Interview: Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod on the Untold Crimes of a 1970s Football Player
***Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions sexual violence.**
In this episode, Jessica Luther speaks with ESPN reporters Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod about Untold, their recent feature that dives deep into a Penn State football player who terrorized women in State College, PA and near his home in Long Island, NY in the late 1970s. We talked about how they came to this story, why it was important to tell four decades after the fact, the complications of memory, the long lasting effects of trauma, and what, if anything, is different now than in 1979.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. Jessica here. A note before we get started: today's interview will contain descriptions of and discussion of sexual assault and rape. So if you're not up for this right now, you might want to skip this interview.
Today, I'm joined by two award-winning journalists, Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod. Last week, they published a long investigative piece for ESPN titled simply Untold. It's about a Penn State football player, Todd Hodne, from the late 1970s, who raped multiple women in Happy Valley before being convicted for one of those crimes. But a judge, Richard Sharp, let him go post-conviction pre-sentencing, and Hodne returned home to Long Island where he committed another slew of horrible, violent rapes. He served prison time, got out, and harmed again, eventually spending the rest of his life behind bars. This piece is harrowing – a warning for all who will read it after hearing this – but it's brilliant. Both the reporting and the writing. It's about football. It's about Penn State. It's about Joe Paterno. But it's also about memory, about who and what are forgotten, and why, and about what it means to tell a story decades later. Even though the subject matter is rough, I'm thrilled to be able to talk to Paula and Tom today about this important work. Thank you both for coming. Paula, it's pretty wild that this is your first time on the show!
Paula: I'm so excited! I've been waiting for this opportunity for the longest time. So, this is an honor. Thank you, Jessica.
Jessica: So, I'd like to start at the beginning. How did you all come to the story? How did you decide to work on it together? And what did that partnership look like?
Tom: So, I grew up in Wantagh, Long Island, and so did Todd Hodne. I went to a Catholic high school on Long Island, and so to Todd Hodne. In fact, I played against him when I was…Well, it’s saying a little bit much that I played against him since I was mostly a benchwarmer and he was, you know, a superstar linebacker. But I definitely knew of him and I knew a lot of people who knew him. And if you grew up as a Catholic high school football player in Long Island, you knew who he was. He was a star and dominant player. And then he went off to play football for Joe Paterno at Penn State. And in the spring of ’79 I opened up Newsday, which is the local newspaper. And there was a big picture of Todd Hodne in a polo shirt with his hands cuffed behind his back. And he had come back from Penn State and had raped and sexually assaulted a series of women, a string of women all over Long Island.
So I was fascinated with that story forever. And I think it was the aspect that this guy had everything – or seemed to have everything – and fell from grace, in the most violent and horrific way. I mean, it had so fascinated me and so caught my imagination that I was thinking of writing about it long before I was a writer. But when I got out of college, I was a salesman. I was a handbag salesman in Dallas, Texas, but I kept a journal. I kept a notebook. And a couple of years ago, I took a look at that journal and saw this note from February, 1981, you know, “One day, write about Todd Hodne.”
Jessica: Wow.
Tom: Yeah. And so when I had heard from my friend in May of 2020 that Todd had died in prison, it just was an immediate sort of now or never moment, like, wow, you've been wanting to write about this for a long time. Why don't you look into it? But at the time, I only knew about the Long Island assaults, and my first phone call was to Hodne’s teammate at St. Dom's, which is the high school he went to. And also at Penn State. And I said, you know, can you tell me something about Todd? What Todd was like before the crimes? And he was like, which crimes? [laughs] And just saying that right now, I just got chills, because that was the moment I was like, what do you mean “which crimes?” And he was like, “Well, there's the ones in Long Island.” He goes, “But then he committed a whole bunch of them at Penn State,” which I knew nothing about. Zero. And that's when Paula came in. [laughter]
Paula: Right. And I remember I was on a run and I was on the phone with Tom and he was telling me about this, and the whole story about the journal and about, you know, what had transpired with these conversations. And I just thought, “This is amazing.” And the second thing I thought was, “How on earth has this not been out?” I mean, I knew all about Sandusky and about everything that had happened with the investigation and just how deep into the institution, you know, all of the reporting that happened around that time. And I kept thinking, how does this not come up in any of that? I mean, if you're doing a retrospective on sexual abuse and behavior at Penn State, how do you not find this? And that became a huge cornerstone of the reporting that we would do, and the narrative that would eventually come out of the story.
