
• 1:52:24
  got the hebe gebs uh in your interaction with him. You've got a really
• 1:52:29
  bad feeling about him. Can you can you articulate that for us here?
• 1:52:33
  Yeah, he was he was paranoid about a lot of stuff. Um,
• 1:52:39
  he you know, as forthcoming as he was, there were other things that
• 1:52:43
  he was kind of like a little uh maybe kind of like sketchy, a
• 1:52:46
  little vagon, a little evasive on um the other he there was there were
• 1:52:53
  a couple of passages that you know, we brought up to him both during
• 1:52:57
  the interview and I think afterward, and he told us that those passages were
• 1:53:03
  actually written by an editor or ghostwriter um at the New York City publishing house
• 1:53:11
  that they used to create this book, and that that editor had died or
• 1:53:16
  something like that. UM. The you know, I the you know,
• 1:53:23
  I think it's it's always tough to you know, like sort of like issue
• 1:53:27
  the judgments because you know, it's been more than two years since that interview
• 1:53:30
  took place. But yeah, I something did strike me in a little bit
• 1:53:35
  as off of him, and you know, I realized that that is kind
• 1:53:39
  of, you know, a little vag in it of itself. M But
• 1:53:42
  you know, from the just to me to me Keenan, the thing about
• 1:53:45
  Mike Gillham and he's important in this story because without him, Aaron Fisher never
• 1:53:50
  comes up with his allocation, and without Aaron Fisher's there's no investigation, there's
• 1:53:56
  no story, the whole thing never gets started. That's what really got get
• 1:54:00
  the snowball going down the mountain that turns into an avalanche. And there's no
• 1:54:05
  credibility to Aaron Fisher's original story, So how it originated comes directly from Mike
• 1:54:11
  Gillham. But if you read Silent No More, he Mike Gillham is a
• 1:54:15
  conspiracy nut job. I mean he believes, he writes in that book.
• 1:54:21
  He writes in that book that the Philadelphia Eagles were in on the conspiracy,
• 1:54:28
  and the proof of that is that the Eagles called Aaron Fisher a couple times,
• 1:54:31
  offering him free tickets. He believes, he believes that Jerry Zenduski was
• 1:54:36
  behind Aaron Fisher's car accident and almost killed him and two of his friends because
• 1:54:43
  it was a car beat up old galopi that Jerry Zenduski had given to Aaron
• 1:54:47
  Fisher, which is just flat out crazy. I mean, these are beliefs
• 1:54:51
  that when I read them in the book, I'm like, this guy is
• 1:54:57
  a quack of epic proportion, and we are relying on his work as the
• 1:55:02
  basis for this entire case on a story that's not credible. What what is
• 1:55:09
  what is your take on my assessment there? Yeah, No, I'm in
• 1:55:14
  claims to agree with you. I'm I am remembering silent no more. And
• 1:55:18
  I'm I think like the the thing I think that like really most you know,
• 1:55:25
  I think like characterized Mike Gill him is you know, his belief in
• 1:55:28
  like this very you know manichean um sort of you know, almost like almost
• 1:55:33
  like primordial belief in like the forces of good and evil and that the world
• 1:55:39
  can be divided into good and evil and that he was good and everyone else
• 1:55:43
  was evil. Um It he betrayed no nuance, no you know, like
• 1:55:49
  sense of you know, like this is more complicated than it might seem,
• 1:55:54
  or anything like that. And you're right, he did. He It wasn't
• 1:55:58
  just that like he was sort of like absent mindedly um or you know,
• 1:56:02
  just sort of like writing this book. He was that that was part of
• 1:56:04
  his clinical practice at least and what you know, both in when he wrote
• 1:56:09
  wrote in the book when he testified, you know what he told us,
• 1:56:12
  which was just that you know, part of uh, you know, his
• 1:56:15
  clinical practice is protecting uh you know, his clients of and what's it's you
• 1:56:24
  know, in reading the book and um, in both just talking to him,
• 1:56:28
  he often talks about as you know, he talks more and more with
• 1:56:30
  his clients, like they deteriorate, you know, their mental states. They
• 1:56:34
  begin to believe that you know, this abuse occurred um and that he is
• 1:56:39
  helping them, uh, you know, sort of like both recovered these memories
• 1:56:44
  before a very specific end. He wasn't he wasn't doing this to you know,
• 1:56:49
  help them, you know, get you know, sort of like to
• 1:56:54
  help improve their health. He was doing this as an adjunct essentially the police.
• 1:56:58
  He was trying to get them to talk to the police so as to
• 1:57:00
  help build the case against Jerry Sanduski. Okay, all right, so that's
• 1:57:06
  enough about Mike Gillham because we're getting bogged down here a little bit, and
• 1:57:11
  this will be an eight hour interview if we go at this space. But
• 1:57:14
  let's go to Dustin Strubel, because he's the only trial accuser that I'm aware
• 1:57:17
  of that's ever done in an interview with anybody. He did an interview with
• 1:57:21
  Mark Pendergrass, which Mark puts in the book. And Dustin is interesting Victor
• 1:57:27
  number seven as you refer to him, because for a couple of reasons.
• 1:57:31
  One, he is in the infamous picture in Jerry Sandowski's book, Touched with
• 1:57:36
  three other trial accusers, you know, four or five, six, and
• 1:57:42
  seven. And he also is somebody who Mark Pendergrass is convinced. Now I'm
• 1:57:48
  a little skeptical this because I know Mark's agenda here. But Mark is convinced,
• 1:57:54
  and I don't think he's lying about his perceptions. Did Dustin really believe
• 1:58:00
  that he was abused by Jerry Sandusky? And that Mark's theory is that he
• 1:58:03
  believes this because of the repressed memory therapy that he acknowledges he went through.
• 1:58:10
  And that's probably the most significant part, at least from Mark Pendergras's perspective of
• 1:58:15
  Dustin Strubel's interview and testimony that he he's the only accuser that I'm aware of
• 1:58:21
  that has basically admitted having gone through what you would call repressed memory therapy.
• 1:58:28
  So what was your experience like with victim number seven? Um, he was
• 1:58:35
  you know, I don't have much you know, bathing to say. He
• 1:58:40
  you know, I think we first spoke with him on either the I think
• 1:58:49
  I think we encountered him, you know, when we first visited to try
• 1:58:54
  to set something up, and you know, he needs to take some time
• 1:58:57
  to think about, you know, how to do it. Um, he's
• 1:59:00
  the the experience was setting up the interview struck me as like very normal.
• 1:59:04
  Um he uh you know he does not UM. My interactions with him,
• 1:59:13
  he did not seem crazy, if you know, like he seemed like a
• 1:59:17
  normal guy. Um and uh the and you know, you know, to
• 1:59:23
  his credit, he was willing to speak with me. Um, you know,
• 1:59:26
  on the record, um over you know, multiple hours. This was
• 1:59:30
  late twenty twenty one when I when I did that interview. UM and my
• 1:59:34
  way, let me let me let me stay before you get to your impressions
• 1:59:36
  of him, let me stay. I think that it's very interesting and consistent
• 1:59:42
  with the repressed memory therapy theory that he was willing to speak to both Mark
• 1:59:47
  Prendergrast and to you in a very open, transparent fashion. Because if you
• 1:59:53
  think of if you think this through, right, if you really believe that
• 1:59:58
  you were abused, right, if you truly believe that, then you you
• 2:00:01
  really don't have anything to fear, right, You don't have anything to fear
• 2:00:05
  from from hostile questioning. And also if you if you weren't really abused,
• 2:00:12
  you also don't even really a fear as much. This is my theory.
• 2:00:16
  You don't you don't fear reliving it because you never lived it the first time.
• 2:00:23
  So you see where you see where I'm coming from this where you don't
• 2:00:26
  have a fear of being interviewed about it because you don't think you're lying.
• 2:00:29
  Right, It's not like it's not like a you know, a Matt Sandusky
• 2:00:33
  situation, who knows he's lying, um and wouldn't would avoid being questioned by
• 2:00:41
  someone like me like the plague, because he knows he would be exposed exposed.
• 2:00:45
  But if you believe you were abused because of repressed memory therapy, but
• 2:00:49
  you never actually went through any abuse, I can see why you would do
• 2:00:54
  interviews with with Mark and Keenan Trotter. Do you see where I'm coming from
• 2:00:58
  on that? Yeah? Okay, So so give me your basic impression of
• 2:01:02
  of Dust and victim number seven. UM, my basic impression. He's a
• 2:01:09
  guy about my age. Um. He you know, I remember, you
• 2:01:16
  know, kind of maybe a little depressed. Um uh, you know.
• 2:01:23
  He he's working at um like a or I think he manages a food outlets
• 2:01:28
  and state college. Um. I guess I'm more interested in your impressions of
• 2:01:32
  him as whether or not you thought he was abused by Charis of Dusky or
• 2:01:36
  if there was any evidence that he was. Um, you know, I
• 2:01:42
  would part of me wants to go back and read that, you know,
• 2:01:45
  to re listen to the interview to you know, uh jog my memory.
• 2:01:48
  Um, I you know, my my impression of him as to whether he
• 2:01:58
  my impression of him is that he sincerely believes that he was abused by Jerry
• 2:02:02
  Sandusky. Um. And that is you know, and that's I don't even
• 2:02:09
  know how we begin to assess whether or not he was actually abused by him
• 2:02:14
  in the absence of like, you know, evidence beyond him just saying it,
• 2:02:18
  um the you know, but just sort of like in his you know,
• 2:02:25
  comportments, um, you know, in his in sort of you know,
• 2:02:29
  like the way he talked, he struck me as someone who believes,
• 2:02:32
  by one mechanism or the other, that he suffered sexual abuse. Now,
• 2:02:36
  whether that's because he actually suffered sexual abuse or because he was the client of
• 2:02:41
  a therapist who convinced him that he was sexually abused and that that sexual abuse
• 2:02:46
  is the basis of all the problems in his life. UM, you know
• 2:02:51
  that I found I'm not sure if I would be able to distinguish that um
• 2:02:57
  and but you know, like the honestly, the thing that stuck out to
• 2:03:00
  me the most is him telling me that he does not believe that several of
• 2:03:03
  the other accusers are telling the truth. He is he was openly skeptical of
• 2:03:10
  the validity of other people's claims. All right, now, that's extraordinary.
• 2:03:15
  So let's let's get into that. So was he specific or was he general
• 2:03:17
  when he said when victim number seven said he doesn't believe other people's claims,
• 2:03:23
  I'll have to go back. I don't think he was specific, but I'll
• 2:03:28
  have to go back and look, I can update on you. And on
• 2:03:30
  that did he say? Why did he say why he was skeptical of other
• 2:03:33
  people's claims against Jerry Sondski while he believed himself to have been abused. My
• 2:03:39
  recollection is the gosh. I think he was basing that on just sort of
• 2:03:47
  like his personal conversations with them, like something struck in him is off about
• 2:03:53
  it, like the way they were talking about it, And what I don't
• 2:03:59
  I'm no, I'll have to go back to the interview. He may there
• 2:04:03
  may have been some he may have been talking not necessarily about the trial victims
• 2:04:09
  or accusers, but about the much larger group of people who received sort of
• 2:04:15
  these like confidential settlements from Penn State, which population. But yeah, regardless,
• 2:04:19
  that's a fascinating thing for a trial victim of Jerry Sadski to say,
• 2:04:26
  I don't believe many of these other accusers. It's also fascinating to me Keenian
• 2:04:30
  and I don't know what your impressions are of this, but you know the
• 2:04:36
  relationship that a lot of these accusers still have with each other today, I
• 2:04:42
  think is more than fascinating, and I think it also goes much more to
• 2:04:46
  my narrative than to the conventional wisdom narrative. And specifically, victim number seven,
• 2:04:53
  who we've just been talking about, is very very very close to this
• 2:04:56
  day with victim number six. Victim number six is really the victim that was
• 2:05:02
  was urged by Sarah again on the Pulicer Prize winning reporter who broke this story.
• 2:05:11
  She was the one that contacted Victim six's mom and said, hey,
• 2:05:14
  look, they're about to drop this case if you guys don't find more accusers.
• 2:05:19
  And that's almost a direct quote that was that was stipulated to by the
• 2:05:24
  prosecution during the trial and lo and behold victim number seven, very close friend
• 2:05:30
  of victim number six and one of the four guys in that photo that I've
• 2:05:34
  already referenced, they all of a sudden become accusers. Well, Victim number
• 2:05:41
  six was the best man at victim number seven's wedding, and during his toast
• 2:05:46
  talked ineloquent, eloquent and nostalgic terms about how they met at twelve years old
• 2:05:57
  as part of the Second Mile charity out if they're both victims of Jerry Sandusky
• 2:06:02
  sexual abuse, right, and you're giving the best man speech. First of
• 2:06:09
  all, the fact that you would even I guess maybe you would be bonded
• 2:06:13
  by your mutual abuse by Jerry. Maybe maybe maybe all Right, I mean
• 2:06:18
  I'm open to that theoretical possibility. But in your best man speech, you're
• 2:06:24
  gonna talk about how how awesome it was when you met at twelve, which
• 2:06:29
  was directly related to the relationship with Jerry Sandusky. That doesn't make any sense
• 2:06:33
  to me. Well, I would push back on that. I mean,
• 2:06:38
  everything I've read about the Second Mile suggested it was an awesome program. That
• 2:06:41
  okay, but what's your abut? Was by Jerry Sandusky? Keenan what's your
• 2:06:45
  abused by Jerry Sandusky? And the second mile has been destroyed in every possible
• 2:06:49
  way in public perception. If it was real, it would completely change your
• 2:06:55
  memories. We can give repressed memories or reversing past memories. You would not
• 2:07:00
  think of it as an in the nostalgic way. You would think of it
• 2:07:03
  as boy, we overcame this hurricane together and it bonded us. That's the
• 2:07:09
  way it was phrased. You're not seeing this at all, are you.
• 2:07:13
  I'm I guess I just disagree. And see, like it doesn't strike me
• 2:07:15
  as like inherently ridiculous that you know, you might have a really great time
• 2:07:19
  at an institution where something also really bad happened to you and that like and
• 2:07:25
  on, I mean, that's like, isn't that like the basis of like
• 2:07:28
  the fucking military, I mean, the suck and everything like that. Don't
• 2:07:30
  like people in the military bond over how shitty it was. And but that's
• 2:07:36
  not what happened. That what was said here? You know what I mean?
