An essay on evidence, obsession, and the price we pay by being right

Epigraphs:

You can’t tell people what they want to hear
If you also want to tell the truth

—Craig Finn

Oh, the price you pay, oh, the price you pay
Now you can’t walk away from the price you pay

—Emmylou Harris

Note: During the long stalled season of COVID, I went through a period of depression. I drank too much. I spent far too much time alone. And, like millions of other people trying to fill hours that had lost their ordinary shape, I listened to podcasts—politics, true crime, history, whatever caught my attention. Somewhere in the middle of this drift I found With the Benefit of Hindsight, John Ziegler and Liz Habib’s lengthy audio investigation of the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the fall of Joe Paterno’s.

I expected to hear a crank. This was, after all, a project arguing that the most notorious convicted child molester in American sports history had been railroaded. Sandusky had been convicted in 2012 on forty-five counts after eight young men testified about abuse. Penn State had paid more than $90 million to settle dozens of claims. The public story had hardened years earlier: Sandusky was a monster; Penn State protected him; Paterno looked away; justice, belatedly and imperfectly, had finally arrived. A man insisting that this structure was largely false sounded less like an investigator than a citizen of the internet with a microphone and an inexhaustible supply of grievance.

And then I listened.

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John Ziegler is not a lawyer. He is an independent journalist, broadcaster, documentary filmmaker and former talk-radio host with a taste for public combat. He is conservative, though “contrarian” may be the more useful category. He likes talking shit to power, talking shit to the people who think they are power, and occasionally talking shit simply because the opportunity presents itself. He is funny, combative, thin-skinned, resourceful, obsessive and totally out of control.

He had also done an extraordinary amount of work on the Sandusky case.

Ziegler began with Paterno. He believed the media and Penn State had transformed a limited failure of institutional judgment into a knowing conspiracy to protect a predator. As he accumulated interviews, records, leaks and contradictions, his theory expanded. He visited Sandusky in prison, corresponded with him, interviewed family members and officials, traveled to Pennsylvania, cultivated sources the national press had abandoned, and spent years reconstructing dates and testimony. By the time he and Habib recorded roughly one hundred studio hours for their original nineteen-part series, Ziegler had crossed from defending Paterno to proclaiming Sandusky innocent.

That final step is where he loses me. It is also where he becomes the most interesting.

I do not believe Jerry Sandusky is innocent. I believe he probably abused boys. The grooming patterns, boundary violations, unusually intense relationships with vulnerable children, physical contact in cars and showers, and multiple accounts of escalating misconduct are too substantial to dismiss. His explanations about horseplay and innocent showering are partially persuasive only in the narrow sense that communal showers and physical joking were more ordinary in the culture in which he coached. I grew up in the 1980s. Boys showered together after sports. Coaches sometimes entered the same open facilities. Towels were snapped; stupid jokes were made; conduct that would now cause alarm was treated as ordinary. That context matters when interpreting an isolated act. It does not explain years of targeted intimacy, secrecy and allegations of sexual contact.

Yet listening to Ziegler made it impossible for me to retain the simpler belief that every important part of the accepted story had been reliably established. His maximal conclusion is unpersuasive. Many of the defects he identifies are real.

That distinction is the narrative spine of this essay. A person can be guilty while the story told about his guilt is partly false. A prosecution can reach a broadly correct result through a contaminated process. Some accusers can tell the truth while others exaggerate, reconstruct or invent. An institution can behave cowardly without having operated a criminal conspiracy. A journalist can discover facts everyone else missed and then damage those facts by demanding that they prove too much.

John Ziegler is right about enough that dismissing him is intellectually lazy. He is wrong about enough that embracing him whole is reckless. The price of being right is what happened between those two propositions.

The Boy in the Shower

The Penn State story begins, in the public imagination, in a shower.

Mike McQueary, then a graduate assistant, said that one evening he entered a football-building locker room and saw Sandusky engaged in sexual conduct with a boy. McQueary did not intervene physically. He left, spoke first with his father and family friend Dr. Jonathan Dranov, then reported the matter to Paterno. Paterno passed it upward to athletic director Tim Curley and university vice president Gary Schultz. President Graham Spanier became involved. The university restricted Sandusky’s access to some facilities and notified the Second Mile, his charity. It did not report the matter directly to police or child-protection authorities.

