By all reports, Jerry Sandusky has been full of smiles and giggles during his recent pretrial courtroom appearances, affecting a goofy -- yes, child-like -- innocence. He grins widely through his hearings, even when the proceedings focus grave attention on him. He laughed earlier this month when he a judge asked him if he was on medication.
Sara Ganim of the Harrisburg Patriot-News, who has been the leading reporter on this story, reports that Sandusky's demeanor seems to be "that of the proverbial dumb jock, a guy who is just a big kid -- to goofy to realize that what he was doing was wrong."
Sandusky's lawyer, Joe Amendola explains his client's unusual smiles and laughter: "That's just Jerry."
But is it? As Ganim pointed out in an excellent piece yesterday entitled "Is this the real Jerry Sandusky?", Sandusky is not a dumb guy. He can't be -- not with his resume.
It's hard to say just who Jerry Sandusky is. Indications are that he himself probably does not really know. Sandusky has, for decades, been living a double life. Now that those two lives have so publicly collided, he may no longer know how to project himself into the world.
But Ganim wonders if his demeanor is more devious than that -- if he's going for a "play-it-dumb defense."
You could see it in the public, self-incriminating interviews he gave in the wake of the scandal going public. It was clear that he either did not understand the situation he was in, or he was pretending not to.
Ganim interviewed Dr. Thomas Haworth, a liscenced psychiatrist who works with victims of child sexual abuse. Howorth said that, though he hasn't personally interviewed Sandusky, he sees Sandusky's demeanor as typical of other self-deluded child predators he has interviewed.
"The nature of these distortions don't have anything to do with intelligence," Howorth said. "If he believes his behavior is normal... this is just the way guys have, these sort of distortions are informing his own behavior, this is typically how people explain their own behavior to others.
"How much they are believing the distortion and how much they are manufacturing excususes is hard to define," said Howarth.
Ganim points out that "childlike immaturity is different than stupidity."
"There are some folks who are quite book smart and bright who are emotionally immature," Haworth said.
But, Haworth said, living in our culture, and working at a children's charity where he received training on how to to properly interact with children, there is no way Sandusky didn't know that showering with children was innapropriate.
Whatever it is that leads to Sandusky's actions -- ignorance, self-deception or pure evil -- it probably doesn't matter one bit to him victims.
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