• 2:07:39
  You know, all right, well clearly we're not going to agree on
• 2:07:43
  that. So that's victim number seven. Now you've left a couple of key
• 2:07:45
  people off your list of interviews. I don't know whether or not it was,
• 2:07:49
  you know, for whatever reason, but I know you interviewed Gary Schultz,
• 2:07:54
  one of the administrators who went to prison. Here. What was your
• 2:07:58
  impression of Gary Schultz? Gosh, Um, I did not. I don't
• 2:08:05
  recall aping that memory of an interview. Um, you don't see you remember
• 2:08:09
  anything, Keaton. I mean, that's why it writes down everything. Okay,
• 2:08:16
  all right, so you don't remember Gary Schultz, but clearly he came
• 2:08:18
  across as a credible person to you, right, I mean, I just
• 2:08:22
  remember the interview not being that useful. Um. To be honest with you,
• 2:08:26
  like you didn't do it. You clearly didn't do it right if you
• 2:08:28
  didn't, if you didn't find it useful, because Gary Schultz is the key
• 2:08:31
  to the whole damn case. Um, if you're if you, if you
• 2:08:37
  if you understand the case. Because mcquery, see, this is one of
• 2:08:39
  the many ways in which you and I uh don't don't see eye to eye
• 2:08:43
  in this case. Because you're in the repressed memory camp with with your buddy
• 2:08:48
  Mark Pendergrass. You don't understand the importance of Mike mcquery and Mike Mike mcquery
• 2:08:52
  is the entire case, and and Gary Schultz destroys Mike mcquery's allegation. And
• 2:09:00
  once mcquery is gone, then these up, the actual accusers are far more
• 2:09:05
  easily disposed of. But the most important interview that you've done, and you've
• 2:09:09
  and you've done far more than one interview, in fact, I don't even
• 2:09:11
  know if you would call them interviews. But you've spoken to Jerry Sandowski many,
• 2:09:16
  many, many times. Yeah, how many times? How many times
• 2:09:20
  would you say that you've spoken to Jerry Sandowski? Approximately? Probably he calls
• 2:09:28
  me every couple of weeks still, usually for about like ten or fifteen minutes
• 2:09:33
  at a time, with that terrible prison telephone system that interrupts you ever eat
• 2:09:39
  two minutes? Yeah, we I think we conducted a more formal as formal
• 2:09:45
  of the interview as we could when we were in Penn State by a Dotti's
• 2:09:50
  phone call because she can speak to him for longer periods of time, and
• 2:09:54
  we and then ever since then, we've yeah, or he's called me um
• 2:10:01
  or my or my colleague and they've yeah, he's so yeah, I've you
• 2:10:07
  know, in total, I probably spent maybe a total twenty four hours talking
• 2:10:13
  to him something like that. UM, and you I would is it fair
• 2:10:18
  to say you would consider Jerry Sanduski now more than just an interview subject,
• 2:10:22
  that you would consider him to be a friend. Gosh, that's a good
• 2:10:26
  question. UM. I'm not sure if I would consider him a friend,
• 2:10:30
  and I don't think he would consider me a friend. UM. But I
• 2:10:37
  you know, I I also you know, I think well of him.
• 2:10:39
  UM. You know, and that's you know, obviously five years ago,
• 2:10:43
  I would have said, you know, on the basis of everything that I'm
• 2:10:48
  aware of, Jerry Sanduski is an unrepentant predator of children who has you know,
• 2:10:54
  used the Second Mile as a you know, grooming facility to procure you're,
• 2:11:00
  you know, sort of a continuous stream of children to abuse. UM.
• 2:11:05
  But having you know, read this book, having talked, um,
• 2:11:09
  you know, with Jerry extensively, having talked with his wife extensively, having
• 2:11:13
  talked with most of his children very extensively, UM, and and also talking
• 2:11:20
  with people who attended the Second Mile, UM, and you know, it's
• 2:11:24
  sort of this whole um, you know, universe of people who've known him
• 2:11:28
  over the years, and UM, who have watched this trial unfold. I'm
• 2:11:33
  comfortable saying, you know, he's a man worthy of admiration. UM.
• 2:11:37
  And and that's not just you know, in the sense of like, oh
• 2:11:41
  my god, this really bad thing happened to him, um, and you
• 2:11:45
  know we should sort of automatically be sympathetic to him. It's because you know,
• 2:11:48
  he clearly like wanted to improve the lives of children. I mean,
• 2:11:52
  not just uh you know another thing. Uh, you know, Nicole and
• 2:11:58
  I've you know, read through whom were just the the hundreds and honestly thousands
• 2:12:05
  of pages of letters that Jerry has written, both from prison and before that,
• 2:12:09
  to a lot of people involved in the case, including um, you
• 2:12:13
  know, many of the cusers. It's clear from almost everything that Jerry did,
• 2:12:18
  in the way that he conducted himself, that he did have a lot
• 2:12:20
  of these people's best interests in mind. And you know, you know,
• 2:12:26
  ever since you know, he went to prison, and ever since you know,
• 2:12:28
  you know, we started talking to him, it's clear that he's not
• 2:12:31
  like, he doesn't want to destroy the people you know that that put him
• 2:12:37
  in prison. He continues to think that this is such a that this is
• 2:12:39
  an enormous misunderstanding, and he like the degree to which he has demonstrated forgiveness
• 2:12:48
  and forbearance and you know, in charity toward others, even those who hate
• 2:12:54
  him most Um, it's it's incredible, I'm I and it makes me,
• 2:13:01
  you know, it makes me incredibly sad to think about that, you know,
• 2:13:05
  someone you know like Jerry is in the position that he is given all
• 2:13:09
  the things that he's done in his life and all the ways in which he
• 2:13:11
  has conducted himself both before and sense. Um. So to answer your question,
• 2:13:16
  you know about he's your friend, I, you know, it's a
• 2:13:18
  good question, Um. But I I can say that I think that I
• 2:13:22
  do admire him, and I I think that in many ways he's an extraordinary
• 2:13:28
  example for other people to model. And if you and if you know you
• 2:13:31
  can if someone can sort of bracket in their head, um, you know,
• 2:13:37
  the you know, the accusations against him, and just look at everything
• 2:13:41
  else he's done in his life, it's clearer that he is a man worthy
• 2:13:45
  of emulation, that he, you know, wanted to model how to be
• 2:13:48
  in the world and to how to you know, truly give himself to others.
• 2:13:52
  Um. And I and you know for that reason, I, you
• 2:13:56
  know, that's how I feel about him. That's that's fascinating on a lot
• 2:14:01
  of levels. Um. I have often described Jerry Sandusky as being remarkably naive
• 2:14:09
  and having a You agree with that, right, I mean, yeah,
• 2:14:16
  yeah right, He's he's a remarkably naive guy and you know, naive ta
• 2:14:22
  and I've even referred to him as a nafe at times, is associated with
• 2:14:26
  understandably, with not being very intelligent. Yet he in some ways is very
• 2:14:31
  intelligent. I mean, he writes these beautiful letters that ended up being used
• 2:14:37
  against him at trial that were somehow perceived as being love letters when there was
• 2:14:43
  nothing remotely sexual about them. Um. And so he's he's simultaneously incredibly naive
• 2:14:52
  and in many ways dumb, yet he's not a dumb guy. Do you
• 2:14:58
  agree with that assessment? Yeah? Yeah, it's he is. He's he
• 2:15:07
  is very unique. Um, he's Uh. I like to call him an
• 2:15:11
  anachronism. Uh. He's kind of like this Peter pan Asque, you know,
• 2:15:16
  a big kid at a heart type guy that you don't really see that
• 2:15:20
  much anymore, which combines sort of this you know adults or you know,
• 2:15:26
  just sort of like the wisdom that you obtain as an adult with this sort
• 2:15:28
  of like, you know, childlike um, innocence about the world, um,
• 2:15:35
  and it's it turned out to not be a good combination in this in
• 2:15:37
  this case, well, it did not turn out well for him, although
• 2:15:41
  it turned out very well for many of many of his accusers. Is from
• 2:15:45
  a monetary standpoint, that's assuming there is no afterlife and no hell. Although
• 2:15:50
  I'm I'm convinced that on Jerry's deathbed, he will be actually happy that that
• 2:15:56
  the kids that he loved ended up benefiting so much from how having betrayed him.
• 2:16:00
  I really do believe that. Do you agree with that? By the
• 2:16:03
  way, I don't even know if you ever thought about it that way,
• 2:16:05
  But but I think that Jerry will take some solace and joy that his betrayal
• 2:16:11
  ended up benefiting those who betrayed him so badly. I yeah, I can
• 2:16:18
  see that, and I can I can see you know, if if what
• 2:16:22
  I think is, if what I think it's going to happen actually happens,
• 2:16:26
  I think on his deathbed, whether it happens before or after, he will
• 2:16:31
  be a significant figure in the way that the media industry changes, in the
• 2:16:35
  way that the practice of journalism changes. Wow. Okay, well that's optimistic.
• 2:16:41
  We'll revisit that in the momentum at some point in his interview. But
• 2:16:46
  but I want to go back to Jerry's dusky for a second. You referenced
• 2:16:50
  him as a peter Pan character, and and this is this is dangerous within
• 2:16:54
  this realm of discussion, because you know, the same kind of thing was
• 2:17:00
  said about Michael Jackson, who I now believe to be also innocent. And
• 2:17:05
  there are those who believe that the peter Pan syndrome is used as a cover
• 2:17:13
  for pedophiles who want to be able to take advantage of young kids. Now,
• 2:17:18
  I don't believe that that's what's happening but Jerry, but that's what a
• 2:17:20
  lot of people perceive. And I don't think it happened with Michael Jackson either.
• 2:17:26
  I think that the peter Pan thing here is more relevant from the standpoint
• 2:17:30
  of Jerry's literal physical development, and that I'm not convinced that Jerry ever really
• 2:17:39
  fully went through puberty. I'm not sure that Jerry is in any sense an
• 2:17:46
  overtly sexual person. He has very low testosterone. He has no testicles,
• 2:17:52
  as you know from having seen the medical Rockers. By the way, since
• 2:17:56
  since I've never had anybody else confirmed on our podcast as to other than me
• 2:18:00
  that I've that has seen the medical records. Can you confirm that you have
• 2:18:05
  seen the same medical records I have with regard to testosterone and his testicles.
• 2:18:09
  Can you confirm that for me? Please? Yeah, I can confirm that
• 2:18:11
  I saw medical records that I validated indicating that he had virtually no testicular mass
• 2:18:18
  and that he um you know, which obviously affected his testosterone output, and
• 2:18:24
  that he took um you know, supplements to make come for it. Okay,
• 2:18:28
  So thank you for doing that, And because to me that the medical
• 2:18:33
  records, it's unbelievable that that that they never made it into Jerry Zandoski's trial,
• 2:18:39
  because I think they alone for a lot of people, both from a
• 2:18:43
  evidentiary standpoint as well as just from a common sense perspective, our automatic reasonable
• 2:18:48
  doubt, if not proof that of innocence. But what do you make of
• 2:18:52
  my theory that that Jerry is one of these a sexual people. I mean,
• 2:18:58
  I haven't spent as much time with them as you have, but I've
• 2:19:01
  been around a lot of football coaches, and football coaches make sexual references,
• 2:19:07
  jokes, They are hyper uh, you know, testosterone type people to toxic
• 2:19:16
  masculinity. Jerry didn't fit that at all. I see Jerry almost as a
• 2:19:22
  grand mother type figure from from a sexual standpoint, I mean, I have
• 2:19:28
  never I can't recall anybody I've ever met that gave off less sexual energy in
• 2:19:33
  any way than Jerry Sandusky, and I just I don't. And I think
• 2:19:39
  that was partially why he couldn't understand the allegations against him. Like when Jerry,
• 2:19:45
  when Bob Costas asks him, are you sexually attracted to young boys?
• 2:19:50
  He literally can't even comprehend the question, which is why it took him quite
• 2:19:56
  a while to finally answer it, because it's not the way he thinks.
• 2:20:00
  What do you make of that theory? I so, I there's something to
• 2:20:07
  be said that his upbringing sort have led him to, you know, sort
• 2:20:13
  of formed a personality in which sex and like, you know, sexuality was
• 2:20:18
  just fundamentally not a huge part of his life, probably due in part to
• 2:20:22
  his deficient to saccone at some point you know, YadA, YadA, YadA.
• 2:20:26
  However, um I this to the degree that it implicates or you know,
• 2:20:31
  you know, calls into his into question his ability to you know,
• 2:20:35
  sexually abuse someone um or you know, a child with uh, you know,
• 2:20:41
  his anatomy um I did you know I I uh. In the course
• 2:20:46
  of reporting on the on the story, I did ask him at one point,
• 2:20:48
  like, you know, Jerry, are you able or at the time
• 2:20:52
  that the accusations that the accused activity took place, you know, this abuse,
• 2:20:56
  were you able to achieve an erection? Because you know, obviously you
• 2:21:01
  know, maybe he may not have been able to to do his you know,
• 2:21:03
  low testicular mass. And he told me like, yes, I could
• 2:21:07
  achieve an erection. I you know, was sleeping with Dottie, like he
• 2:21:11
  could you know, have sex. So like the you know I hear sort
• 2:21:16
  of like the you know there, I think there might be some elements of
• 2:21:20
  truth of the theory, but it is I at least according to Jerry,
• 2:21:24
  he could maintain an erection and he could. Okay, you missed, You're
• 2:21:28
  missed. You you are misunderstanding my point on the on the testicular matter issue.
• 2:21:35
  The testicular matter issue. Uh oh yeah. Yeah, Like there's two
• 2:21:41
  elements that there's two elements to this that that apparently aren't overtly obvious to me,
• 2:21:45
  They're very obvious. But when I when I'm referenced this, a lot
• 2:21:48
  of people, like yourself, don't immediately get it. There's two elements.
• 2:21:52
  Number one, the allegations that he faced in this trial and at the trial,
• 2:21:58
  especially by victim number nine, Sebastian Payden, are not old person married
• 2:22:05
  sex. Okay. This is this is gay porn in a very violent way
• 2:22:13
  with someone who is a heterosexual teenage boy who has no interest in engaging in
• 2:22:20
  this in anal sex, which is a completely different animal than married sex with
• 2:22:26
  Dottie. And so from a testosterone standpoint and from a tescular standpoint, I
• 2:22:31
  questioned whether or not that's even remotely physically possible for anybody at his age,
• 2:22:37
  but especially him. And then the second element of this, which is maybe
• 2:22:41
  even more important, is given the nature of all the allegations, if they
• 2:22:46
  were real, at least one or two of the accusers would have mentioned,
• 2:22:52
  Hey, by the way, you know what was really weird about Jerry is
• 2:22:56
  that he had no balls. Nobody said that, Keenan, nobody said that.
• 2:23:03
  You've read the transcripts of the trial. This is these are teenage boys
• 2:23:07
  who are hyper hyper sensitive to and aware of their genitalia and other other you
• 2:23:16
  know, men than they might see in a locker room or whatever that that
• 2:23:20
  nobody said, even though it was a million dollar plus ticket of proof that
• 2:23:26
  you were you were somehow intimate with Jerry Zadusky. Nobody said anything about the
• 2:23:30
  fact that he has no testicles that is damning from an evidentiary standpoint in a
• 2:23:35
  case where there is no actual evidence or corroboration of any of these stories.