That chain of events supports a serious criticism of Penn State. Whatever precise act McQueary saw, he believed it was sexual and alarming. Paterno fulfilled the limited bureaucratic act of passing the report to his superiors, but later acknowledged that he wished he had done more. Curley, Schultz and Spanier treated the incident as an internal risk to be managed. Their response was insufficient because the possible victim and other children—not the institution—should have been the center of the decision.

But the version that reached the public was more definite than the underlying record. The grand-jury presentment described McQueary seeing anal intercourse. McQueary later said he had not seen penetration and had not used language that specific. The date migrated from March 2002 to February 9, 2001; Ziegler has argued at length that December 29, 2000, better fits the surrounding records. The length and content of McQueary’s conversation with Paterno have also been disputed. The man believed to have been the boy in the shower reportedly denied that he had been abused and defended Sandusky before ultimately receiving a civil settlement.

None of this proves that the shower encounter was innocent. Sexual acts do not become harmless merely because a witness lacks the ideal viewing angle. Trauma, embarrassment and conflicting loyalties can produce denial. Memory naturally changes. But these are not trivial variations either. The difference between seeing anal rape and hearing or glimpsing conduct that appears sexual is legally, morally and narratively enormous. The public was handed the most explosive version first. Every later ambiguity was forced to compete with an image already burned into the culture.

The result was a form of backward reasoning: Sandusky was eventually convicted of abusing boys; therefore, McQueary must have witnessed the worst possible act; therefore, every Penn State official who heard some version of his report must have understood it exactly as the public later did; therefore, any institutional hesitation must have been a cover-up. Each link may be arguable. The chain is not self-proving.

Paterno occupies surprisingly little of the real legal story. He received a report, passed it to the men responsible for the university and failed to follow through. That is not heroic. It is also not persuasive evidence that he knowingly protected a serial abuser for years. His firing, death and the removal of his statue gave the scandal its Shakespearean public shape, but they do not establish what he knew.

Spanier is more complicated. He approved an institutional response that did too little and prioritized Penn State’s exposure. He was ultimately convicted of a misdemeanor count of child endangerment, served fifty-eight days and remained convinced that he had been scapegoated. Calling him a coward would flatten a murkier failure. He appears to have behaved like an administrator inside a powerful institution: cautious, procedural, self-protective and disastrously willing to accept uncertainty when certainty would have required an ugly confrontation. That may not be a grand conspiracy. It can still be a profound moral failure.

The Settlements

Sandusky’s criminal trial and Penn State’s civil settlements are frequently blended into one body of proof. They are not the same thing.

The trial placed witnesses under oath and allowed cross-examination, however rushed or ineffective the defense may have been. The settlements were private risk resolutions. In 2013 Penn State announced twenty-six settlements totaling $59.7 million. By 2015 its audited total had reached approximately $92.8 million for thirty-two claims, and later accounting pushed the broader cost beyond $100 million. The agreements explicitly did not require Penn State to admit the validity of each allegation.[1]

The university’s incentives were overwhelming. It faced catastrophic publicity, potentially enormous jury awards, discovery that could expose embarrassing documents, and a governing board desperate to end a crisis. A settlement did not mean, “We have established that this exact history occurred.” It meant, “The expected cost of fighting this claim exceeds the price of buying certainty and a release.” That is common civil-law logic, particularly in institutional-abuse cases. It is neither an admission of guilt nor evidence of fraud.

Still, the process deserves scrutiny. Penn State’s insurance carrier did scrutinize it, because the carrier might ultimately have to pay. In litigation between the university and its insurer, an expert for the insurer wrote that Penn State appeared to have made little effort to verify claimants’ credibility and noted missing affidavits or other personal verification in some files. University personnel acknowledged that the consulting psychiatrist did not personally interview the first group of claimants. Penn State later introduced direct psychiatric examinations, but confidentiality prevents the public from reconstructing the complete evaluation of most claims.[2]

Penn State did not establish thirty-two separate histories of abuse. It purchased thirty-two resolutions under conditions in which contesting an allegation had become almost as dangerous as losing one.