Tom: Yeah. And that was the thing, you know, of course we did an internet search right away. There was one line on the internet about Todd Hodne, and that was from a Sports Illustrated article from 1980 in which Sports Illustrated was asking Penn State questions about sort of the uncharacteristic off the field peccadilloes of its players. And there's a line in there that said it began with Todd Hodne, who raped a series of women on Long Island.
Paula: It didn't even go that far.
Tom: It was like a clause and a half, and that was it. And that was the thing. I mean, it had gone away – that story especially, the Penn State attacks.
Jessica: I'd like to hear a little bit...This is kind of a selfish question on my part, but I'd like to hear about the nuts and bolts of the reporting. This comes up in the piece, but like, how many people you talk to, how you found them? I know, Paula, you're a document hound. What documents were you looking at. And I would like to hear sort of the biggest obstacle that you faced in reporting on this story.
Paula: The biggest obstacle was time, truly. I mean, so many of the records had been destroyed. I mean, these rapes happened before anyone thought to keep rape kits for DNA testing. And so, so much of the stuff just didn't exist. And it varies state by state. Like, some states, they held on to the records. I mean, this became an issue with the prison and the parole records. In some states they held on to them, and in other states they had already destroyed them. And then the releasability of them in both cases varied, right? And we had in Pennsylvania – which I don't think has very good laws when it comes to this – we really battled with the Centre County district attorney's office there to release what few documents it had. And it was one of those situations where like they had some discretion to give us stuff, but they weren't legally obligated to. And we were only able to get some of the police reports with the help of the survivors because they had more standing than we did.
I remember being in the lobby of the Centre County district attorney's office with Betsy Sailor, who was one of the survivors, and Karen, sitting in there, calling the records custodian who was gone, was not present, apparently. And listening to Betsy on the phone, pleading with them for her records. And it just broke my heart because I'm like, this woman has suffered so much. And Betsy's an amazing…I mean, you can tell from the story, she's an amazing woman. And here she is on the phone, 40 some years later, almost begging them to give them her police report. I'm like… [laughs] I don't know.
Jessica: Why didn't they…Just like a policy, or they just…?
Tom: Yeah, I think that also they're so used to this idea of, okay, they owe you the records by some kind of law, but all these laws also provide for a certain amount of discretion, and discretion just means “no.” [laughs]
Jessica: Right, right.
Paula: Yeah. [laughs]
Tom: You know, it's really true. They just decide not to, because they can.
Paula: Yeah. Even when the law was on their side, like, one of the victims from Long Island, she was deceased and her daughter – she’s in the story, Kathleen Pirkl – was going back and forth with Nassau County to get her records. And the law is entirely on her side in this case, like, they had to provide it to her. She had to get proof of being next of kin, of being the executor of her mother's estate. She did everything. She filled everything in. And they responded to her and they said we don't have anything for you. And I knew that they were wrong, because I had already been in touch with them and they sent me a denial letter listing all the things that I couldn't have. And I sent that to her and I said they're lying to you because they have all of these things and you're entitled to them. And only until we connected all these dots and then when she made it clear to them that I had been in touch with her, only then did she get the records of her mother and grandmother's sexual assault and assault. And I'm thinking, this woman should not have to go through this.
And after that, I mean, it still took forever. The person she dealt with wasn't very responsive. It's just so disturbing how hard it is to get this information. And again, in a couple of these cases, we would not have received any of it had we not have the help of the survivors. And Tom can talk about how we actually came across the best information, the most comprehensive documents from Pennsylvania actually came from a prosecutor's office in New York.