• 2:23:41
  Does that make more sense to you? Now? It makes sense. I
• 2:23:45
  mean, yes, I understand your theory and I and we've discussed this in
• 2:23:48
  the past, and I you know, the only thing that would you know,
• 2:23:52
  strike me about that theory is that, like the some men have anatomy
• 2:23:58
  where you know, like they don't have low hanging testicles and the testicles naturally
• 2:24:01
  retracting to the body given temperature fluctuations. Okay, Aaron Fisher claimed to have
• 2:24:07
  engaged in a hundred episodes with Jerry Sandowski, a hundred keenan He's victim number
• 2:24:16
  one if he had engaged with Jerry Sandowski, which was by the way impossible
• 2:24:22
  of giving the timelines that were presented a trial. But if that had happened,
• 2:24:28
  Aaron Fisher would don't know damn right well, that that Jerry Zandoski had
• 2:24:33
  no testicles. I mean, this is this is not a matter of debate.
• 2:24:39
  This is you don't. You're not seeing this, even as a game
• 2:24:41
  man, You're not seeing this. No, I see the theory. I
• 2:24:46
  guess you know. I you know what I'm most confused by, Keenan,
• 2:24:54
  based upon your responses to my questions and my assertions, I have no idea
• 2:24:58
  why you believe Jerry Sanduski is innocent because everything I say, I see it.
• 2:25:03
  I don't really know. I'm not sure. Uh yeah, yeah.
• 2:25:07
  You seem completely convinced that Jerry is innocent based upon your your descriptions of your
• 2:25:11
  conversations with him. You don't, I mean you don't. You couldn't remember
• 2:25:15
  anything from Gary Schultz's interview. You didn't say anything negative about Dustin Struble,
• 2:25:20
  you barely said anything negative about Mike Gillum. Why the hell do you think
• 2:25:24
  Jerry is innocent? Then, Keenan, Why do I think Jerry is innocent?
• 2:25:28
  Um? It's a constellation of things. Um, I think the I
• 2:25:33
  think the thing that like most strikes me is the changing nature of every single
• 2:25:37
  accuser story. Um. Just and this and this is something specifically that's Sarah
• 2:25:41
  said. Saraganton did not have access to she she did like she obviously like
• 2:25:46
  covered you know, the trial and everything, but like the you can only
• 2:25:50
  really sort of look on the longitudinal scale, just over time of how each
• 2:25:56
  accuser's story changed and how sort of like they changed in in many cases in
• 2:26:03
  sort of like the same way from you know, nothing happened to well,
• 2:26:07
  something happened to well this it happened around this specific time, no matter what
• 2:26:11
  was you know, uh, and then oh, nood actually happened around this
• 2:26:13
  time or this time or this time and the um. So that's so that's
• 2:26:20
  one thing, like the there's no like evidence beyond testimony that this took place.
• 2:26:26
  Um. And the testimony that does exist is extremely unreliable because it changes
• 2:26:31
  so much. And in in normal uh sort of you know, criminal trials,
• 2:26:37
  the testimony that changes over time where the details change is considered less reliable
• 2:26:41
  and you know, uh calls into questions sort of the basis of the conviction.
• 2:26:46
  But in this case, the fact that these the stories change over time
• 2:26:50
  was seems to have been taken as evidence that they were in fact very real,
• 2:26:54
  because well, they're so traumatized and they can't be possibly be expected to
• 2:27:01
  tell the same story every time. So that's one reason UM. I think
• 2:27:05
  a second reason, um is sort of, um, you know a little
• 2:27:11
  bit of what you were talking about, which is sort of the logistical sort
• 2:27:16
  of like questions around this too. It was like, in isolation, you
• 2:27:22
  could probably you know, each you know, accusation or each accuser, like
• 2:27:28
  the story could you know, in isolation, you know, be understood as
• 2:27:33
  you know, believable, you know, just in isolation. But when you
• 2:27:37
  add them up all together, it it would suggest that Jerry Sandusky was essentially
• 2:27:43
  in a state of almost constant sexual arousal and constant uh you know, uh,
• 2:27:50
  he was essentially constantly looking for young boys to prey upon and abuse,
• 2:27:56
  like he would have the time for nothing else in his life. Because there
• 2:28:00
  were so many accusers in each of whom contains so many accusations that there he
• 2:28:07
  would essentially have to you know, invent telepartation, to be everywhere at once,
• 2:28:11
  to be abusing everyone. So there was something about like you know,
• 2:28:13
  the logistics of it. And then like I think the third um, you
• 2:28:18
  know thing was just like the you know, the sort of like the lack
• 2:28:26
  of response to Marx book I thought was pretty damning in the media. I
• 2:28:31
  would think that if you know, a book came out throwing into question almost
• 2:28:37
  every single thing about, you know, the outcome and sort of like the
• 2:28:41
  nature of the case, that there would be some kind of pushback of it,
• 2:28:43
  if not from Saraganum, then from a different journalist who was maybe personally
• 2:28:48
  or emotionally or professionally invested in the outcome of Jerry Sandusky being guilty. But
• 2:28:52
  that has not happened. And you know, there are there are probably some
• 2:28:56
  other things that I forgetting in this, you know, at this particular moment,
• 2:29:01
  but I think those I just want to understand that last point. So
• 2:29:05
  you're basically saying that if Jerry Zandowski was guilty, the other the side saying
• 2:29:09
  he's guilty, would be far more open and eager to debate the facts of
• 2:29:15
  the case. Is there that is correct? There would not be this de
• 2:29:18
  facto omerta around the entire subject um. There would not be this institutional fear
• 2:29:26
  um not only at miners and but other news rooms are uncovering it right well,
• 2:29:31
  that that's how Jerry Zindoski became like masks you know that we we have
• 2:29:35
  to pretend that masks work and were any any questioning of that is to be
• 2:29:41
  completely forbidden in mainstream discussion, even though it's quite obvious that masks don't work,
• 2:29:46
  and it's quite obvious if you know the facts. But there is there
• 2:29:48
  is like an mainstream discussion about the efficacy of masks, right like, No,
• 2:29:54
  I mean, there's more than there is of Jerry Zandoski's innocence. I'll
• 2:29:58
  give you, Yeah, there's I'll give you. I'll give you I'll give
• 2:30:00
  you that. I'll give you that. But the evidence is very similar the
• 2:30:05
  evidence that masks work the evidence that Jerry Zuduski is guilty. You're pretty much
• 2:30:07
  the same. Zero. But I want to since there's no other better place
• 2:30:13
  to put this question, and I've already alluded to it a couple of times,
• 2:30:18
  I have posited the theory based upon my own experience many times, including
• 2:30:24
  in the podcast, with the benefit of hindsight, that gay men seem to
• 2:30:30
  understand more quickly how absurd some, if not most or all of these stories
• 2:30:37
  are then heterosexual man because heterosexus. I think one of the elements of the
• 2:30:43
  perfect storm in this case is that you know, let's face it, it's
• 2:30:46
  a football story. Most of the men surrounding the story are heterosexual men,
• 2:30:50
  and heterosexual men automatically have their brains explode on this issue of obviously mail on
• 2:30:58
  boy child sex abuse. I mean, it's understandable, but I think it's
• 2:31:01
  exaggerated when you're a heterosexual guy, and so they're when your head explodes.
• 2:31:07
  You're not thinking about this logically, and you don't you want to talk about
• 2:31:11
  the details, you don't want to talk about the logistics, and you just
• 2:31:15
  presume guilt and you're not even gonna question it. But gay men, in
• 2:31:18
  my experience, and you are one of them, look at these stories,
• 2:31:22
  and in my experience, they basically go, wait a minute, this doesn't
• 2:31:26
  jive with what I understand to be reality, and that a lot of these
• 2:31:33
  stories seem like gay porn written by straight men, because everybody in this story
• 2:31:37
  is a straight guy. All of the accusers are straight guys, and you
• 2:31:43
  know, seemingly the lawyers and the therapists are straight guys. So all the
• 2:31:46
  people involved in the writing of the story, we're straight men talking about gay
• 2:31:50
  sex and it just doesn't fit literally or figuratively with reality. What is your
• 2:31:58
  assessment of my theory on that as a gay man. I think it's a
• 2:32:03
  legitimate avenue inquiry. Um, you know, I I am not you know,
• 2:32:09
  an expert you know, necessarily an anatomy, but I can you know,
• 2:32:13
  you know, speak from experience and sort of some of the things of
• 2:32:16
  which Jerry Sandusky has been accused. Um, like, uh, would how
• 2:32:26
  do I put this? It's not as if like there's you know, anything
• 2:32:30
  that he's been accused of would be you know, completely totally you know,
• 2:32:35
  you know, you know, defy gravity or anything like that, but it
• 2:32:39
  sort of like the the way in which they're described, like you know,
• 2:32:43
  essentially it's just like you know, these brutal acts of you know, anal
• 2:32:48
  rape in basements or you know, uh, you know, sexual abuse or
• 2:32:52
  you know, like forcible oral sex in shower rooms and you know, shower
• 2:32:56
  in locker rooms. Um. You know, like again like none of those
• 2:33:01
  things defy gravity, but they do sort of you know, raise the question
• 2:33:05
  of like how you know realistic these stories are. I mean just I thinker
• 2:33:13
  the shower go ahead, go ahead with the shower incident, go ahead,
• 2:33:16
  I mean the shower incidents. I think, like you know, raise the
• 2:33:18
  question, Okay, so if you if you're going, if you want to
• 2:33:24
  you know, gain access to you know, sexual access to children. Um,
• 2:33:30
  like, why would you like do it in a very public area where
• 2:33:35
  anyone could walk in at any moments and area very It's important that those showers
• 2:33:43
  are very they're very open, they're not enclosed showers. And it's also important
• 2:33:48
  to point out why did it always happen to these public showers on Penn State
• 2:33:54
  and not in his home where which would be did far but some accusations did
• 2:34:01
  happen in his home? Right? No, No, there's never been an
• 2:34:03
  accus There's no accusation anywhere that Jerryson Dusky asked a kid to take a shower
• 2:34:07
  in his home. Oh right, but like there was still the stuff in
• 2:34:11
  the basements, like not the shower per se. But yeah, but but
• 2:34:16
  hold on, we're being told that his modus operande was this was the shower
• 2:34:20
  move somehow to bring it bring boys to Penn State in open, semi public
• 2:34:26
  showers, and that's where these sex acts would occur. And I maintained the
• 2:34:33
  reason why the reason why they got stories of showers at Penn State was because
• 2:34:37
  of the Mike mcquerie story becoming public and Penn State making it clear they were
• 2:34:41
  gonna pay for stories of showers at Penn State. So shockingly, all of
• 2:34:46
  a sudden, there were lots of stories of showers at Penn State. It's
• 2:34:48
  really fun. When you create a market for a story, you're gonna get
• 2:34:52
  that story and so um. But I find okay. So from a logistical
• 2:34:58
  standpoint, I get where you're saying there, but I want to take issue
• 2:35:01
  with one thing you said. The stories don't defy gravity, even from a
• 2:35:07
  gay man's perspective. But here's where they do defy gravity, Keenan. None
• 2:35:13
  of the accusers, none of the victims quote unquote in this case are gay.
• 2:35:18
  And that changes everything because you go from the Catholic church situation, which
• 2:35:28
  was largely, if not entirely, gay priests praying on boys that were either
• 2:35:35
  gay or showing signs of being gay, who were at least somewhat willing participants.
• 2:35:43
  They couldn't obviously give consent because they were too young, but they were
• 2:35:48
  at least curious enough to not fight back and have a fight or flight response
• 2:35:54
  to a man trying to sexually abuse them. In this case, every single
• 2:36:01
  one we're all married just about are clearly not gay and then not being gay
• 2:36:09
  the first thing. I mean, it's you know, Jim Clemente, the
• 2:36:13
  so called sex crimes expert fraud that the paternal family hired and backfired tremendously claim
• 2:36:18
  that Jerry Zaneski was one of the top pedophiles that he'd ever encountered, ever
• 2:36:24
  investigated, top one percent of all pedophiles. And my response to that is,
• 2:36:28
  so, wait a minute, the top one percent of all pedophiles went
• 2:36:33
  oh for thirty six when it came to picking a gay boy to prey on,
• 2:36:39
  because that would be a hell of a lot easier to do than on
• 2:36:43
  a heterosexual boy. How does he go over for thirty six because that's the
• 2:36:46
  number of people that we know that got paid by Penn State, and there's
• 2:36:50
  no sign of any of them being a homosexual a boy at that time or
• 2:36:52
  at any time in their life. So that to me is the part that
• 2:36:56
  does defy gravity here. You don't see that. I that's an interesting theory.
• 2:37:03
  Um. I was not. I was not aware of the uh,
• 2:37:09
  the belief that Catholic priest prints explicitly on gay boys. But that's interesting.
• 2:37:16
  Um, if that's true. Um, that's even in the movie Spotlight.
• 2:37:20
  Even the movie Spotlight acknowledges that about the about the Catholic Church scandal. I
• 2:37:24
  mean it's I mean, I went to a lot of Catholic schools in my
• 2:37:26
  life, kating and yeah, okay, I mean, I'm telling you that
• 2:37:33
  was the essence of the Catholic Church scandal. That I'm sure it wasn't all
• 2:37:35
  of it. I'm sure that there were exceptions, but the essence, that's
• 2:37:39
  what it was. And there there's a there's a fundamental difference between an adult
• 2:37:46
  male, uh trying to abuse a heterosexual teenage boy and a boy who either
• 2:37:54
  may be gay or is is struggling with his sexuality. And it may be
• 2:37:58
  curious, that's a completely different world, especially keenan when there's no drugs,
• 2:38:07
  no alcohol, and no pornography. Those are the three things used to apply
• 2:38:13
  child abuse victims, sex abuse victims, and Jerry's not even accused of doing
• 2:38:18
  any of that. So the part that defies gravity is how the hell did
• 2:38:24
  Jerry Satowski get heterosexual teenage boys with no drugs, no payoffs, no alcohol,
• 2:38:31
  no pornography to engage on multiple occasions, sometimes up to one hundred times
• 2:38:37
  in how Mo senxual sacks that defies gras well well to play I complete double's
• 2:38:46
  avcate here and oh god, I'm not it doesn't. But like the my
• 2:38:52
  understanding is that like the way that you know he or like the theory of
• 2:38:58
  how he obtained access was as he sort of you know, exerted this you
• 2:39:03
  know, gravitational you know, whole on others, he was this you know,
• 2:39:07
  kind of big name, big guy on kids. But he wasn't Kanan.