Ziegler is strongest when he keeps his attention on that distinction. He is weakest when he assumes that a financially interested claimant is therefore lying. Money is a motive to fabricate; it is also compensation sought by people who were genuinely harmed. A changed account can signal contamination; it can also reflect shame, delayed disclosure or a witness finding language for an experience he previously could not describe. In a serious examination, suspicion is the beginning of inquiry, not its conclusion.

The Lock Haven cluster demonstrates both the value and danger of Ziegler’s method.

Lock Haven is a small city in central Pennsylvania, roughly thirty-eight road miles and about fifty minutes northeast of State College. Penn State’s main University Park campus sits in State College, not in western Pennsylvania. Geography does not make the allegations impossible. The Second Mile existed precisely to connect disadvantaged children from communities such as Lock Haven with Sandusky, Penn State facilities, camps, games and other outings. Transportation came through the charity, Sandusky and the adults running its programs.[3]

Five claimants from the Lock Haven area—Aaron Fisher, Frankie Probst, Skyler Coover, Glenn Neff and Joshua Culver—reportedly received settlements totaling $35.5 million. They attended the same school district; three shared a lawyer; only Fisher testified at Sandusky’s criminal trial. That clustering does not establish coordination. It is also not meaningless. Members of the same social and institutional network could share truthful experiences, influence one another’s recollections, learn the settlement system from one another, or do all three.

The claims were not geographically uniform. Fisher met Sandusky through a Second Mile camp at Penn State and alleged a relationship that moved among the charity’s activities, Sandusky’s car, Central Mountain High School and Sandusky’s home, including its basement. His was not a sudden post-conviction claim: he reported abuse in 2008, helped initiate the investigation and testified at trial. Whatever one thinks of changes and therapeutic influence in his account, Fisher does not fit the description of a man who merely appeared after checks began flowing.

Probst also met Sandusky through the Second Mile. In a nationally televised 2011 interview, he called Sandusky a father figure and denied being touched inappropriately below the belt, although he described showering with him, overnight trips, discomfort with Sandusky becoming clingy, and touching on his leg in a car. More than four years later, Probst filed a civil claim alleging years of far more serious oral and anal abuse beginning around age ten. Penn State reportedly settled for $9 million. That does not prove the later account false. It is an enormous transformation that demands an explanation more rigorous than either “victims always disclose gradually” or “he saw the money and lied.”[4]

Public details surrounding Coover, Neff and Culver are thinner because their civil claims remained confidential and none testified in Sandusky’s trial. Neff reportedly alleged oral and anal assaults on multiple dates in 2004 and 2005 but did not report them until 2016. A later judge questioned Neff’s reliability in an unrelated proceeding over attempts to convert part of his structured settlement into immediate cash; that ruling concerned his financial representations, not whether Sandusky abused him. Coover underwent one of Penn State’s later psychiatric evaluations before receiving a reported $7 million. The accessible record does not permit a responsible reconstruction of the exact sites, trips or transportation asserted in every confidential claim.

Culver supplies Ziegler’s most combustible Lock Haven anecdote. Tennielle Jones, Culver’s former fiancée and the mother of his child, gave a tape-recorded interview in 2017 for a proposed Newsweek investigation by Ziegler and journalist Ralph Cipriano. According to their unpublished draft, Jones said Culver bragged that he had received $5 million from Penn State and told her he stayed awake for three days before meeting a therapist so that he would appear emotional and convincing. It was reportedly the first time he had mentioned Sandusky to her. The claimed amount matched a settlement figure that had not then been publicly disclosed.[5]

That is a real lead: a named source, a recorded interview and a specific allegation containing potentially checkable knowledge. It is not an adjudicated fact. Newsweek never published the investigation, Culver was not cross-examined about Jones’s account, and I have found no independent confirmation that he admitted fabricating abuse. Ziegler and Cipriano may have found evidence of fraud. They may have found a furious ex-partner recounting a boast accurately, inaccurately or without its full context. The correct journalistic verb is alleged.

