Skeptic article says Sandusky is innocent

Leftist evolutionist professor Jerry Coyne writes:

Was Jerry Sandusky, “the most hated man in America”, guilty of sexual child abuse?

Up to now, virtually everyone would have to answer the title question with a resounding “YES!”, but after reading a new article in Skeptic magazine by Fred Crews (former chair of English at Berkeley, a debunker of Freud and recovered-memory therapy and, for full disclosure, a friend), I’d have to answer “I’m not sure.” ...

At the time of the trial, nobody had any doubt about Sandusky’s guilt, and the press jumped on the story. ...

Then, in October of last year, Mark Pendergrast, who’s also published on the fallacy of “recovered memory”, came out with a book called The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgement . In his view, Sandusky is “probably innocent.” But how could that be, with ten alleged victims in the trial  and the press backing up the allegations?

I haven’t read Pendergrast’s book, but the Skeptic article by Fred Crews, “Trial by therapy: the Jerry Sandusky case revisited“, summarizes the book in an accessible way. I’d recommend reading it, as Crews isn’t somebody who is gullible, and has spent his career as a skeptic, largely about Freud and issues of recovered memory. I note as well that THE expert on the fatal flaws of “recovered memory”, Elizabeth Loftus, has also endorsed Pendergrast’s book ...

Almost everyone believed Sandusky's guilt. Not me. At the time of the trial, I posted many times on this blog about the absurdity of the evidence against him. It was essentially all recovered memories of carefully coached witnesses who were also suing Penn State for millions of dollars. There was never any good evidence.

This case is just one of several where the public was overwhelmingly convinced of guilt, even tho the facts were wildly implausible. Others were the McMartin preschool, Duke lacrosse, UVa fraternity rape, Trayvon Martin, and Ferguson Mo police. These were all witch-hunts that no one with common sense should have ever believed.

When I first started posting on Penn State, I did not know anyone with an ounce of skepticism about the official story. No journalist or any public official showed any skepticism. It seemed obvious to me that the Freeh report was just a crooked lawyer hatchet job to generate legal fees for plaintiffs' attorneys.