• 2:39:13
  I can't believe. I can't believe. I don't even I'm sorry.
• 2:39:15
  I'm sorry, I don't. I don't even know why you believe Jerry is
• 2:39:18
  innocent because you're wrong about so much of this. When Aaron Fisher starts to
• 2:39:24
  get abused by Jerry Sandusky as victim number one allegedly, Okay, you know
• 2:39:28
  how old Aaron Fisher was the last time Jerry Sandusky coached a football game.
• 2:39:33
  He was five years old. Five years old. By the time he comes
• 2:39:37
  to in Aaron Fisher's life, he is a goofy guy who runs a charity,
• 2:39:41
  who doesn't even drive a nice car, who doesn't command any respect at
• 2:39:46
  all. And that was actually the biggest part of the problem. Jerry still
• 2:39:50
  thought he was worthy of respect, and the kids of that generation didn't give
• 2:39:54
  a crap who Jerry Zandowski was, and they certainly, unlike Catholic priests,
• 2:39:58
  didn't view him as a god like figure who you know, they were somehow
• 2:40:03
  intimidated by and they were gonna let him sexually abuse him for some unknown reason.
• 2:40:07
  I mean you I can't. I'm really, I am actually baffled by
• 2:40:13
  why you believe Jerry Zanduski to be innocent based upon your your belief system.
• 2:40:16
  Either that or you're just trying to hang on to some bullshit mainstream narrative because
• 2:40:22
  you're afraid of what your friends are going to think about about this interview.
• 2:40:26
  I mean, I don't, I really don't get it. I'm I'm more
• 2:40:30
  baffled now after hundreds of I don't have any hour many thouzends of hours of
• 2:40:33
  our conversation that you actually believe Jerry Zaneduski is innocent. I so like the
• 2:40:41
  there it's tough to talk about. I'm I have extraordinary doubts about the the
• 2:40:52
  his um you know, culpability in sort of what he was accused of in
• 2:40:58
  the twenty twelve trial. UM, something that remains something of a black box.
• 2:41:01
  Obviously are all of the people who see private settlements through Penn stage who
• 2:41:05
  are not subject to trials. UM. I, like you said, like
• 2:41:11
  I've it's been sort of like about a year since I really like you know,
• 2:41:16
  really engaged, you know, sort of like in the source material.
• 2:41:18
  It's still really tough to think about it, to talk about too. Okay,
• 2:41:22
  all right, all right, well I'll give you a pass a nap,
• 2:41:24
  so let's go back. Let's go back to your journey on this story.
• 2:41:28
  Okay, So we've talked about the facts, We've talked about your investigation,
• 2:41:31
  We've talked about your relationship with Jerry Sandowski. So you and Nicoll at
• 2:41:37
  Insider are convinced that you've got something. You start working on actually publishing something,
• 2:41:43
  and um and it hits all sorts of snags and apparently um and during
• 2:41:50
  this time period, it should be pointed out for for full context, you
• 2:41:54
  and you and I start doing what I call weekly therapy sessions. Do you
• 2:41:58
  remember you remember recall the period where every Monday you and I would talk for
• 2:42:03
  about forty five minutes about your struggles and trying to get this story into the
• 2:42:07
  into the end zone over the goal line. Correct you remember this? Yeah?
• 2:42:11
  Yeah, yes, yes, I remember, and and and we would
• 2:42:16
  talk about the case, but mostly we would talk about your personal struggle in
• 2:42:20
  trying to get this done, right, I mean, is that a fair
• 2:42:22
  assessment? Yeah? Okay, it was, yeah, okay. So we
• 2:42:28
  would have these weeks, we would have these weekly discussions, and I'm trying,
• 2:42:31
  I'm trying to give you support. I'm trying to give you ideas on
• 2:42:35
  how to tackle this story because it's an enormous challenge, right, It's an
• 2:42:41
  enormous challenge to try to get this story into some semblance of a journalistic enterprise
• 2:42:46
  that's going to be viable, that that insider will be able to go with
• 2:42:52
  um and and the story I'm sure you know. My impression is that it
• 2:42:56
  starts to expand beyond just Mark Pendergrass's book. Um, but that you guys
• 2:43:03
  go back to Mark at some point. And I didn't even know this because
• 2:43:07
  you didn't tell me at the time, but I would later find out that
• 2:43:11
  you got you and Nicole go back to Mark at over this issue of his
• 2:43:16
  daughters, and that this clauses a major major problem with regard to moving forward,
• 2:43:22
  Can you can you give us some details on that? Sure? So,
• 2:43:28
  UM, I think this was the summer of twenty twenty one, um
• 2:43:33
  we um. I think from the very beginning, we you know, we
• 2:43:39
  all agreed that at some point we were going to have to talk um to
• 2:43:43
  the daughters of Mark Pendergrass, you know, because it was it's a part
• 2:43:48
  of his you know, it's part of who Mark is. It's a part
• 2:43:52
  of the book. Um. And if we were to publish you know,
• 2:43:56
  the story without acknowledging that history, that would expose us to you know,
• 2:44:01
  criticism that we had not you know, fully covered all this stuff. It
• 2:44:05
  would it would also you know, raise the risk of those daughters coming out
• 2:44:07
  of the woodwork um and you know, saying this or that. And you
• 2:44:11
  know, it was just sort of like we need to like figure out what
• 2:44:16
  was going on here, and we needed to contact the daughters. Um.
• 2:44:18
  And uh it's uh so we there was and I and we also knew that
• 2:44:30
  you know, Mark was uh you know, there was a lot of emotion
• 2:44:35
  around it. He um. You know, I uh, I don't you
• 2:44:39
  know recall exactly what he said very early on. But when we went to
• 2:44:43
  him in the summer of twenty twenty one and said, we are, um,
• 2:44:48
  you know, just to give your head stuff. We need to you
• 2:44:50
  know, talk to your daughters. UM. Just not like we're not gonna
• 2:44:54
  you know, the point of this is to not make it all about you,
• 2:44:56
  but we at least need to give them the opportunity to comment on this,
• 2:45:00
  because we are going to mention that this happened, and we have to
• 2:45:03
  give anyone who's mentioned in our story the opportunity to comments. Um and and
• 2:45:09
  and so it was. It was sort of a you know, informing him
• 2:45:13
  and also asking him for assistance and contacting them um. And he kind of
• 2:45:18
  blew a gasket. Uh. He essentially said like we can't do it.
• 2:45:24
  Um uh heuh. And if we do it, he will, you know,
• 2:45:31
  stop cooperating with us. He'll stop talking with us. UM. It
• 2:45:35
  like if we do this, it will be you know, the worst thing
• 2:45:37
  ever we will um, you know it will just like you know, it
• 2:45:45
  was essentially you know, threatening, like sort of like the you know,
• 2:45:48
  like the whole story or like you know, it was I thought it was
• 2:45:52
  crazy, um or not that I thought it was crazy, but it was
• 2:45:54
  just like he was the humanly opposed the idea of us contacting his daughter.
• 2:46:01
  UM, so you are bottom line, So bottom line, it could not
• 2:46:03
  have gone worse, right, I mean yeah, so it was so like
• 2:46:09
  I I regarded it as, you know, just a challenge to be overcome.
• 2:46:13
  So what that meant was that I had to compose this. I had
• 2:46:20
  to compose. I had to do you know, three things, right,
• 2:46:24
  Like one, compose this long letter to Mark, explain exactly why we need
• 2:46:28
  to do this and why you know, we have to be in charge of
• 2:46:31
  our own reporting process, Like we cannot obey you know, you know,
• 2:46:35
  a source or subject's desire for us to not contact someone, because that would
• 2:46:39
  mean that we are not in control of our own reporting process. And I
• 2:46:41
  and I explicitly pointed to the Rolling Stone um uva uh you know situation that
• 2:46:46
  you probably remember this when Rolling Stone um published that article about a rape on
• 2:46:52
  campus. Um. And the reason why that story blew up in Rolling Stone's
• 2:46:56
  face was because the reporter obeyed the main subjects desire for her to not contact
• 2:47:01
  the people that were involved in the story in that case, the friends who
• 2:47:07
  she said she talked to. And UM, I think you know a couple
• 2:47:11
  other people that would have otherwise indicated the story. And it was like and
• 2:47:13
  you know, so it's like, you know this two thousand and twenty five
• 2:47:18
  hundred long, you know letter to Mark, you know, as long as
• 2:47:22
  like a long ass article just for this one little piece of reporting thing.
• 2:47:26
  And hold on a second. You you wrote a letter it was twenty five
• 2:47:31
  hundred words to Mark Pendergrass, begging him to cooperate with regard to contacting his
• 2:47:37
  daughters. Well, I may be exaggerated the exactly it was a long letter.
• 2:47:43
  UM, I remember being that maybe it was an exactly exact number doesn't
• 2:47:46
  matter, but that's a that's an extraordinary thing, uh to do. And
• 2:47:52
  so tell me, so tell me how how it worked out, tell me
• 2:47:54
  what happened. So we um and I whatever. It wasn't really begging.
• 2:48:01
  He was just saying, like we're gonna like this is happening. Um,
• 2:48:03
  I'll have to think up the letter. But like it was its inter saying
• 2:48:05
  this is why we're doing this, why we have to do it. Um,
• 2:48:09
  and he let me let me, let me I'm sorry, go ahead
• 2:48:11
  and finish what we're gonna saying go ahead, So he kind of relents,
• 2:48:16
  UM, and he's like like Okay, just do whatever you want to do.
• 2:48:22
  But he still won't have help us, you know, find them.
• 2:48:24
  So we have to spend all this extra effort tracking down the daughters who have
• 2:48:30
  changed their names, you know, sort of like made it difficult to contact
• 2:48:33
  them, and then I have and then I need to come up with a
• 2:48:37
  completely different, really long letter to one of the daughters, the only one
• 2:48:41
  who's content information I could find, to explain what's going on, and you
• 2:48:46
  know, like to you know sort of like stayed up front, what's you
• 2:48:48
  know, everything you know that's happy, YadA YadA YadA um, and uh,
• 2:48:54
  you know why we're all doing this, and and you know, it's
• 2:48:58
  the letters are hard to write because like I am now in the middle of
• 2:49:03
  this like ancient family drama about like sexual abuse, which is like completely tertiary
• 2:49:11
  to like the actual story that I'm trying to report and write about and which
• 2:49:15
  like is going to like maybe come up to like a sentence in the final
• 2:49:18
  report. So it's just like fucking it trusting doing all this, and it's
• 2:49:24
  all right, well let me stop you there, katid. Okay, So
• 2:49:28
  I think you can understand my position on this, because I mean I talked
• 2:49:33
  about blowing a gasket, which is how you describe Mark's initial response. It's
• 2:49:37
  really hard for me not to blow a gasket when I warned Mark ten years
• 2:49:43
  ago that this was a deadly problem that would prevent him from ever getting into
• 2:49:50
  the end zone on the story. I warned you and Nicoll in our first
• 2:49:54
  conversation that this was going to be a problem with Mark that was to prevent
• 2:50:00
  it from ever getting into the end zone. And I didn't understand, and
• 2:50:05
  I still don't understand it. Maybe you can explain it to me now why
• 2:50:07
  you're so to this day and why you were at the time so invested in
• 2:50:15
  making this about Mark's book. If Mark's a problem, which he clearly is,
• 2:50:20
  and I don't know whether or not he abused his daughters or not,
• 2:50:22
  I'm willing to accept his word that he didn't, although his reaction to you
• 2:50:26
  is a bit suspicious to me that you would be that I rate about you
• 2:50:31
  contacting the daughters. Who knows. Maybe there's another explanation for that, But
• 2:50:35
  there is another explanation, But yeah, you want to give it now or
• 2:50:39
  yeah, the explanation is that he was He still maintains hope of repairing his
• 2:50:45
  relationship with his daughters, and that he viewed our desire to contact him about
• 2:50:50
  this as like potentially you know, damaging to that project. Okay, fine,
• 2:50:54
  whatever, It's not even that important to me. The important part of
• 2:50:58
  this is Mark is a major hindrance to getting this story fucking done. And
• 2:51:07
  I don't understand Keenan when I warned you from the beginning that this was a
• 2:51:13
  dead end, and I told you numerous times, ditch the whole Mark book.
• 2:51:20
  It doesn't have to be about the fucking book. This is a massive
• 2:51:24
  story, the Jerry Zanosky Penn State story. Why not just doing an investigation
• 2:51:30
  of the story itself. Use Mark Pendergrass's book whenever relevant, reference it,
• 2:51:35
  whatever. But if you don't make it the whole kitten kaboodle, you don't
• 2:51:39
  even have to worry about the fact that his daughters say that he sexually abused
• 2:51:43
  them. Why were you, guys so invested in your original concept of making
• 2:51:50
  this about fact checking Mark Pendergrass's book. But the thing is that we were
• 2:51:56
  not like like the story like expanded beyond that like it was. I know
• 2:52:03
  I understand that, so but then why but clearly this made it created a
• 2:52:09
  massive hurdle in getting the story done. I mean, I mean you just
• 2:52:15
  described it, and I know from a fact, I didn't see it as
• 2:52:16
  a I didn't see it as a hurdle. It just seemed like, you
• 2:52:20
  know, its just sort of like part of the job at the time.
• 2:52:22
  I didn't see it as fatal to the story. Okay, Well, uh,
• 2:52:28
  the story never ended up getting done, and you lost a lot of
• 2:52:31
  time and effort tracking down the daughter. By the way, did you ever
• 2:52:35
  track down the daughter? I did, Yeah, and had that God that
• 2:52:41
  she was. She was just like, uh, what did she say?
• 2:52:48
  She she didn't want she the daughter that we were to contact, was just
• 2:52:50
  like, um, I you know, like, I appreciate you reaching out.
• 2:52:56
  I understand that you're trying to be really careful. I don't want to
• 2:52:58
  have anything to do with this, all right. So all right, So
• 2:53:03
  so all that all that work, you get nothing. You get nothing of
• 2:53:07
  any value. You've wasted time, you wasted effort, you wasted resources,
• 2:53:13
  and you're still, whether you're admitting it or not, you're still way too
• 2:53:18
  invested in Mark's book. Because that's and this happens naturally. I'm not blaming
• 2:53:22
  you, because this is your human reaction. You start with a project or
• 2:53:24
  we're going to do a story about this book, and that becomes the prison
• 2:53:28
  through which you see everything. And it's very difficult to change directions when you're
• 2:53:33
  so far down one path, even though this guy Ziggler, who you probably
• 2:53:37
  think is half crazy, is telling you that this is not going to end
• 2:53:41
  well and that there's no path to the end zone through Mark Pendercrast's book.