The ostentatious money photographs belong to Fisher, not Culver. Ziegler published an image of Fisher lying amid large-denomination cash and giving the camera the finger. Elsewhere he displayed photographs of another claimant’s new Audi and other post-settlement consumption. Who poses in a pile of money after receiving millions in an abuse settlement? It is grotesque optics—juvenile, provocative and almost purpose-built for Ziegler’s argument. It proves nothing about whether the abuse occurred. People with legitimate settlements can behave like fools. Yet evidence does not have to prove the ultimate charge to possess evidentiary value. The photograph helps explain why Ziegler suspected the public morality play concealed uglier and more opportunistic human motives.

The Lock Haven five therefore tell us something more limited and more useful than either camp wants. They show that allegation networks can form inside existing social networks; that the Second Mile explains opportunity and transportation; that some stories preceded the financial panic while others came years later; that accounts could expand dramatically; and that Penn State paid confidential claims the public still cannot fully evaluate. The cluster justifies investigation. It does not justify collective acquittal or collective condemnation.

What Ziegler Gets Right

Ziegler’s first great service is resisting narrative compression. The national press took a sprawling set of incidents, reports, institutional decisions, therapeutic encounters, criminal charges and civil claims and compressed them into one clean sentence: Penn State protected a monster. Ziegler reopened the components and asked which proposition was supported by which evidence. That is exactly what journalism should do after the first moral emergency has passed.

Second, he recognized the importance of changing accounts. Variation is not automatically deception, but neither should every escalation be insulated from scrutiny by the vocabulary of trauma. Several witnesses initially denied abuse or described limited conduct, then alleged far more serious acts after repeated interviews, therapy, publicity or legal representation. In at least two instances, the sexual history asserted in a civil claim was substantially broader than the account given under oath at the criminal trial. If both versions cannot comfortably coexist, the discrepancy belongs at the center of the analysis.

Third, Ziegler exposed how investigators could communicate certainty to uncertain witnesses. Suggestive interviewing is not a fringe concern. Telling a person that other boys have described the same acts, assuring him that blocked memories are normal, or repeatedly revisiting a desired hypothesis can affect recall without anybody consciously conspiring to create false testimony. A witness may become more sincere as his memory becomes less reliable. The opposition between “truthful victim” and “lying opportunist” is too crude to capture memory contamination.

Fourth, he distinguished Paterno’s actual conduct from the symbolic role assigned to him. Paterno should have followed up. That failure does not prove he possessed decades of secret knowledge or directed a cover-up. The most famous person in a scandal is not necessarily its causal center.

Fifth, Ziegler kept reporting after institutional and media interest had moved on. He obtained interviews, settlement material, medical records and internal statements that complicate the official history. A proposed 16,000-word Newsweek investigation he developed with Cipriano was killed before publication. Ziegler’s telling of that collapse is predictably apocalyptic, but the underlying draft contains material that deserved a wider and more careful public examination.

Finally, the latest legal development means his central procedural concern cannot simply be laughed away. On August 28, 2026, the Associated Press reported that a judge had scheduled a September 8 evidentiary hearing concerning an affidavit from a trial witness identified as R.R. The witness says he was extensively coached, told that trauma might fragment memory and encouraged to affirm details he did not fully remember. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office considers the recantation highly suspect. Even a credible recantation would not automatically produce a new trial, much less prove Sandusky innocent. But a court is now preparing to hear, under legal procedures, a claim resembling the contamination theory Ziegler has argued for years.[6]

That does not make him right about everything. It makes the respectable world’s refusal to engage him look worse.

Where Ziegler Goes Off the Rails

Ziegler treats almost every ambiguity as a one-way ratchet toward innocence. A denial favors Sandusky; a later allegation proves contamination. Continued affection favors Sandusky; anger proves financial motivation. An accuser who behaves badly is untrustworthy; an accuser who behaves well is performing. A media outlet that rejects Ziegler is afraid of the truth; one that interviews him confirms his legitimacy. The theory becomes difficult to falsify because opposition itself becomes evidence of the cover-up.

He also overreads medical evidence. Records suggesting low testosterone, sexual dysfunction or distinctive anatomy can be relevant to specific allegations. Impotence is not a defense to all sexual abuse. Abuse can involve touching, coercion, oral contact and acts not requiring a sustained erection. Physical limitation may make one described act less plausible without erasing an entire course of misconduct.