Tom: Yeah, in Suffolk County. The other obstacle was…And it's also related to Paula's answer from before. It’s related to time. It was people either forgetting or just, you know, saying, well, this happened 43 years ago. Why do you want to talk about it? You know, especially the players and especially the coaches. The coaches, I mean, I was shocked at how many coaches had no idea – who coached him! – had no idea who Todd Hodne was. I mean, you would think that they would know the guy who went home because he had this rape conviction and then went on to rape and sexually assault a bunch of women, a string of women in Long Island. But they didn’t, or said that they didn't. And a lot of football players completely minimized either his contribution to the team or the amount of time that they spent with them. I mean, nobody was “Todd Hodne’s friend” for a long time, but he had plenty of friends.
Jessica: Yeah, well, it's interesting. I mean, you have a quote in the piece. I have it here. It's Dave Baker, an assistant sports information director at Penn State in 1978, who is still at the school as an associate athletic director today. And he said, “I never met him. And I don't remember if he ever played a game for Penn State. It was a long time ago. He got in trouble and he was no longer on the team.” And I was like, huh? “I don't remember if he ever played a game for Penn State” was fascinating to me because this was a huge line in the Sam Ukwuachu case at Baylor. Like, “He never played for the team. We don't have to care about him.”
Tom: Right. Right.
Jessica: And then I kept reading, and he had played!
Paula: An entire season!
Tom: Yeah. He had a successful freshman year.
Jessica: And I mean, the memory thing is really fascinating to me. When Dan Solomon and I were working on our longer piece about Baylor that came out at Deadspin, we looked into a rape case when Briles was a high school football coach. And, man, memory was so interesting. Like, none of the men on the school board at the time remembered anything about it. I called the woman on the school board at the time, and boy did she remember talking about that! [laughs] So, before we get into the narrative writing of this, can we go back and just tell the listeners a little bit about the actual timeline of events of Hodne and how this played out?
Tom: Yeah. So, on September 13th, Todd Hodne raped Betsy Sailor. And it was in her apartment. She lived off campus in State College. Betsy believes that he stayed there onwards of two hours. And it was about, what, another month later they connected fingerprints, you know, connected from the scene fingerprints that were sharp enough and present of mind enough to know…I mean, she was listening to Hodne while he was rummaging through the apartment, knowing what he touched and remembering what he touched so she could find those fingerprints and report them. Anyway, they were finally connected to Hodne through this…Well, number one, they had his fingerprints because he did the burglary at the record store in summer. And then this other thing happened, which was kind of almost like a fluke in this story, and that's where Paula’s going to take over.
Paula: So, without having a name, the fingerprints didn't do much for the police. They needed a name. And Susan, one of the victims, after her assault, she kept getting these harassing phone calls. And Susan's dad at the time happened to be kind of higher up at the phone company, and he was able to have the calls traced. And sure enough, they went back to Hodne's dorm room in Hamilton Hall.
Tom: 279 Hamilton Hall.
Paula: And that's how the police ended up actually having a name to trace back to the fingerprints. And it's that moment, when talking to the prosecutor about that and why that mattered, that was one of many moments where it reminded me we're talking about the 1970s and, you know, it's hard to look at these sort of crime scenarios in the mindset of that time period because you're looking at it in the mindset of 2022, what you expect police to be able to do. And I was like, oh yeah, right. Of course, they had fingerprints, but that didn't get them anywhere. They couldn't just enter them into a database. There's no database, there's no computer. [laughs] So yeah, that part with her and that phone call was so crucial to ever being able to catch him.
Tom: And who did the police call first when they made the fingerprint match?
Paula: Joe Paterno.
Tom: Yeah. And so Joe was part of this investigative process from that moment until the trial. The trial began on March 1st, 1979–
Paula: During spring break.
Tom: During spring break, so there's no coverage. There’s no coverage whatsoever.
Jessica: Hmm. That’s interesting.
Tom: And on March 3rd, Todd Hodne is convicted of breaking and entering, rape, and involuntary deviant sexual intercourse. All of these are felony 1s, and it’s a unanimous verdict of the jury. And then judge Richard Sharp allows him…He’s on $25,000 bond. Judge Sharp announces that he's not going to revoke his bond and that Hodne is free to go until sentencing.