• 2:53:46
  And I keep getting vindicated time and time again. You never even told me
• 2:53:50
  about this when it happened, but you eventually, I guess, get through
• 2:53:52
  that. And now we're into the spring of twenty twenty two, so a
• 2:53:56
  little bit over a year ago, and you're telling me that you're close.
• 2:54:03
  This is yours, the narrative during our weekly therapy sessions, that you're close
• 2:54:07
  to publishing. In fact, you even give how how close? How close?
• 2:54:11
  I don't know what what what what you were telling me was true or
• 2:54:15
  not? How close did this get to actually becoming a published piece in the
• 2:54:20
  Insider, I don't know how to even measure how close a got like maybe,
• 2:54:26
  um, I don't know, I don't know how how close it gots?
• 2:54:31
  Um. I think like you know in part it's hard to say.
• 2:54:37
  I think I would say we probably got sixty percent of the way done.
• 2:54:41
  Um. Uh, Like like if you're looking at the project now, it's
• 2:54:46
  probably like sixty percent done, I think, um. Because like the end
• 2:54:54
  part of it was just like even as you know, we were like getting
• 2:55:00
  you know, closer and closer to like writing, you know, to finishing
• 2:55:03
  a draft you know, about which you know that's a whole separate disaster,
• 2:55:05
  but we were we continue to you know, accumulate paper. So you know,
• 2:55:11
  we had sources who had all these documents, and it took so much
• 2:55:13
  time to get the documents and uh so you know, as time went on,
• 2:55:18
  we had this sort of like backlog of documents to go through, and
• 2:55:22
  each of those documents could in theory affect, you know, the things that
• 2:55:24
  we were writing in the draft. So we it was like it was like
• 2:55:31
  and at the same time, there are you know, ten or twelve individual
• 2:55:37
  lawsuits in various courts across the country that pertained to the Sandusky case in some
• 2:55:41
  way, and we hoped or had the ambition of being able to you know
• 2:55:46
  capture the state of each of those cases in like having some kind of like
• 2:55:50
  apprehension of like what was going on with them as they were happening. So
• 2:55:54
  but it was impossible to just like freeze it in time and be like,
• 2:55:56
  Okay, this is the cutoff date where like we have to like publish something
• 2:56:01
  UM. And I but I want to go back to your question about,
• 2:56:05
  you know, like why we were so focused on you know, like the
• 2:56:09
  Mark thing and or the Marks book. And I think one of the reasons
• 2:56:13
  is that we were hearing UM that other outlets were like exploring this book UM
• 2:56:18
  in various ways, and but subsequently all those outlets, UH, at the
• 2:56:24
  very last minute it killed it under like extremely strange circumstances. Do you have
• 2:56:28
  an example, because this is news to me. Who are you talking about?
• 2:56:31
  UM? I don't want to say their name, but I think Harper's
• 2:56:37
  killed a story about it UM. And this other magazine I'm called First Things
• 2:56:43
  killed a story about it. What was called what what was the second one?
• 2:56:48
  First Things? It's a intellectual journal. Ohhh, okay, that's that
• 2:56:54
  was from Frederick Cruz. That was that was the cal Berkeley professor who was
• 2:57:00
  going to write a story about Jerry Sanduski's innocence and he thought it was a
• 2:57:03
  done deal. And that got killed by the Catholic Board, which, by
• 2:57:07
  the way, I also told Frederick was never going to happen, because there's
• 2:57:11
  no way in the world that a Catholic magazine is going to stand up for
• 2:57:15
  Jerry Sandowski after they've just been through the Catholic Church scandal. So that was
• 2:57:20
  I've never heard about the Harper's thing. That's news to me. I don't
• 2:57:24
  know if there's anything else you can add to that, either on or off
• 2:57:26
  the record, but I'm curious. But all right, so I'm still baffled
• 2:57:33
  as to this day why and frustrated why you were You guys were still so
• 2:57:37
  focused on Mark's damn book, which I don't even think tells the right story
• 2:57:41
  of what happened here and has all sorts of political problems associated with it.
• 2:57:46
  But in the spring of twenty twenty two, you and I are having our
• 2:57:50
  weekly therapy session, and I, delusionally in retrospect, think that we're somewhat
• 2:57:54
  close to actually seeing this become public, because that's what you're telling me and
• 2:58:00
  have been telling me for quite a while. And then all of a sudden,
• 2:58:03
  and I'll never forget it, because I was picking up my kid from
• 2:58:05
  school. When this conversation transpired, you stopped me and you said, John,
• 2:58:13
  I had to be honest with you, I'm going to be taking a
• 2:58:18
  break from the story because I'm and I don't know exactly what your words were,
• 2:58:22
  but I'm basically being forced to take a sabbatical from my job at the
• 2:58:28
  Insider to deal with some personal issues and that those personal issues were related to
• 2:58:33
  alcoholism. And is that your that's correct? So can you give us give
• 2:58:39
  us a little bit more sense of what was going on at that time?
• 2:58:43
  Yeah, I was just it was a time where I you know, you
• 2:58:48
  know, my my editors were expecting me to turn in a draft and by
• 2:58:52
  that time, like it was, you know, I was, you know,
• 2:58:58
  Nicole's working on other projects, um or it was focusing on other projects,
• 2:59:01
  and they were everyone was just kind of waiting for me to turn in
• 2:59:03
  you know, a couple of drafts or several drafts, um because we had
• 2:59:09
  at this point the story was like a five part story, um, you
• 2:59:13
  know, with various angles on everything, um And you know, at the
• 2:59:16
  same time, we had this you know, massive backlog of paper, and
• 2:59:20
  I kept thinking that I could you know, you know, get through all
• 2:59:24
  of it. And like I, you know, one day I would um,
• 2:59:28
  you know, sort of like cure my procrastination, um and get through
• 2:59:33
  all this. And I and you know, at the same time, I
• 2:59:35
  was like I was despairing. I was despairing about the state of the project.
• 2:59:39
  UM. I was, you know, despairing about you know, like
• 2:59:43
  my ability to finish it. Um. You know, and you know sort
• 2:59:48
  of you know how that would you know, you know, affect you know,
• 2:59:50
  everything else about my life? UM? It was, yeah, I
• 2:59:56
  was, you know, and all I wanted to do was drink and you
• 2:59:58
  know, just like I didn't want to touch a fucking keyboard. I didn't
• 3:00:03
  want to, you know, I I didn't want to. I did not
• 3:00:07
  want to be in the position that I was in, in which I was
• 3:00:09
  somehow responsible for this large investigative story that challenge fund that you know, challenge
• 3:00:16
  sort of like fun you know, fundamental tenets of a major investigative story.
• 3:00:22
  UM, one that you know probably defined you know, an era of investigative
• 3:00:26
  sports journalism. UM. I I just didn't want to be in the position
• 3:00:31
  that I was, and I didn't see a way out of it, and
• 3:00:35
  so I was just telling everything everybody everything was fine. Even as I blew
• 3:00:37
  deadline after deadline and it sucked, um I how much. I'm sorry?
• 3:00:46
  Go ahead. And then one day John called me and said, dude,
• 3:00:50
  you gotta like something's gotta change here, like you need to take a break.
• 3:00:54
  Um. And you know, even at the time, I don't think
• 3:00:56
  I quite understood, um that alcohol was issue. I still think the issue
• 3:01:01
  was just like, oh, I'm so you know, depressed or you know,
• 3:01:05
  just nonfunctional or you know, the you know. I think something that
• 3:01:09
  to my and my belief, compounding it, I think was, you know,
• 3:01:13
  at that point, you know, there everyone was, you know,
• 3:01:16
  working remotely, and you know, even when I went into the office,
• 3:01:20
  no one was at the office. You know, my team, both the
• 3:01:24
  investigative team, um or both the newsroom in general and our team in particular,
• 3:01:28
  had distributed throughout the country. Um. I you know, I wasn't
• 3:01:33
  really seeing anyone in person anymore. UM And that like, and I just
• 3:01:41
  felt so alone and just like in despair. Um. And I wasn't really
• 3:01:46
  sure what to do. So I'm sure there was as there always is,
• 3:01:50
  there were there were a lot of complicating factors is to why you were turning
• 3:01:56
  to alcohol and why this was becoming such a problem you had to take a
• 3:02:00
  sabbatical. But what component did your frustration with the Sandusky case and what the
• 3:02:07
  Sandusky case forced you to examine about the nature of humanity and the nature about
• 3:02:13
  the media. What role did that play in exacerbating your alcoholism. I think
• 3:02:22
  it played, you know, a significant role, you know in that it
• 3:02:28
  you know this, you know, the book you know was I think like
• 3:02:33
  a larger catalyst for how you know, this case made me look at my
• 3:02:37
  own profession because it wasn't like it felt like almost like this doom loop or
• 3:02:43
  something where I had this knowledge that something was run in the house of investigative
• 3:02:50
  journalism and I but like the only tool that I had available to me was
• 3:02:58
  investigative journalism to try to fix it. And I it like and I also,
• 3:03:05
  you know, struggled with like the question of like what if, like
• 3:03:07
  all this is wrong and I've invested the past several years of my life in
• 3:03:13
  you know, exonerating um, you know, someone who is in fact,
• 3:03:18
  like a serial child sexual predator. Like what if you know, like this
• 3:03:22
  comes out and it just like blows up in you know, everybody's face,
• 3:03:26
  and um, you know that affects everyone and I And another thing I like,
• 3:03:33
  I'm you know, I think about often is that you know, we
• 3:03:37
  I I was worried about the collateral damage. I think quite a bit.
• 3:03:43
  Uh. You know, John and I we constantly referred to the story as
• 3:03:48
  combustible, like it like if it you know, if something went wrong with
• 3:03:52
  the story after its publication, it would be very difficult, I think,
• 3:03:56
  to contain the damage, not like you know, so you know, if
• 3:04:00
  you were to play you know, I'm not saying it's like a perfect parallel,
• 3:04:05
  but you have to remember John and I came. You know, John
• 3:04:09
  and I first met when we worked at Gawker. He was the editor in
• 3:04:11
  chief of gawker dot com. You're talking about you're talking about John Cook,
• 3:04:16
  who published I just want to make sure people understand you're talking about John Cook.
• 3:04:20
  I'm talking about in in the interview. He's your boss. He's the
• 3:04:24
  guy who would eventually make the call not just for you to be to have
• 3:04:28
  a sabbatical, but then he would later basically fire you. And he would
• 3:04:33
  later call me and tell me that the story was dead, although they had
• 3:04:37
  no problems with the journalism involved with it, but that it was just in
• 3:04:41
  his words, too risky, which is an incredibly remarkable thing for him to
• 3:04:46
  say. But it's one hundred percent consistent with with what you're saying here,
• 3:04:50
  which is that you guys contemplated constantly the risks involved here that if this doesn't
• 3:04:58
  go perfectly, even if our journalism is great, this could really do great
• 3:05:03
  damage to our brand at the Insider because the story is just that toxic and
• 3:05:07
  that combustible. Correct. Yeah, And you have to remember, like John
• 3:05:13
  and I met at Gawker dot Com, which in fact was destroyed over a
• 3:05:18
  story. Um like, it's definitely not you know, inherently comparable to the
• 3:05:22
  story that you know, we were trying to write. But it was nevertheless,
• 3:05:26
  we directly witnessed the destruction of our own company based on editorial you know,
• 3:05:31
  judgments. This was and you know, there's obviously you know, my
• 3:05:35
  you know, my former colleagues, you know mc Gawker would probably dispute that
• 3:05:39
  and say Gawker did not was not destroyed over an editorial judgment. It was
• 3:05:43
  destroyed because Peter Teel funded a battery of lawsuits against the company and secrets.
• 3:05:48
  But it was nevertheless the case that we directly witnessed sort of the destruction of
• 3:05:52
  our own newsroom. We end and we you know, were like sort of
• 3:05:58
  and for better or worse, you know. And I And to be clear,
• 3:06:03
  I love John. I mean I have hold nothing against him. He
• 3:06:05
  remains a dear friend of mine. I think he's an amazing guy. Um
• 3:06:09
  And you know, one of the things that we, you know, have
• 3:06:11
  bonded overmost is, you know, our appetite for risk. And that's why
• 3:06:16
  I wanted to work at Hawker, That's why he wanted to work at Hawker.
• 3:06:20
  Well, apparently his appetite for risk isn't as great as you thought it
• 3:06:22
  was. Um or or or at least every every every risk appetite you know,
• 3:06:28
  is measured in degrees. But like I would say, John has more
• 3:06:33
  of an appetite for risk than the vast majority of people working in me.
• 3:06:35
  Well, that's even more depressing than I thought it was, given the way
• 3:06:39
  this would all turn out. All right, So let's go back to the
• 3:06:41
  timeline. So you tell me you're taking this sabbatical, and it was a
• 3:06:46
  very brief conversation and you and at that point I knew, I knew a
• 3:06:50
  couple of things. One I was going to talk to you for quite a
• 3:06:52
  while, and two h that this story was dead, that there was no
• 3:06:56
  chance whatsoever that insider was going to put out an extensive expose destroying the case
• 3:07:05
  against Jerry Sandusky with a reporter who, assuming they even came back, had
• 3:07:11
  just gotten over alcoholism. That politically, that increased the risk and made it
• 3:07:20
  untenable from a risk reward equation standpoint, as we've just alluded to. Now,
• 3:07:26
  you, of course, to being far more optimistic and maybe more naive
• 3:07:31
  than me, You did not accept this, and in fact, you eventually
• 3:07:35
  came back to the job and thought there was still a chance that this was
• 3:07:41
  going to happen, and you weren't there for all that long before you ended
• 3:07:46
  up getting fired. So tell me what happened with regard to the firing.
• 3:07:50
  Sure, And I just want to back up a little bit, like over
• 3:07:54
  while I was on sabbatical, I joined alcoholics Anonymous, I got a sponsor,
• 3:08:00
  I got sober um, uh you know, And and I've been sober
• 3:08:05
  ever since. Um. I haven't had a drop of alcohol um since then,
• 3:08:09
  and it's been great. And I thought that I was kind of so
• 3:08:13
  I came back I think in mid July or late July or something like that.