His rhetoric corrodes his best reporting. He calls people frauds, morons and liars before the evidence has completed the journey. It is entertaining—often extremely entertaining—but it gives skeptical readers permission to dismiss the documents with the man. The investigator discovers a discrepancy; the polemicist declares the whole case dead; the discovery dies with the overstatement.

Most importantly, he does not adequately account for the cumulative pattern surrounding Sandusky. Individual allegations may wobble. Some may be false. Yet a powerful adult repeatedly created private, physically intimate relationships with vulnerable boys, brought them into showers and his home, touched them in cars, cultivated dependence and crossed boundaries that require explanation. Ziegler frequently treats the absence of conventional pornography, a confession or DNA as affirmative evidence of innocence. Many child-abuse cases produce none of those things. The relevant conduct often occurs privately and leaves no recoverable physical trace.

I therefore cannot follow him to total exoneration. I can follow him to a narrower, unsettling place: I am no longer confident that Sandusky committed every major act attributed to him, that every witness’s final account was independently reliable, or that the trial process adequately separated original memory from subsequent influence. Those doubts matter even if Sandusky is guilty.

Guilty Man, False Stories?

History offers imperfect but useful comparisons to the Sandusky case. Julius Rosenberg was genuinely involved in Soviet espionage. Ethel Rosenberg’s role was less clear, and the prosecution used the threat of her execution in an effort to force cooperation. Their case demonstrates that underlying wrongdoing does not validate every prosecutorial claim or every punishment imposed around it.

Wayne Williams was convicted of murdering two adults and was publicly associated with a much larger group of Atlanta child murders. Closing numerous cases through administrative attribution created a broader story than the two convictions established. Williams may be guilty of more than the adjudicated murders; the point is that “guilty of something” cannot do the evidentiary work for “guilty of everything.”

The Wenatchee child-abuse prosecutions of the 1990s offer the darker warning about investigative generation. Repeated and suggestive questioning produced expanding networks of allegations, prosecutions and ruined lives before many convictions collapsed. That does not mean every mass-abuse case is hysteria. It means an investigation can become a machine that manufactures confirmation faster than it tests alternatives.

Sandusky is not Richard Jewell, an innocent man wrongly suspected in the Atlanta bombing. Nor is his case the Duke lacrosse prosecution, where the central allegation collapsed before trial. The more demanding proposition is that a guilty man can receive an unreliable trial or become the center of a partly false social narrative. Defending his procedural rights does not require liking him, trusting him or announcing his innocence.

Like most people, I have problems with aspects of the American legal system. I nonetheless accept its foundational aspirations. The state should prove criminal guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. An accused person should receive competent counsel and a meaningful chance to confront the evidence. A convicted person retains the right to challenge unlawful confinement through appeals, post-conviction proceedings and, where available, habeas corpus. Habeas is not a magical declaration of innocence, and the post-conviction presumption is not identical to the presumption at trial. It is the mechanism by which the state is required, in limited circumstances, to justify continuing to hold a human being.

That principle is easiest to praise when the prisoner is sympathetic. It matters most when he is Jerry Sandusky.

Liz Habib and the Discipline of Company

Ziegler did not make With the Benefit of Hindsight alone. Liz Habib, an experienced television journalist and sports anchor, spent approximately one hundred hours with him in a California studio assembling the original series. Raised in the Pittsburgh area in an athletic family, she worked in Steubenville, Cleveland, Phoenix and Los Angeles, became Fox 11 Los Angeles’s first female weekday sports anchor, won Emmys and later taught journalism. She now works in the federal Small Business Administration.[7]

Her role matters because she gives the project a second intelligence and a different rhythm. Ziegler is the crusader; Habib is the person in the room who can hear how the crusade sounds to somebody not already living inside it. She does not neutralize his excesses, and the series ultimately shares too many of his premises. But her questions, summaries and professional presence help turn an archive of obsession into a narrative that an outsider can enter.

There is a larger lesson there. Contrarians need company—not cheerleaders, but people capable of preserving the distinction between a discovery and a verdict. Ziegler’s work is most persuasive when another mind forces him to slow down. It loses force whenever certainty outruns the record.