Jessica: So, it is interesting. Like, I wrote a note as I was reading, when you got to the part where you introduce Karen more extensively. She was raped by Hodne. And the section her, over the time you're talking to her, she’s remembering more and more. You actually use the word ‘awakening’ in the piece to talk about what that experience was like. What are you all thinking about memory and storytelling, at this point? Like, how do you know what to trust, what you can use? How does that work in journalism in particular, where we have fact checking and lawyers and all this other kind of part of the process?
Paula: Yeah, it's always interesting how people remember something, especially when it is tied to a trauma, right? So, when I cold called Betsy Sailor completely out of the blue, and she picks up the phone and I established that she is who I think she is, she starts talking about her assault and what happened. And as she's telling me this story, it is as if she is reading it from her 1978 court testimony that, you know, Tom and I had looked at previously, all the way down to talking about that you remembered that she had Clinique makeup – because Clinique was new at the time. All of these details. And I am just floored at how this has just stayed with her, and so ever present. And yet she's so stable and in control of it and she owns it, right?
And with Karen, I think it is very present with her as well. I think with her, she has struggled because she was one of those who were forgotten, and that has always weighed on her. And I think that she spent so much time listening to people tell her to move on and to forget about it, and I think to a certain degree a lot of that for her had been repressed. I was probably the first person in decades to ask her about this, and as she is going through these conversations and…I mean, there are a lot of phone calls back and forth or emails back and forth, and every time she remembers a little bit more. You know, she would send something out of the blue saying she remembered a car or she remembered something that the police asked of her. And same thing with some of the other women. Some of them I just had a couple of conversations with, and all of it was out there at the same time. Others, similar sort of thing. Like they would say, oh, by the way, you know, after we talked, I was thinking about this and I remembered X, Y, and Z.
And as to your question about, well, how do you prove that? As much as we could with documents, like with Betsy, obviously we had the court testimony. And it's also why, in the story, we made a point of whenever any of the other women were mentioned, document wise, especially the women from State College whose own reports had been destroyed, if they were referenced in Betsy's report, if there was a friend or roommate who we could get some sort of corroboration from. Anything that they could provide to us, you know? One of the women talked about interactions she had with a bowling coach, and the coach didn't remember her, but I actually had request her transcript, and by god, she had bowling. She showed up, sent me the copy of the transcripts she had at that semester. I was like, okay. So, you're right, it's incredibly tough because memory is a very…I don't know, it's a tricky thing.
Tom: It taught me a lesson about suppression, because I think that the rule in this story was the people who either suppressed it – mostly the players and the coaches – or who had it suppressed – people like Karen – had more trouble remembering it, you know, 40 some odd years later than people like Betsy, who, you know, as Paula just said, had owned it, who went to court and won a case against this person. And I think that that was definitely something to learn. I think that was pretty consistent. As Paula said, I mean, until we got Betsy's police files, there was no way to find out anything about the other women who were sexually assaulted in Penn State, other than Betsy Sailor. We had nothing. The first inkling that we had that there were others came when Paula made a document request at Centre County, and we got the transcripts for Betsy's preliminary hearing and some aspects of that case, including also the case in which Hodne was arrested and convicted of burglarizing the record store. He wound up getting suspended for that.
But there came this one piece of paper with the transcript from the preliminary hearing that said...And it was the only piece of any police report that came in that bunch of files. And it said the detective Duane Musser went to 279 Hamilton Hall to speak to Hodne's roommate (redacted) to ask the redacted roommate about Betsy Sailor plus four other women and then four other occasions. And that's the thing that set us on the search, because before that we had no real clue that there were other women other than rumors from football players.
Jessica: Wow. That's incredible. The other thing I wanted to ask you about with memory is the fact that you're telling this story post-Sandusky, and that there's a certain way that people think about Joe Pa and think about Penn State and their relationship through that case. And I'm wondering how you accounted for that filter. Like, even people involved in the story, they come to this with a…They already have an understanding of Joe Pa, or they already have an institutional understanding of Penn State. Is it possible to separate those things out as people are remembering things that happened previous to that? Do you see what I'm saying? Like, I'm wondering if there's even a way to separate that out, or if you just take that for granted, that that might be influencing how they're understanding what had happened before.
