© Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, leaves court in handcuffs after being convicted in his child sex abuse trial at the Centre County Courthouse
Conspiracy theorists are pretty much always treated as if they are insane. The notion that powerful people might secretly conspire to conceal evidence or direct an outcome - at the expense of the powerless - is often portrayed by mainstream culture and media as entirely irrational.
Indeed, there are crazy conspiracy theories out there (global warming is a hoax, anyone?). But sometimes, real conspiracies do take shape and those in power do collude to direct outcomes in secret. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of sexual abusers in elite institutions.
Recently, a slew of such elite institutions - from
Yale University to the
United States military (
which we explored in our discussion of The Invisible War) - have been exposed as having become aware of systematic sexual abuse, and having suppressed evidence of it.
On 22 June of this year, Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach at Penn State University, was found guilty of abusing ten boys over the course of a decade and a half. At first, the Sandusky case at Penn State seemed like that of a lone abuser. Now, it seems to be turning into a story of extensive and shockingly high-level coverup of the known rape of
children. A new trove of emails from 2001,
read by a firsthand source to a CNN reporter last week, suggest that 15 young lives were not just ruined because Sandusky abused vulnerable boys for over 15 years, but were ruined, too, because powerful men around Sandusky knew exactly what he was doing - and colluded in detail with one another not to stop it.