The Price of Being Right

What price did John Ziegler actually pay?

We should not romanticize it. The Sandusky project gave him a signature subject, a devoted audience and hundreds of hours of content. It produced interviews, appearances and a reputation as the man willing to argue the case nobody else would touch. I cannot establish that it impoverished him or single-handedly destroyed a conventional career he otherwise would have possessed.

The reputational price is easier to see. To question one Sandusky accuser was to invite suspicion; to declare Sandusky innocent was to become professionally radioactive. Editors, broadcasters and ordinary readers could treat association with Ziegler as evidence of moral defect. The failure of the proposed Newsweek article—whatever mix of legal caution, editorial judgment and institutional fear killed it—left his strongest material trapped on his own advocacy site, where people inclined to distrust him would never encounter it.

There was an opportunity cost too. A decade devoted to one nearly impossible cause is a decade unavailable for other reporting, relationships and work. Obsession builds expertise by narrowing life. Ziegler knows the evidentiary history of this case at a level few journalists can match. The achievement and the damage may be the same fact viewed from opposite ends.

His greatest price, however, is persuasive. By insisting that Sandusky abused nobody, Ziegler makes it harder for the public to hear his demonstrably stronger claims: that the McQueary narrative was overstated; that Paterno was assigned knowledge not proven by the record; that some accounts changed radically; that investigators and therapists may have shaped memory; that Penn State’s settlement process sometimes substituted payment for robust adversarial testing; and that at least one trial witness now says the process influenced him.

Ziegler found holes in a wall and announced that there was no wall. People looked at the wall, saw that it remained standing and ignored the holes.

That may be the final meaning of The Price of Being Right. It is not simply that society punished Ziegler for challenging a sacred narrative. Sometimes it did. It is that his need to be right about the whole case reduced the force of what he was right about. He paid for certainty with credibility. The public paid too, because valuable evidence became easier to discard. The truth paid most of all.

I came to the podcast expecting a crank. I found a crank, certainly, but also a genuine journalist: brave, funny, obsessive, infuriating and capable of discovering things more respectable people had missed. I began believing the Sandusky case was essentially closed. I finished believing Sandusky was probably guilty and the story of his guilt was substantially less reliable than I had assumed.

That is not the conversion Ziegler wanted. It is still a conversion.

The September hearing may amount to nothing. Recantations are treated skeptically for good reason. Memories change; loyalties change; pressure can operate in several directions. The court may find R.R. incredible, immaterial or insufficient to disturb the other convictions. Sandusky may die in prison, and history may retain him exactly as it has known him since 2011.

But he gets the hearing. The state must listen, answer and make a record. That is not an exoneration. It is the law doing the difficult thing the law exists to do: looking again when nearly everyone would prefer never to look at all.

John Ziegler has been asking people to look again for more than a decade. He has often asked badly. He has sometimes demanded conclusions the evidence cannot carry. He has insulted the audience, the witnesses, the press and occasionally his own best work. He has also refused the comfort of a finished story.

On that essential point, I agree with him.

Dedication:

For John. You are totally outta control but you still rule baby.

Sources

1. Penn State, “Settlements Announced for Sandusky Victims,” October 28, 2013; WHYY, “Penn State, Insurer Scuffle Over Paying Sandusky Victims,” November 30, 2015.

2. Ralph Cipriano, “Easy Money at Penn State,” Big Trial, August 14, 2018; Cipriano and John Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley,” unpublished proposed Newsweek investigation posted by Ziegler, March 29, 2018.

3. Penn State, University Park campus information; contemporary route information between Lock Haven and State College.

4. NBC interview with Frankie Probst, November 21, 2011; Cipriano and Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley.”

5. Cipriano and Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley,” section titled “The Lock Haven Quintet.”

6. Mark Scolforo, Associated Press, “Judge Will Hear Recantation of Sexual Abuse Claim Against Ex-Penn State Coach Jerry Sandusky,” August 28, 2026.

7. With the Benefit of Hindsight project page; U.S. Small Business Administration biography of Elizabeth Habib.

For John Ziegler—Baby, you are totally out of control. But you rule.