Paula: I don't know if this answers your question exactly, but one, when you say that, it reminds me of when I went down the road of looking at other rapes in State College around that time and ended up talking to several women who were activists on campus or worked for the rape crisis center or were part of the women's program. Like, just that sort of movement. And talking to them about, you know, what the culture was then. And I'm sure it wasn't unique to State College in the 70s, but they're sort of battle for any type of recognition or support. I mean, the stigmas then were just so much worse than they are now. But then hearing them talk about their reaction when the Sandusky news came out and how they weren't surprised. They didn't take all the Sandusky news as a revelation because they were saying this, this attitude…I mean, Jessica, you know how people do not like to think about things being, you know, cause and effect and the “bad apple” phrase is one that lots of universities like to use.
Jessica: The “isolated incidents.”
Paula: Yes. The isolated incidents. Right, right.
Tom: The anomaly.
Paula. The anomaly. But it isn’t, because what they're saying and what is the god honest truth is that how the university and the community just handled or did not handle or wanted to ignore what was happening with Todd Hodne, it set up a system. It set up a status quo. It set up a this is how we deal with or don't deal with or deflect or whatever when issues like this come about. And when all of the stuff, as you move forward, and the stuff happens with Sandusky, even though we're talking about a different type of abuse and different victims, that whole system born from these other events is still filtering through the same leaders are there, with the same attitudes and the same belief systems. And it's no wonder that things end up in a similar pattern of not everybody doing the right thing. People could be doing more and, you know, all of that. And that's what these women were saying, that when this stuff came out about Sandusky, they said the script was written for this 20 years earlier.
Jessica: One of the things I wanted to ask you guys about is writing the story. You've written it for a sports outlet, for ESPN. But it is interesting in that, like, I would say the main institutional villain probably in the story is judge Richard Sharp. Like, his decision to let Hodne go home post-conviction pre-sentencing is just…Like, I can feel my blood pumping, just even saying this to you, because it's just so shocking. And yet this isn't a story about, you know, the criminal justice system or something like that, right? This is framed….The lede and the kicker are both brilliant. And they're Penn State stories and they're about Joe Pa and Sandusky. And I'm just wondering why this is a sports story.
Tom: I mean, I look at this not as a sports story, but as a sexual violence story. But it's a sexual violence story that couldn't be anything but a sports story. This pretty much had to happen in the sports world. You know, it's one of those stories where like the punctuation is applied by the various protagonists. I mean, Todd Hodne's first known sexual assault of the Happy Valley series occurred on the day that he was suspended. If you want to underscore the sports connection, you know, it's right there.
Paula: Yeah. For all the ties, because it was a football player, all of that. But it's also worth pointing out that one of Hodne’s defense attorneys is a former Penn State player. And he's the guy that we all know, that still exists in every college town in America.
Jessica: I wanna gonna say, all these beats, they're so similar. Like, you know how it is, Paula, when you start one of these cases, like, you ask about the lawyers. Do they have a connection to the school? Because that's such a normal thing, even now.
Paula: Yeah. He's the guy that you call to get out of trouble and helping some guys negotiate pro contracts. So he was working in that capacity too. So, yeah, I mean, it's ever present.
Tom: And he still had gym privileges. He could still work out with the team.
Jessica: Wow.
Tom: I also don't think that you can understand Joe Paterno without it. I think the fact that there’s…I mean, his career has always been defined as this rise and sudden, almost inexplicable fall. And I mean, that's been the narrative since his statue came down. And I think that this completely rewrites that. The fact that there was a prelude to that, the fact that under his oversight there were two really dangerous serial sexual predators. I mean, I guess he's unlucky? [laughs] Or is it something about, you know, the culture that he created, you know, facilitated this. Because I mean, we pitched the story before Sandusky was taught Hodne, but really you can just look at it as after Todd Hodne came Sandusky. And because, I mean, you would think that he would have learned something during the Todd Hodne thing. You know, it was a disaster, and you would think that he would learn something from it, but he either didn't learn anything or he learned the wrong things.
