Louis Freeh enjoys an exalted public reputation, though there may be reason to wonder why. As the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the nineteen-nineties, he ingratiated himself with congressional Republicans by conducting numerous investigations of the Clinton White House, which produced more news leaks than criminal convictions. The Central Intelligence Agency absorbed a great deal of blame for the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, but those attacks took place on American soil, which the F.B.I. is also supposed to protect.
Freeh has deftly turned, in recent years, to a profitable new career leading internal investigations of troubled institutions. Now Freeh’s most high profile post-F.B.I. assignment is coming under new scrutiny. In 2011 and 2012, Freeh led the internal investigation of Pennsylvania State University following the disclosure that Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at the school, had been a serial child molester. The story has largely disappeared from the national media, but it remains big news in Pennsylvania. This week, Graham Spanier, the president of the university who lost his job in the scandal, filed a lawsuit against Freeh for defaming him in his report. (Spanier’s hundred-and-forty-three-page complaint is available online.
I interviewed Spanier about the Sandusky case in 2012.) Sandusky is serving a much-deserved sentence of thirty to sixty years; he is seventy-one, and so will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. Joe Paterno, who had been Penn State’s head coach for more than forty years, was fired, and died soon afterward. Spanier, who had become president of the university in 1995 and was widely admired, resigned. Spanier took the fall for, according to Freeh, failing to follow up on reports of Sandusky’s abuse. Freeh wrote that Spanier acted in “consistent disregard … for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.” He also wrote that Spanier “empowered Sandusky to attract potential victims to the campus,” and that Spanier “repeatedly concealed … Sandusky’s child abuse.” Spanier’s lawsuit claims that this is false. (Freeh’s spokeswoman told me that Freeh would have no comment on Spanier’s lawsuit against him.) Spanier and two other university administrators have also been criminally charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, and other charges,
But that case is snarled in pretrial proceedings. Freeh’s case against Spanier focusses on two incidents that he failed to respond appropriately to: one, in 1998, and another, in 2001. In the first, a woman called the university police to report that Sandusky had showered with her eleven-year-old son. The police, as well as local social-services agencies, investigated the woman’s claim and closed the investigation after advising Sandusky not to take any more showers with children. (Though Spanier was made aware of the investigation, it’s not clear what Spanier knew about the incident.) Sandusky quit his university job in 1999,
Leaving to work at his children’s charity, the Second Mile, though he was given coach emeritus status and access to athletic facilities. In the second matter, from 2001, a graduate assistant named Mike McQueary witnessed an incident in the locker-room shower between Sandusky and a young boy; he later testified that he thought the boy was being raped. He reported it in some form to Joe Paterno, the head coach at Penn State. The precise nature of how McQueary described what he saw to Paterno, and how Paterno described it to others, has long been open to dispute, but witnesses testified that Spanier was never told directly that what Marquetry witnessed had been a sexual assault. Spanier said that he understood it as “horsing around in the shower.”
In any event, Spanier signed off on a plan for Sandusky to be told not to bring children to the main campus any longer, and to inform the head of the Second Mile about the situation. It is difficult to square Spanier’s behavior and Freeh’s broad condemnation. The Sandusky story set off an understandable, and immediate, storm of outrage. Many news reports condemned the university, especially Paterno and Spanier, for purportedly enabling a molester to operate in their midst. Freeh used his report to reinforce that initial impression. As it turned out, Freeh’s denunciations of Spanier were a lot clearer than his actual evidence against him.
Indeed, in the years since, the story of the university’s behavior has turned out to be considerably more complex than it originally seemed. For its part, the N.C.A.A. has eased up on some of the sanctions that it initially imposed on Penn State. It restored a hundred and twelve football victories, which had been stripped from the university’s record, and allowed all of a $60 million fine paid by Penn State to be spent in Pennsylvania, instead of being spread around the country. To be sure, Spanier’s case against Freeh will always be a long shot.
The legal standard for public figures, like Spanier, who bring a defamation case is extremely, and appropriately, high; Spanier will have to prove either that Freeh knew his report was false or that Freeh displayed reckless disregard for whether it was true. Still, the very complexity of the facts as they have eventually emerged should remind us of the risk of rushing to judgment.
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