• 3:08:20
  UM and uh, you know, I thought like I was fixed or
• 3:08:24
  you know, like like I would just sort of resume pick up where I
• 3:08:28
  left off. And UM, when I when I came back, John told
• 3:08:35
  me that or you know, we agreed that I would work on a couple
• 3:08:39
  of other projects just to you know, warm up before diving right back into
• 3:08:41
  Sandusky. Given sort of the relationship between the Sandusky project and you know,
• 3:08:46
  my struggles with Sobriety UM and the story UM that I in the stories sort
• 3:08:56
  of that I worked on UM or that I was assigned to, the first
• 3:08:58
  of which UM was doing research for a story that involved about it was essentially
• 3:09:07
  trying to investigate teachers in public high schools across the country that sort of like
• 3:09:16
  sexually groom their students in order to I guess like have sex with them after
• 3:09:22
  they graduate or something like that. UM. And like you know, that
• 3:09:26
  was just sort of it was just sort of like you know, something to
• 3:09:30
  a fishing expedition, but just I was you know, in charge of doing
• 3:09:33
  all sort of like filing those requests and or like you know, first getting
• 3:09:37
  the UM uh, finding the list of you know, schools that we wanted
• 3:09:41
  to send request to and then sort of coordinate all that. And then the
• 3:09:45
  second one was working on a project UM that involved a database of every single
• 3:09:54
  transgender person who was murdered in the United States in the past five years or
• 3:10:00
  so. UM. And I like the and what I one of the things
• 3:10:09
  I began to you know, sort of like realize about that was that there
• 3:10:11
  was you know, with the Sandusky thing. Like you know, as I
• 3:10:16
  said earlier in this interview, I find sexual you know, like I was
• 3:10:22
  beginning to find more and more you know, stories about sexual abuse about you
• 3:10:26
  know, you know, about this kind of stuff like like really difficult to
• 3:10:31
  write about or like continue to write about. I it would you know,
• 3:10:35
  the image I had in my head, you know a lot was I would
• 3:10:39
  it felt like I was standing on a you know, a diving board,
• 3:10:43
  um in sort of like you know, above this huge black pool into which
• 3:10:50
  I couldn't see is just full of black liquid, and but beneath the surface
• 3:10:54
  were you know, sharp objects and you know, things that you know would
• 3:11:00
  hurt me. And I just I like that, like you know what upset
• 3:11:03
  mean. I you know, I was beginning to realize I don't want to
• 3:11:05
  write about. I don't want to think about. I don't want to have
• 3:11:09
  anything to do with these kinds of stories, um, because these are like
• 3:11:13
  they made me want to drink like I'm not I or like I you know,
• 3:11:18
  I'm And you have to remember like I like, you know, I
• 3:11:22
  was at Gawker, and I like, you know, I did write about
• 3:11:26
  that stuff, but there was all this other stuff that I wrote about too
• 3:11:28
  to balance it out. But now I was finding myself in the position of
• 3:11:31
  which the only thing that I, you know, was kind of like you
• 3:11:35
  know, as signed to be doing involved accusations of you know, sexual trauma,
• 3:11:43
  sexual abuse, brute you know, just like sexual brutality, and so
• 3:11:46
  it was it was too dark for you, it was. Yeah, it
• 3:11:48
  was just so fucking dark. I in it, like and I was like
• 3:11:52
  I don't want to and you know, I every day I would wake up
• 3:11:56
  like eight am and you know, try to do the work. And you
• 3:12:00
  know, I got some work done, but it was like dragging myself over
• 3:12:05
  glass to do it. Um. And I all right. So so at
• 3:12:11
  a certain point, John Cook says, okay, enough, enough is enough,
• 3:12:15
  thanks Keenan. But you know, we don't need your services anymore and
• 3:12:18
  you get fired. Correct, Yeah, that's correct, And I mean he
• 3:12:22
  did it in a very nice way. That's great. I'm sure he was
• 3:12:26
  nice about it. That's fantastic he was back. In fact, he was
• 3:12:28
  so nice about it that you were under the delusion when we talked about this,
• 3:12:33
  that you did not think that this was the end of the Sandusky story,
• 3:12:37
  that you could still work on the Sandusky story and bring it back to
• 3:12:39
  them when finished, and that they would they would run it with you as
• 3:12:43
  some sort of a I guess, a freelance writer for them. And I
• 3:12:48
  told you at the time that that was ludicrous and delusional. I don't know
• 3:12:52
  if you remember that, but I didn't. I do again, and and
• 3:12:54
  and when it's was I correct about that, Keenan, Well, never say
• 3:12:58
  no, right, I mean no, no, no, no, I
• 3:13:01
  was correct about that, because you're because John literally called me to make it
• 3:13:05
  clear. I have on the wreck. I have a tape recording of his
• 3:13:11
  message of him saying the story is dead. So I mean, I don't
• 3:13:16
  know how much more clear he could be. And then I called him back
• 3:13:20
  and we had a very extensive conversation about how the story is dead and why
• 3:13:24
  it's dead. And it's all because of risk aversion and not because of anything
• 3:13:30
  lacking in the journalism or the truth of this version of events. So I
• 3:13:35
  know the story is dead. It's remarkable to me that you're still holding onto
• 3:13:39
  some fantasy that it's not dead. But after all this work, after all
• 3:13:45
  these years, all these conversations between you and me, and you and Jerry
• 3:13:50
  Sandowski, and all of our therapy sessions, all this ends in absolute squat
• 3:13:56
  nothing being public. Nicole never does anything on it. And you know has
• 3:14:03
  has completely disappeared on the story because she, I guess still has her job
• 3:14:05
  there at Insider. And so what's your assessment of all this? This is,
• 3:14:11
  this is a complete disaster. Uh, Jerry has been let down,
• 3:14:15
  the truth has been let down, The administrators have been let down from Penn
• 3:14:18
  State, who would also be exonerated in all this. And um, and
• 3:14:24
  you know what, what's your assessment of how and why this happened? Keenan
• 3:14:30
  Um? What is my assessment of whine how this happened? Uh? I
• 3:14:39
  don't know. God works in mysterious ways. I mean this is I think,
• 3:14:45
  you know, I spent a lot of time both you know, during
• 3:14:48
  when I was, you know, fully enthralled in the story way before you
• 3:14:52
  know, the the faught you know, like the story appeared to be in
• 3:14:58
  danger of feeling I was still then like praying you know that another you know,
• 3:15:03
  group of journalists or like another journalist who had more experience than I,
• 3:15:07
  did you know, maybe had more social capital than I did, maybe just
• 3:15:11
  you know, uh, you know, it was more prominent than I.
• 3:15:13
  Did you know, someone like Pamela call Off or David Grant or you know
• 3:15:20
  the you know, investigative reporter at you know, the New Yorker or something
• 3:15:24
  like that, that like some other journalists, would you know take this and
• 3:15:28
  like take all the glory like I, like, I like I didn't want
• 3:15:31
  to do this, like because like I thought like it would you know,
• 3:15:37
  you know, you know, you know, bringing me riches or fame or
• 3:15:41
  anything like that. Like if anything, I thought it would it was most
• 3:15:45
  unlikely, you know, in danger of making me like become canceled or just
• 3:15:48
  like unemployable elsewhere. Like I prayed and prayed and prayed that like you know,
• 3:15:52
  somebody else, would you know do this? Did you ever contact anybody
• 3:15:56
  else? Did you ever contact anyone else and say, hey, I got
• 3:15:58
  this great story for you. All the work has been done on all you
• 3:16:00
  got to do is check it and put your name on it, as you
• 3:16:03
  have you ever done that? Well, that wouldn't be true. The story
• 3:16:09
  is not done, and well, no, though the story is keenan the
• 3:16:11
  story the score, the story is done, meaning not not your version of
• 3:16:16
  it. But all the work has been done. We know what the result
• 3:16:20
  here is. We have it proven. The case has proven. Um.
• 3:16:24
  I mean, you know, the idea that you think that because you didn't
• 3:16:26
  didn't finish your version of it, that it's not done is pretty freaking hilarious
• 3:16:31
  to me. Um. I mean, Mark Pendergrass wrote his book and we
• 3:16:37
  have an entire epic podcast detailing every element of the story, which you seemingly,
• 3:16:41
  uh, you know, look down on because you're a New York liberal
• 3:16:46
  elitist who thinks that you know, podcasting doesn't matter, I guess, um.
• 3:16:50
  But the reality is, the story is there, and clearly you haven't.
• 3:16:54
  You haven't gone to anybody else that and said, hey, look there's
• 3:16:58
  a great story here. That's that's already been done for you. Right,
• 3:17:03
  Just to be clear, you've you've not contacted anybody else, right, Um.
• 3:17:07
  I mean I've talked with other people in media about it, but not
• 3:17:09
  like in the context of here's a great story that just seems to be done.
• 3:17:13
  It's more of like, how exactly so so you prayed, so,
• 3:17:18
  Keenan, So you prayed that someone would do this, but you didn't drop
• 3:17:22
  an email to someone that that might actually do it. So how how exactly
• 3:17:26
  was God supposed to work there? Keenan, You're you're praying to God,
• 3:17:30
  but you know, you know the old thing about you know, God tells
• 3:17:33
  you you're gonna win the lottery. Uh, and and then you're wondering why
• 3:17:35
  you haven't won the lottery since God told you that, And God says,
• 3:17:39
  well, we have to buy a damn ticket. Um. You know,
• 3:17:41
  why why wouldn't you send a goddamn email to someone? Keenan? Oh I
• 3:17:46
  didn't. I. UM. The stupid answer is that I you know,
• 3:17:52
  I opened some emails and I was like, I can't fucking write this like
• 3:17:56
  I and I think the other I know, John, I know you're so
• 3:18:03
  disappointed to me. I appreciate that. Um. But at the same time,
• 3:18:07
  I, um, you know, the this podcast is the first step,
• 3:18:11
  at least to me. UM, you yourself. I know how much
• 3:18:16
  you are frustrated with me, and how frustrated with you with me you remain.
• 3:18:22
  But it's also true that you are a source of courage for me.
• 3:18:24
  Um in a very strange way. You have shown in all your actions,
• 3:18:28
  like your willingness and desire to stand up for the truth, even if you
• 3:18:33
  know you do so in your very special John Zigler way. UM. And
• 3:18:37
  I hope that you know, you know, being on this podcast, like
• 3:18:43
  you know, at the very least gets you know. I'm hoping, you
• 3:18:46
  know, some people listen to it, um in you know, in that
• 3:18:50
  I can talk to more people that I'm planning, you know, to you
• 3:18:52
  know, talk to more and more people and see you know, what you
• 3:18:56
  know might be done. Um uh yeah, it's tough, it's and it's
• 3:19:05
  a good point. You know, maybe I should, uh, you know,
• 3:19:09
  reach out to some people about this, um well, one of the
• 3:19:13
  many things that keenan one of the many things that frustrates me about you,
• 3:19:16
  and you know, and thank you for your kind comments, but I frankly
• 3:19:22
  don't think you were kind enough. I mean, I spent many hours on
• 3:19:26
  the phone with you, and when I refer to them as therapy sessions.
• 3:19:30
  That's what they were. They were therapy sessions. I was trying to help
• 3:19:33
  you, one because I wanted you to get the goddamn story done, but
• 3:19:35
  also because I could tell you we're going through a struggle that only I fully
• 3:19:39
  understood, and that therefore I could potentially help you with that struggle. And
• 3:19:43
  I think you would acknowledge that that's what happened, right, I mean,
• 3:19:46
  that's that's what those therapy sessions were about, and so um. But one
• 3:19:50
  of the many frustrating elements of this is I disagree that there was someone better
• 3:19:56
  than you to take this story on. Before the alcoholism. You were a
• 3:20:03
  young, woke, liberal gay man working with a woman and a major media
• 3:20:11
  outlet. That's the perfect combination to take this story on. Because someone who's
• 3:20:18
  established is never going to take this story on because they have too much to
• 3:20:22
  lose, Keenan, it has to be someone who is young and ambitious and
• 3:20:31
  is willing to take a little bit more risk because they have less to lose.
• 3:20:35
  That was you, until the alcoholism completely destroyed whatever credibility you had to
• 3:20:41
  basically became like Mark Pendergrass's kids, believing that they were sexually abused by him.
• 3:20:48
  You became at that point radioactive from a standpoint of this story. Not
• 3:20:54
  that you should have been, but I'm talking about the real world, the
• 3:20:56
  real world in which we live. Well, as soon as this story comes
• 3:21:00
  out, the first thing that's going to be, Oh, who's keen in
• 3:21:03
  Trotter? Oh, oh wait a minute. This guy he just took a
• 3:21:05
  sabbatical for alcoholism and he's telling us that Jerry Saduski is in it. That's
• 3:21:11
  not gonna fly. I mean, so before that, you were incredibly well
• 3:21:18
  positioned. I've always felt that this story has to be done from a liberal
• 3:21:22
  perspective. Great that it was a gay man. Great that if there was
• 3:21:26
  a woman involved, and that's what you had going on here, and an
• 3:21:31
  a media outlet that, by your own acknowledgement, with an editor that had
• 3:21:35
  a very high threshold for risk, and this thing got blown up. And
• 3:21:41
  I think it got blown up for a lot of reasons. It is not
• 3:21:43
  all your fault. Maybe it never would have happened. Maybe John Cook never
• 3:21:48
  would have really had the balls to pull the trigger when it came down to
• 3:21:52
  it. Because one of the things that I have found is that in theory,
• 3:21:56
  any decent editor goes, oh, that sounds like a great story.
• 3:21:58
  Pursue it. But then there's there's a completely different threshold when it comes to
• 3:22:03
  actually going forward with publication as opposed to investigating it. They can always come
• 3:22:09
  up with an excuse while the story is not ready, we don't have it
• 3:22:11
  totally nailed down, not every dot I is dot and that every T is
• 3:22:16
  crossed, or we got to worry about this, or we don't have a
• 3:22:18
  news hook. There's they can. It's an easiest thing in the world to
• 3:22:22
  find an excuse to not actually go through with something that you think is too
• 3:22:24
  risky. And so my guess is it probably never would have happened, Like
• 3:22:28
  the same thing happened to me and Ralph Cipriano at Newsweek when we were promised
• 3:22:33
  to cover at Newsweek, very similar situation, where that got far closer to
• 3:22:39
  publication than you ever did, apparently with the Insider, even though that didn't
• 3:22:43
  take us long. But I have to say, Keenan, I do think
• 3:22:46
  that there is a cultural and gender issue here. I gotta tell you,
• 3:22:52
  I don't know, I'm curious to your response to this, but I got
• 3:22:56
  I gotta say the fact that you you know, come from a woke world.
• 3:23:01
  And you start in this story at basically thirty years old. And you
• 3:23:05
  know, Nicole's pretty young too. I don't know how old she is.