Jessica: Yeah. Sorry to go back to it, but it just reminds me so much of Briles and that story when he was a high school coach, and that was why we pursued it. It was so hard, but we were like, we've got to get this. This has to exist somewhere, just to say, like, by the time he's making choices at Baylor, he had already made choices. Like, it wasn't as if this was brand new for him in that moment. This was something he had already had to make a choice about at another point. I mean, I totally get that.
Paula: But one of the things that really stuck with me was it was a parole board hearing, and he's talking about how football was always such a part of him. And there's this sort of running theme through much of what he says about how, when he lost football, because he was suspended from the team because of that burglary, he wasn't entirely gone because Paterno made it clear if he kept his nose clean he'd have a chance to come back. But because he lost that opportunity, that was so hard for him to deal with, and that football was part of his identity. You know, everything that we tie in with the aggression and the sense of entitlement, all of that. I mean, I don't think you can separate this and his actions from his identity as a football player. He says, you know, “Football was everything, my self-worth. It was who I was. It was also where I expressed what you might deem negative emotions.” You know, he goes on, “I never dealt with anything in my life, and I stored it up and turned it into anger on the football field.” And, you know, it goes into sort of how that just becomes part of him.
Jessica: Yeah. I found the parole hearing. So, it was 2019, a year before he died. I was reading it and I almost didn't know what to make of it, because we know he's a liar. That's well-established. You guys use that word a lot in the piece, actually. And I was like, man, someone like me who studies this, this is what I would expect. Like, this is what I want them to say almost, like, to explain this connection. So I was like, is he saying this because he thinks that's what he's supposed to say in order to make sense of this? This is 2019. This is, what, four years post Baylor? Paula, both of our books exist in the world. Our conversation around college football and sexual assault is the most robust maybe it's ever been. I mean, I guess we'll just never know, whether or not he believed this or if he was like parroting what he thought the parole board would want to hear.
Tom: It's a really good question, because I mean, there is a canned aspect to some of that testimony, especially when he's talking about his sexual fantasies and trying to distinguish what kind of fantasies he was having versus…I mean, he had clearly gone through a lot of required therapy to even get before the parole board. And he's speaking that, but I always thought that when he's talking about football, it's the least canned of what he had to say. Like, when he's talking about the rapes and him being a control rapist and stuff, I mean, it sounds very, very institutional, but when he's talking about football, it does not. And that was always of interest to me.
Jessica: But yeah, it's the way he even talks about like, “When I got to Penn State, that's when I learned that, you know, women are sexual objects, this is part of being a player, having access…” I was like, dude, I wrote that in my book. [laughter] I was like, is he just proving my point? Or is he just saying what’s in my book? I was like, I feel so…I was so interested in that little piece.
Paula: That is a really good observation, because as you read through the parole hearing testimony over the decades, his response has changed and then this type of language becomes more a part of his argument. And the question is, is that really because of therapy and him getting in touch with his inner demons? Or is it because–
Jessica: Did he see Paula Lavigne on ESPN? [Paula laughs] Outside the Lines, yeah. [laughs]
Paula: Did he read Jessica's book and be like, ah, this is what I need to argue. This is…People will feel for me now because this is out there.
Jessica: And of course, with someone like this, you can't know because this was part of like his entire deal, is just saying whatever at whatever moment.
Tom: Right.
Jessica: I know you guys have been asked this before, but I can't not ask you. Why was it important to tell a story that's now four decades old?
Tom: I mean, I think that there's a bunch of different things. Because I was asked that, you know, when I was doing my calls, when I would call…Especially calling football players. They were like, why are you writing about this now? Why would anyone write about Todd Hodne in 2020, 2021? I mean, I think it seemed to them sort of ridiculous. There were definitely the closer you got and the better people knew Todd, you would get people who actually talk about being shaken up. I mean, I talked to this one guy, Frank Brickowski, who was a basketball player who hung around with Todd and he goes, “I've never been able to really look at any of my friends the same way.” He goes, “I just never know. You can never know what people are capable of.” So in the beginning, I was kind of conscious of that. I was kind of self-conscious about, like, why are we doing that story? Why are we doing this? And then Paula talked to Betsy and that all went away. I knew I knew exactly why we were doing it.
