An Open Letter to Mike McQueary

Jane Leavy writes an open letter to Mike McQueary:

Dear Mike,

We don't know each other and I doubt we will ever meet, though I'm available if you want to talk. I write as someone who has reported on the soul-deadening impact of sexual abuse on Mickey Mantle, and as a person who has been touched by the same pathology. You are a moving target in a tragedy that is unfolding as inexorably as anything authored by Euripides but at the warp speed of 21st-century information technology.

In the days since your name surfaced as a grand jury witness testifying to the anal rape of a young boy in a shower room at Penn State, you have been vilified for doing too little and have received death threats for saying too much. Your thick thatch of red hair has become synonymous with the storm that is likely to touch many more lives than those we already know to have been torched by God's most egregious sin.

What we now know about the unfolding tragedy of childhood sexual abuse — which is not a "sex scandal," as many have redacted it to be — is a fraction of what we will come to know. There will be more allegations and accusations, explanations and evasions, bulletins by the hour. And we do not yet know the extent of the awful truth or the full extent of your actions or inactions — nor do we know what to believe about the difference between your grand jury testimony and your more recent statements.

What we do know is this: To grasp the full awfulness requires confronting a culture that militates against truth-telling, and an understanding of the ways in which trauma leads to evasion.

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