• 3:23:07
  But you're, you're, you're both coming from this liberal, you know,
• 3:23:11
  New York woke environment where you're you guys have been brought up in a completely
• 3:23:16
  different world, a different generation, where you're a bunch of whoosies, where
• 3:23:22
  you don't take adversity at all, You don't plow through any kind of an
• 3:23:26
  adversity, you give up incredibly easily. You Oh, oh, woe is
• 3:23:31
  me. Um, I can't do this, this is so difficult. Uh
• 3:23:35
  and you don't anything getting in goddamn done and uh and and that's my perception
• 3:23:41
  of what happened here, that this woke environment has created such a whoosification,
• 3:23:48
  such a fear of risk, such a fear of getting things, of actually
• 3:23:52
  working hard and enduring difficulties and enduring situations that aren't ideal. And you know,
• 3:24:01
  and sometimes life was tough, but you guys weren't ever taught that life
• 3:24:03
  is tough. You guys think it's all supposed to be freaking easy. That
• 3:24:07
  and if it's not easy, you just stop or you or you go to
• 3:24:13
  alcohol, or you go to you take a sabbatical, And who cares that
• 3:24:16
  the Jerry Sanski's gonna die in prison? Oh well, it's just the way
• 3:24:20
  way things work. And so I'm curious is to And I don't mean this
• 3:24:26
  as I'm sure it sounds like a direct attack on you, but I'm curious
• 3:24:30
  as a as a young woke individual, what do you make of my perceptions
• 3:24:33
  of how, how and why this thing really went to shit? Um?
• 3:24:43
  Yeah, I'm not sure thought wosification. I mean it seems a little pat
• 3:24:48
  of an explanation. I think the like the idea that we abandoned this because
• 3:24:54
  like we didn't know how to work hard, Like we were working very hard
• 3:24:58
  for a lot of It's that's saying you didn't. I'm not saying you didn't.
• 3:25:03
  I'm saying when push came to shove, you allowed it to die.
• 3:25:07
  You didn't. You didn't fight for it. And I mean, even in
• 3:25:09
  this interview, you can't simultaneously say that like like accused me of like misplaced
• 3:25:18
  optimism and of like because I still would love to get this story published and
• 3:25:24
  like it might take some time. Um, but that doesn't mean it's might
• 3:25:28
  be able to get a time you and I have keenan part of why this
• 3:25:35
  this interview we're doing right now is happening now is that you thought you were
• 3:25:41
  gonna on my suggestion that you were gonna put out your personal story of having
• 3:25:46
  endured the Sandusky saga for so long, and you're not even able to finish
• 3:25:52
  that, and so then we redid this interview a second time. It's because
• 3:25:56
  you didn't like the first interview. I mean, every every instance of this
• 3:26:00
  interview is is is your flasticity, And I made sure. I mean that's
• 3:26:05
  the only one I can come up with to describe this. I mean,
• 3:26:09
  you won't, you won't do anything, and now you're sober, and I
• 3:26:11
  can't even imagine when you were, like when you were an alcoholic. I
• 3:26:15
  mean, how how will the world could this possibly have ever gotten done?
• 3:26:20
  With this attitude? How I think? Like you know, I I you
• 3:26:30
  know, part of the reason I want to work with Nicoles because I could
• 3:26:31
  not do this by myself, right, Like I um, I've I've never
• 3:26:37
  thought that, like I am like the protagonist of any of this stuff.
• 3:26:41
  I Like, I told you that's why I was praying, because I was
• 3:26:46
  like, I don't think I am capable of doing this, and I will
• 3:26:48
  try to do it despite that, um, And I will try to do
• 3:26:52
  it despite knowing all the flaws UM of myself that like might empe me from
• 3:26:58
  doing so. And like, like, I like, this is not the
• 3:27:01
  first thing that I failed at, Like I this is like most of my
• 3:27:07
  life has been character I mean, you know, going back to Gawker,
• 3:27:09
  you know, like you know, going back to you know, I,
• 3:27:13
  Oh my god, Like probably one of the most craziest failures was I went
• 3:27:18
  to, um, you know, I like dramatically watched out of officer candidate
• 3:27:24
  school for the Marine Corps. I mean, this is like I'm like accustomed
• 3:27:28
  to failure and I still you know that doesn't like, just because you might
• 3:27:31
  fail at something, it's not a reason to not do it. I'm not
• 3:27:37
  sure if that's satisfactory for you, but I'm happy that I tried. Well,
• 3:27:43
  look, you deserve credit for that, and you put a lot of
• 3:27:45
  work and effort into this. Um, I don't think it's gonna count amount
• 3:27:48
  to anything. I don't even think you're gonna get your own personal story,
• 3:27:52
  which again was at my suggestion done. And I think that's probably why you
• 3:27:56
  decided we would do a second version of this interview, because you know,
• 3:28:01
  you're a chronic procrastinator, and that's why I have tried to give you actual
• 3:28:05
  deadlines, thinking that that might provoke you into into action, and that has
• 3:28:11
  not been nearly as successful as I thought that it would be. And so
• 3:28:16
  I don't think that you're ever going to do anything on this. I mean,
• 3:28:20
  you know, and it so, I well, part of me some
• 3:28:24
  I think, like I you know, to some extent, like you know,
• 3:28:28
  obviously it is you know, you know, a little self serving,
• 3:28:31
  but like I've I am still you know, I've I've come to the belief
• 3:28:35
  that, like for something like the Sandusky story, that like an article or
• 3:28:41
  you know, a big story may not be the way to um or is
• 3:28:46
  not the way to sort of like push this story forward or to like you
• 3:28:50
  know, get people talking about this. I think the way to get people
• 3:28:54
  talking about this is to facilitate or generate a controversy. I mean, I
• 3:28:58
  came from Gawker. That was what we did. That was sort of like
• 3:29:00
  what we were supposed to do, was to facilitate to facilitate controversy because I
• 3:29:05
  think controversies, you know, or you know, just like the exchange of
• 3:29:07
  views and like, even in extremely high emotional registers are one of the best
• 3:29:13
  ways to get to the truth. And I'm and maybe this podcast, this
• 3:29:18
  podcast, this episode of this podcast will cause a controversy to some Dee,
• 3:29:22
  we won't and get people talking to Keanan Kean, and I understand what you're
• 3:29:26
  saying, But this podcast isn't going to create any public controversy because you're not
• 3:29:30
  a celebrity. I'm not a celebrity, you know. You know, people
• 3:29:33
  who listen to it will find it fascinating, I think, on a number
• 3:29:37
  of different levels. But but it's not going to create any public discussion because
• 3:29:43
  there has to be a pressure point publicly. There has to be something within
• 3:29:48
  the mainstream that sparks this controversy or this discussion. You can't go from the
• 3:29:56
  bottom up on the food chain on this. It has to be something that's
• 3:30:01
  taken seriously at the top and worked its way down. And I don't see
• 3:30:05
  a scenario for that at this point, barring some sort of breakthrough in court
• 3:30:09
  for Jerry Zandusky, which isn't going to happen because he's he's so afraid of
• 3:30:13
  going to federal court, and he stays in state court. In fact,
• 3:30:16
  he has a hearing in state court coming up shortly, which is part of
• 3:30:20
  why we're releasing this interview when we are. But that's never going to go
• 3:30:24
  anywhere because the entire state of Pennsylvania is deeply invested against him. He's never
• 3:30:30
  going to get a fair hearing or a fair appeal in Pennsylvania. But he's
• 3:30:33
  afraid to go to federal court because if he fails there, it's over.
• 3:30:37
  There's no other avenues of appeal and he's going to rot in prison for the
• 3:30:41
  rest of his life. And I think psychologically he's very afraid of that.
• 3:30:43
  By the way, can you address that, Keenan, do you based upon
• 3:30:48
  your conversations with Jerry. I don't know if you've ever talked to him about
• 3:30:50
  this, but would you agree with my assessment that he's terrified of going to
• 3:30:54
  federal court because if that fails, he doesn't know how he'll live his life
• 3:30:58
  with nothing else the focus on. Yeah, he's um, he's very invested
• 3:31:05
  in sort of exhausting every single avenue of legal relief at the state level,
• 3:31:11
  um to the detriment of or you know, at the direct cost of potentially
• 3:31:16
  obtaining relief at the federal level. And it is it's a legal strategy.
• 3:31:20
  Um that you know, he you know, I think like for him or
• 3:31:26
  makes sense to him. Um and yeah, I mean it's hard not to
• 3:31:33
  disparage on it's it's not or it's I mean, I mean, what do
• 3:31:46
  you think about like Malcolm Gladwell in this context, Like, you know,
• 3:31:50
  have you asked him these questions or Malcolm Gladwell is the ultimate proof of what
• 3:31:56
  I'm talking about here. Malcolm Gladwell his book Talking to Strangers, which has
• 3:32:01
  an entire chapter on this subject, which uses me as probably a primary source.
• 3:32:07
  And I've spoken to Malcolm extensively about this. It's very obvious. And
• 3:32:13
  I didn't even come up with this theory. USA Today columnist who was also
• 3:32:16
  working got a story in the Sandowsky case that got killed at the last second.
• 3:32:20
  He came up with this theory having read Gladwell's chapter. He believes Keenan
• 3:32:26
  I don't think you and I've ever talked about this. He believes A.
• 3:32:28
  J. Perez is his name. He believes that at the end of that
• 3:32:33
  chapter, Gladwell originally had said that he believes that Sandovsky is innocent and that
• 3:32:39
  it got killed by the publisher, and he switched it from Jerry Sandovsky to
• 3:32:45
  Graham Spaniard, the former president of Penn State, was obviously a much safer
• 3:32:50
  person to defend. And by the way, Gladwell and Spaniard have a long
• 3:32:54
  history together, way before this case, and so there they were basically friends.
• 3:33:00
  And so I don't know whether or not for sure that happened, but
• 3:33:01
  I do know this, Gladwell completely disappeared once the book came out and he
• 3:33:07
  started to get any kind of negative blowback on simply the very tepid assertions he
• 3:33:16
  made, which were basically that the Sandusky case is muddied and confusing and uncertain.
• 3:33:24
  And then if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you know,
• 3:33:26
  follow John Ziggler. That's almost exactly what he wrote word for word,
• 3:33:31
  and he, you know, he basically admits having some doubt about Sandusky's guilt,
• 3:33:37
  but he doesn't say anything close to Sandusky is innocent. And I think
• 3:33:41
  Gladwell was a classic example of someone who had way too much to lose,
• 3:33:46
  way too much to risk, way too established. It's a shame because his
• 3:33:50
  whole brand used to be before COVID that he's the guy that would stand up
• 3:33:56
  for you know, the truth, even against you know, liberal orthodox as
• 3:34:01
  you know, because he has liberal street cred. But to me, I'm
• 3:34:05
  not at all surprised by what has happened with Gladwell. It doesn't make me
• 3:34:09
  happy, but I think it's indicative of the larger problem and why it is
• 3:34:16
  that I said what I did about you and the call being far better positioned
• 3:34:20
  than Gladwell would be. Nobody is going to take this on. It's a
• 3:34:24
  catch twenty two Keenan. No one will take this on until there is a
• 3:34:28
  major court victory. And there's not going to be a major court victory in
• 3:34:31
  Pennsylvania state unless than until somehow a major media outlet started to get people saying,
• 3:34:37
  wait a minute, was this a massive miscarriage of justice? So none
• 3:34:41
  of that's ever going to happen. And you, you were in a position
• 3:34:45
  to maybe break that jam, that log jam, and it didn't work.
• 3:34:50
  I was in a position in Newsweek to potentially do that. It didn't work.
• 3:34:54
  So I take responsibility for that situation screwing up as well. What either
• 3:35:00
  of these circumstances change the world. I doubt it, but you never know
• 3:35:03
  what kind of spark you know is going to create an ultimate explosion. I
• 3:35:09
  really think Keenan, ultimately everyone's going to be in the same kind of position
• 3:35:15
  as Mark Pendergrass, whoever even tries to do this. You're either going to
• 3:35:18
  get ignored or you're gonna get destroyed. Those are the only two options.
• 3:35:22
  If what you put out there is bulletproof, they're just going to ignore you
• 3:35:26
  because it doesn't fit their agenda, it doesn't fit their narrative, it's too
• 3:35:30
  confusing at this point, the story is too old, or they decide they
• 3:35:35
  see a weakness like with Mark Pendegrass kids, or your alcoholism, or me
• 3:35:39
  just being you know who I am, that it's someone who is easily destroyed
• 3:35:45
  that they're just that's what they'll do. So there's only two options, ignore
• 3:35:48
  or destroy. And there's no way to invest the media in this counter narrative
• 3:35:56
  a specially since Jerry is a great white Christian male. If Jerry was black,
• 3:36:03
  if Jerry was Sandowski was black, I'm curious, as a liberal,
• 3:36:05
  would you acknowledge Keenan that if Jerry Zanowski was black, that, first of
• 3:36:11
  all, none of this would have happened the way that it did, but
• 3:36:13
  that there would be a far, far greater chance of reversing this because there
• 3:36:18
  would be an inherent constituency for trying to exonerate him. Do you agree with
• 3:36:24
  that, That's a good question. I don't know. I'm not sure I
• 3:36:28
  agree with that. Well, you're you're wrong, because because you need you
• 3:36:35
  need, you need no in order, you need some some hook for within
• 3:36:43
  the liberal establishment, the media establishment, for there to be a self interest
• 3:36:50
  in Jerry being exonerated, and if he was black, that would provide one,
• 3:36:56
  because it would go to the agenda and the and the narrow of the
• 3:37:01
  justice system being obviously very much dead set against black people, are being biased
• 3:37:07
  against black people, or worse than that, and so that doesn't exist here,
• 3:37:11
  and so Jerry has no cards to play. And barring numerous and I
• 3:37:20
  think they would have to be at least three or four of the accusers to
• 3:37:22
  come forwards simultaneously and in some sort of very credible way to say that this
• 3:37:28
  didn't happen. And even that, I think the media would probably rationalize in
• 3:37:31
  some way, shape or form. They probably say, well, heck,
• 3:37:33
  you got four accusers saying it didn't happen. But there's still thirty two people
• 3:37:37
  who got paid by ben State who say it did happen. So it clearly
• 3:37:41
  did happen. It's just that these guys are confused. I mean, that's
• 3:37:43
  that's the way this would go down. So there's no scenario, there's there's
• 3:37:48
  no path out of this maze. And but I do want to try to
• 3:37:54
  end on a somewhat optimistic note because you said something that I found fascinating when
• 3:37:58
  you describe your interaction with Jerry Sendski and you said that you believe on his
• 3:38:05
  deathbed or that is that his life in general. Maybe I'm miss characterizing it.
• 3:38:09
  If I am, please correct me. But you said earlier in this
• 3:38:13
  interview that Jerry Sandoski's life and death will have an impact on the media industry
• 3:38:20
  in a positive direction when it's all said and done. Did I get that
• 3:38:24
  correct? And what do you mean by that? Yes? Um, I
• 3:38:28
  mean that you know regard. What I mean by that is that you know,
• 3:38:35
  obviously you know this particular story, Um is uh, you know the
• 3:38:41
  story that I was working on like may or may not be published. Um.
• 3:38:43
  You know, despite however delusionally optimistic I, um, you know,
• 3:38:48
  maybe, um, but I do think that, like I, I know
• 3:38:50
  that I'm not the only journalist who you know, is aware of the story.