Paula: Yeah. I mean, two ways to answer that. One, the utmost obvious for me is for the women. I mean, they have waited decades to be able to tell their truth and to get their story out there. And you know, a couple of them didn't want to talk, but most of them did. And I guess of all the comments we received from the women afterward, the one that just brought me to tears was Kathleen Pirkl, whose mother was raped by Hodne and she passed away a number of years ago. And I asked Kathleen and I said, you know, what do you think your mother would think of this? And she's like, oh my gosh, she's dancing in heaven right now. Thank you so much.
Jessica: Oh, wow.
Paula: I just...That she would say that, it just makes me want to cry. I was so touched by it. I mean, hearing from Kathleen and Betsy and some of the other women about what this meant for them and…You know, I think it's hard. It's really hard. And I think it forces some tough discussions and emotions that they haven't dealt with for a long time. But I know that it means a great deal and it means a great deal to a lot of other women out there who reached out afterwards. And I think the other thing that I think is important about telling the story this many years later is to show people, especially people who dismiss these types of things, to show them how long this trauma lasts. And Betsy Sailor is in her sixties. Her mom, Ann Sailor, is in her eighties. And I remember calling Ann Sailor, and she was talking about the day that Betsy called her to tell her that she had been raped, and the emotion in Ann's voice…I mean, she can't even get through that story without starting to choke up.
I’m going to invoke another Baylor comparison. It immediately took me back to interviewing Candice Hernandez, Jasmin Hernandez’s mom – Jasmine Hernandez being, you know, Tevin Elliott's victim from Baylor – and telling me like the exact same story. And when I was talking to Candice, you know, Jasmin's assault had happened just a few years earlier. It was very fresh for them. Ann Sailor and Betsy Sailor could have been talking about something that happened last year, with the level of emotion in their voice and the fact that you could tell that it still was something that pierced their hearts. It I just thought was so important to tell, because people need to know that this, this does not go away. I mean, this has been a part of them and this memory is ever present for them. And, you know, for people to think, oh, you'll get over it or, you know, you’ll move on – no. I mean, that's not…It will always be a part. And for them, it always has been.
Jessica: I thought that was a really beautiful part of the piece towards the end, where you guys talk about that aspect of, like, it makes you who you are, but also you don't want it to define you, all that sort of things that we hear victims and survivors all the time. It's really beautifully done. We've talked about this a bit already, but I did feel very despondent and I can’t…I didn't make a note in the piece, so I can't remember exactly where it hit me, but I was like, is anything different now? Like, in 2022, from what I'm reading about 1979, Are we better now, Paula? [laughs]
Paula: I don't know how many times we've both been asked that question after the latest scandal. And then something else happens, like after Florida State, are we better? Then there's Baylor, and then there's Michigan State, and there's Michigan, and there's LSU. And it's like, all of these schools should have learned something. So I don't even know how to answer that question anymore! [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah. Which is totally fair.
Paula: But you know what? actually, I will say something, and it's a part of the story that I have to bring up, because one answer to making things better is having more people like Irv Pankey.
Jessica: Oh yeah. I read this on a plane the other day and I got to that part of the story and I was trying not to like sob on the plane. I didn’t wanna be that person, but it was hard.
Paula: Yeah. Having men, especially male athletes, do the right thing…I mean, their coaches should be doing the right thing. The institution should be doing the right thing. But when people like Irv stand up and stand up for women and stand up for victims, like, that leadership from within…I mean, maybe that is our answer. Maybe that is how it's going to change. You know, maybe the institutions aren't going to do it and the coaches aren't going to do it. Maybe it will have to come from within the players. And I know that the work of, you know, like Brenda Tracy, and that's what she really emphasizes, is leadership from within, from the athletes, from the whole bystander intervention and standing up for women. And I think anything that anyone can do to encourage that and model bravery and the integrity that he had is at least one step forward.
Tom: I mean, you know, Todd was one of those friends. They hung out. They used to go on Tuesday nights to the train station and drink beer.
Jessica: Well, didn't he go to the hearing to support him, the preliminary hearing?
Tom: He sure did.
Paula: That was his initial intent. Yes.
Jessica: Wow.
Tom: Yeah. I wonder what's going to happen with Irv, you know, now that the story is out. And there's a short film coming out soon called Betsy and Irv, and it basically features them. It’s sort of excerpted from the story and it's really lovely. It's a really beautiful…I mean, good luck not crying when you watch the film.
Jessica: Oh, I’ll cry. I cry about everything.
Tom: Yeah. You don't have a chance. [laughter] I mean, it's really lovely. It would be a wonderful thing if Irv could become a spokesman for that sort of identification that he had with the victim.
Jessica: Yeah. Okay. Well, I had one final question, which is I'm wondering what…There’s so much here. This is 30,000 words, which is like, wow. Kudos to you. I assume it was probably like 50 at some point.
Tom: No, it was always 30. [laughter]
Jessica: Always 30. Yeah, same. Same for me. That's exactly how I write too. I'm wondering, what do you hope readers take away from this?
Tom: You know, to me, this is a story…There’s a really, really big evil in this story, and it's Todd Hodne. And everyone is sort of tested in a way, every single character in it. And people respond in all different ways. You know, a lot of people look at it, oh, this is just like another attack on Joe Paterno. It's not. It’s a portrayal of how Joe Paterno responded to an eval that I don't think that he quite understood. And so there's a lot of things that arise out of the story that are really, really intensely, intensely dramatic, depending on how people respond. And the women in this story are tested more severely than anyone can scarcely imagine. The ones who we spoke to, so many of them were determined and said that they were determined to survive, no matter what. To live through this. And then you have Irv Pankey seeing that and being inspired by it, and looking at Betsy saying “this is bravery.” And I want people to just be aware of that. This is going to sound corny, but to be like Irv, to look at the pain and say, yeah, I understand that, because I feel it and there's somewhere in my life where I can relate to it. I mean, one of the really distressing things of the many distressing things of going on Twitter and looking at the Paterno trolls is that they never, ever, ever mention the victims, ever. They don't exist. And they do exist in real life, and they survived this. And that's what I want people to get out of the story.
Paula: I think of all the things that I want people to take away from this is to understand the danger of silence and how there is such a stigma to this. And so many people, even with seemingly good intentions, didn't want this to get out, didn't want to say anything, and how that is in so many ways just increasing the harm and the importance of talking about and acknowledging these difficult things, even when it might bring negative attention to something, is crucial for everyone involved at the end of the day. And yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things I want people to take away from this. I want them to celebrate the survivors and everything they've gone through, but to realize going forward how dangerous it is to be silent on these issues.
Tom: I mean, the danger of the silence is really literal because there’s no doubt in my mind that if the story was told back then that he would not have gone home.
Paula: No. You know, we talk about that a lot and when that whole issue with the judge and his decision, I think about the Brock Turner case and I think about all the outrage that came out after he received such a light sentence. I mean, that completely blew up. And the judge was recalled. It started an entire movement. I hate drawing comparisons between one woman's plight to another, but yeah, exactly. Like, if this had happened and more people knew about it, I can't not think that there would be outrage, and that speaks to…This was 1979, and there’s very little coverage, you know, there's no internet, there's no social media. And so the word doesn't get out. But yeah, it would be very different if more people knew about it.
Jessica: Well, thank you both so much for all of your time, for coming on Burn It All Down, and especially for this amazing work that you have done. It means a lot to me and I'm sure to a whole lot of people.
Tom: Thanks, Jessica.
Paula: You’re quite welcome. Thank you.
Tom: It was really a great opportunity to talk about all this. Thanks.
Jessica: That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn. For show links and transcripts, check out our website: burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find a link to our merch at our Bonfire store. And thank you to our patrons. Your support means the world. If you want to become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. As always, burn on and not out.