• 3:38:54
  I know that, like and all sort of that stuff like this takes
• 3:38:58
  time, and there's you know, and Jerry, you know, for better
• 3:39:03
  or worse, is in prison, is like in pretty good health all things
• 3:39:07
  considered, and is not in immediate danger of dying, and that, like
• 3:39:13
  you know, in one way or another, whether it's you know, before
• 3:39:16
  or after you know, he dies. I think there is a reckoning coming.
• 3:39:20
  I it's a it's still that reckoning, is still a train off in
• 3:39:24
  the distance. But I can hear it, and I can hear, you
• 3:39:28
  know, it's train horn or whatever coming And I don't know what it's going
• 3:39:31
  to get here, and I don't know exactly what it's going to look like
• 3:39:35
  when it arrives, but I think it's coming. And I and I,
• 3:39:41
  you know, I can't say whether I'm going to be, like you know
• 3:39:43
  this, you know, the protagonist of it, or someone else's I don't
• 3:39:48
  really fucking care. But I know that in one way or another, the
• 3:39:50
  case of Jerry Sanduski is going to transform the practice of investigative journalism in particular
• 3:39:56
  and the media industry in general, and and you know it may and that
• 3:40:01
  might not be you know, the cleanest thing that ever happens. Like it's
• 3:40:05
  gonna be fucking messy. This podcast is messy, but like honestly, life
• 3:40:09
  is messy, and like that's how things work out. And I, you
• 3:40:13
  know, this podcast is you know, represents for me, you know,
• 3:40:18
  the first time I've gone public with talking about this, Even if it's on
• 3:40:20
  your podcast, even if it's not on a fucking billboard in Times Square,
• 3:40:24
  it's public in some way that I can point others to it and say that,
• 3:40:26
  you know, here you can listen to me talk about this. And
• 3:40:30
  I, you know, I'm trying to be braver and I'm trying to be
• 3:40:33
  more courageous and if not not only to like you know, for Jerry's sake,
• 3:40:37
  but to show other journalists that, you know, it's possible to talk
• 3:40:41
  about things that contradict you know, you know, stories in which investigative journalists
• 3:40:46
  are professionally invested. And I'm not perfect, you know that, of all
• 3:40:50
  people, I'm not going to save everyone. I am not Jesus Christ.
• 3:40:56
  But to the extent that I, you know, can you know, spread
• 3:41:01
  the word or get people to talk about this, whether it's through a story,
• 3:41:05
  whether there's a podcast, whether it's through you know, a very public
• 3:41:07
  controversy. I want to do that because even still, like, I like,
• 3:41:13
  there has to be buying. It can't just be like this, uh
• 3:41:18
  you know, oh, there's this big article that's released and now everyone believes
• 3:41:20
  it. It has to be a process like this. Can you know,
• 3:41:24
  the process of you know, convincing someone takes time. It took it took
• 3:41:28
  me a year and a half of reading marks Book to be truly convinced.
• 3:41:33
  Um. And you know, you you asked me before, like why I
• 3:41:35
  focused so much on Marks Book? I think, you know, in part
• 3:41:39
  because you know, it is the most sort of like, uh, you
• 3:41:43
  know, it's the most well packaged of all of you know, like sort
• 3:41:46
  of the the you know, the cases against the current case. And yeah,
• 3:41:52
  I'm I completely agree with you. I'm like, I've messed so many
• 3:41:56
  things up, and I've you know, I wish it were not the other
• 3:42:00
  way, but this is how it is right now, and I can only
• 3:42:03
  move forward, and I can hope and pray that you know, Jerry Sanduski
• 3:42:07
  will do all these things. But You're right, I had to. I
• 3:42:09
  had to get off my butt and like talk to people and you know,
• 3:42:13
  call people and you know, talk to them about it. And you've given
• 3:42:18
  me a good you know, kicking the ass to do so. And I
• 3:42:20
  look, none of this was ever going to be perfect. None of this
• 3:42:22
  was ever going to be you know sort of you know this like perfect journey
• 3:42:28
  of you know, investigative journalism that ends in this like fabulous book deal and
• 3:42:31
  be owning a condo in Tribecca or something. I don't think that was ever
• 3:42:35
  going to be in the cards. But like, honestly, I'm still trying,
• 3:42:39
  and it's taking some time, but I'm still trying, and it may
• 3:42:43
  not look like much at the moment, but I am trying, and I
• 3:42:48
  can only hope that that will help change things, and that Jerry Sinduski will
• 3:42:52
  be the reason. Okay, Well, a couple of things as we finish
• 3:42:56
  here. Um one well stated and much appreciated, although you're wrong about Mark
• 3:43:03
  Pendergrass's book being the most well packaged alternative story of what really happened here.
• 3:43:09
  That's my podcast and Liza Abib's podcast with the Benefit of Hindsight, which you've
• 3:43:13
  never even fully listened to. So if you did, you wouldn't have said
• 3:43:18
  that about Mark Pendergrass's book. Our podcast has convinced many, many, many
• 3:43:24
  more people of the truth of this case than Mark Pendergrass's book ever will.
• 3:43:28
  But you're you're living in this antiquated, nineteenth century, elitist, liberal New
• 3:43:35
  York world where because it's in a book form that somehow that gives it even
• 3:43:39
  more, you know, somehow more credibility when it's not even the right story
• 3:43:43
  of what happened. But I don't want to get in at this late stage
• 3:43:46
  in the interview into another argument about that. I mean, that was your
• 3:43:48
  biggest mistake, was latching yourself onto Mark Pendergrass's book, and for reasons I've
• 3:43:56
  already stated. But on your optimism perspective, I really wish that's something that
• 3:44:01
  I believed. I'm still willing to hope that you're right. I would be
• 3:44:07
  thrilled to be wrong in my assertion that you're you're overly optimistic. Nothing would
• 3:44:13
  make me happier. I agree with you that it doesn't even matter to me
• 3:44:18
  who gets the goddamn credit for it. I just want the story fixed.
• 3:44:22
  However, I also know this isn't going to happen by magic. And that's
• 3:44:28
  and that's partially partially why I do kick you in the ass, uh.
• 3:44:33
  And I hope you understand and appreciate that that's at least part of my motivation
• 3:44:37
  in doing this. And I'm not just trying to make you feel bad.
• 3:44:39
  I'm trying to provoke you into action because I know you well enough to know
• 3:44:43
  that you do get blockage. And uh, you agree with that, right?
• 3:44:48
  Oh, totally, totally yeah. Okay, So so you understand that
• 3:44:54
  where my heart is on this, right, I absolutely understand where you're heart
• 3:44:56
  as John, and I understand that you're a hard add you're a hard ass,
• 3:45:00
  but I also understand it comes from a good place and you know the
• 3:45:05
  So all right, well we'll end it on that. And I do appreciate
• 3:45:09
  your time. I appreciate your work on the cave. I appreciate you being
• 3:45:13
  honest, and I also appreciate you willing to get your ass kicked by me
• 3:45:18
  on occasion. And I hope that you're as resilient in in uh, in
• 3:45:24
  your pursuit of the Sandusky story finally being told as you are in enduring my
• 3:45:28
  ass kickings. Um, But we'll see and I will be very eager to
• 3:45:33
  see if what, if anything, happens in the next chapter of this Uh.
• 3:45:37
  Is there anything else you wanted to say? Or are you good with
• 3:45:39
  that being being the end of this discussion? UM? I think I would
• 3:45:45
  want to say, is you know, if anyone I know who is listening
• 3:45:50
  to this podcast for the first time, I would love to talk with you
• 3:45:54
  about the case, or you know, if you have anyone who else has
• 3:45:58
  a podcast or journalists to talk to me, I feel free to reach out.
• 3:46:01
  I would love to talk with you. I'm not like trying to avoid
• 3:46:03
  anyone anymore. I will talk to literally anyone about this, and I will
• 3:46:09
  talk to them for as long as they want. I can share with them
• 3:46:11
  everything I have. I'm I'm beginning to realize that this is more like this
• 3:46:18
  is going to be a group effort in one way or the other, and
• 3:46:20
  I can and I still have to work hard. I still have to,
• 3:46:22
  you know, do work, but like I can't do this on my own.
• 3:46:26
  And if anyone wants to talk with me or work with me about this,
• 3:46:30
  I would love to talk with them. So interesting, I like that.
• 3:46:33
  I like that ending, and and I'll just say to you, Keenan,
• 3:46:37
  UM, next time we talked to Jerry Sandowski, please give them my
• 3:46:41
  best. I have to talk to him in a long time. I do,
• 3:46:45
  I do wish the best form, even though I'm I'm not optimistic about
• 3:46:48
  how this is all going to turn out. All right, Keenan, thanks
• 3:46:52
  so much for your time, and I'm all the best to you going forward.
• 3:46:54
  Thanks so much, John, talk soon. There's a lot more I
• 3:46:56
  could say about that interview. I think I'm going to hold off. I
• 3:47:01
  will say that Keenan and I have spoken since we recorded that, and we're
• 3:47:05
  on good terms. I think he kind of in a weird way, respects
• 3:47:09
  that I went after him as heart as I did there because he knows he
• 3:47:11
  deserves it. He also knows why I'm doing it, partially to kick him
• 3:47:16
  in the ass. But I got to say that maybe the biggest thing that
• 3:47:20
  I get out of that interview, in this whole experience, is this generational
• 3:47:24
  divide when it comes to the news media and how incredibly sensitive these younger generation
• 3:47:31
  reporters or quote unquote investigators really are. And it's illustrated by this issue of
• 3:47:37
  the direct message that I sent to Keenan's co reporter if you will, Nicole,
• 3:47:43
  who was referenced in that voicemail message that the editor at Insider, John
• 3:47:48
  Cook left me. I mean, when I heard that message, I'm like,
• 3:47:52
  what does he think I said to Nicole? I mean, it was
• 3:47:56
  almost like I was harassing her. And the first interesting part of that was
• 3:48:01
  the date of his call to me complaining about that was many weeks, many
• 3:48:09
  weeks and in one case, months after I had direct messaged Nicole. Now
• 3:48:15
  to be clear, I direct messaged Nicole many many times during this investigation.
• 3:48:20
  And as I went back and looked, Okay, so what did I say,
• 3:48:22
  I'm like, I don't remember saying anything remotely inappropriate. Nicole, what
• 3:48:28
  the hell is she complaining about that she wants the editor to call me to
• 3:48:31
  knock it off. Which, by the way, it's not like I continually
• 3:48:35
  messaged her. I sent her two messages over a several month period of time.
• 3:48:39
  This was the first one, And the best I can figure out is
• 3:48:41
  that this was when I realized that Keenan was taking a sabbatical for alcoholism.
• 3:48:48
  And that point I realized, all right, we're dead in the water.
• 3:48:50
  There's there's no scenario with his works and what I direct messaged her was I
• 3:48:56
  told you that you guys would end up being useless as usual. I was
• 3:49:01
  dead right, and yet you will all somehow still doubt me. That was
• 3:49:07
  it. No profanity, nothing criticizing, really heard directly, just basically saying
• 3:49:15
  I told you this wasn't gonna work, and you guys kept telling me I
• 3:49:18
  was wrong. And a lot of the tension during the several years of this
• 3:49:22
  investigation, which you probably picked up in the interview with Keenan, is this
• 3:49:28
  idea that I felt like my version of the story was way more credible than
• 3:49:31
  Mark Pendergras's version of the story, which is what they were focused on,
• 3:49:33
  and which ended up killing the story for reasons that became clear during the interview
• 3:49:39
  with Keenan. Then in September September sixth of twenty and twenty two, this
• 3:49:45
  must have been when I found out that Keenan was fired and that for sure
• 3:49:48
  the story was dead. I direct message Nicole saying once again, I'm almost
• 3:49:56
  always right, especially on the Sandowsky story. That was it. And then
• 3:50:01
  several weeks went by and I got a call from her boss saying, don't
• 3:50:03
  message her anymore because she's having a tough time with this, and Nicole,
• 3:50:09
  much like Keenan, is definitely in the younger generation of so called media investigative
• 3:50:15
  reporters. If that's any indication of this younger generation, we are more screwed
• 3:50:20
  than we realize, and I do believe that that's the case. I believe
• 3:50:22
  that the news media is broken as it currently is, is going to get
• 3:50:26
  far, far worse because as this younger generation takes over, they don't have
• 3:50:30
  a clue. They don't care clue, have a clue about the standards,
• 3:50:33
  They don't have a clue about the way things are supposed to be. They
• 3:50:35
  think that social media drives the world. Popularity is the coin of the realm.
• 3:50:39
  Truth doesn't really matter. You know, you get criticized and that's inherently
• 3:50:43
  wrong. You get praised, it's inherently good. They have no sticktuitiveness,
• 3:50:46
  They have no ability to overcome obstacles or any sort of difficult situations. They
• 3:50:54
  give up very easily. They rely on drugs and alcohol. They takes about
• 3:51:00
  otical I mean where it's just totally and completely screwed, not just on this
• 3:51:03
  story, but when it comes to journalism in general. So I hope that
• 3:51:09
  that interview did what I expected that it would, giving you a real insight
• 3:51:15
  into just how broken this whole situation is not just by me telling you,
• 3:51:20
  but by me showing you. And it's also if you are somebody who is
• 3:51:24
  very interested in the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerrysondusky story. While it's frustrating as
• 3:51:28
  hell, I hope it also gives you some insight as to why the truth
• 3:51:31
  still has never and probably will never be told in a proper mainstream venue.
• 3:51:37
  If you want to find out more about the whole Penn State Joe Paterno Jerrysondoski
• 3:51:43
  fiasco, I urge you to check out our other podcast, With the Benefit
• 3:51:46
  of Hindsight, which is hosted by me and Lizabebe and is produced by Mike
• 3:51:52
  Agavino. In the next episode of the Death of Journalism talk about interesting interviews,
• 3:51:58
  it's possible we may have one that is close to as interesting as the
• 3:52:03
  Keenan Trotter interview. And that's because we are scheduled to interview former Trumps super
• 3:52:09
  fan Bill Mitchell. Now that name may not mean much to you, but
• 3:52:13
  seven years ago he and I did an interview together where I was anti Trump.
• 3:52:18
  He was super pro Trump. He hung up on me and then blocked
• 3:52:22
  me on Twitter. Now he's on Team De Santis and he's coming on to
• 3:52:26
  Death of Journalism, So make sure you'll mark your calendar for episode fifty nine.
• 3:52:31
  Until then, thanks so much for listening. Please remember to subscribe,
• 3:52:33
  rate, review, and share this podcast as much as you can. If
• 3:52:37
  you share it on social media, make sure you tag me and I'll be
• 3:52:39
  happy to share it myself. Until next time, this has been the Death
• 3:52:43
  of journalism and my name is John Zick.