Horseplay won't bugger-up the football dollars

Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State football coach up on child sex charges, has a very helpful lawyer with a sparkling media strategy ... Trial will be a needless formality ... Stand-by for extensively legalled media portraits of the Iron Ore Queen ... Pillsbury Flom files 

WTF is Jerry Sandusky's lawyer doing?

Sandusky, the retired assistant coach of Pennsylvania State University has been charged with more than 50 counts of child sex abuse.

Other casualties include head coach Joe Paterno and University President, Graham Spanier. Both were sacked for not doing enough when confronted with the allegation that Sandusky had anally raped a boy in the shower.

To the unfamiliar, the money and attention Americans give to college football is unfathomable.

It is reflected in the moistened eyes of Joe Paterno's adoring athletes and Penn State's well-to-do alumni who called him Papa Joe, a moniker they wisely no longer embrace.

College football brings in $50 million a year to the venerable university. No one at Penn State was going to let a little horseplay, as Sandusky likes to call it, interfere with that sort of green. All for a bunch of bloated uni students who run around in a game with an average actual playing time of 12 minutes.

Sandusky: "I enjoy young people"The criminal charges have pumped up the righteously indignant, who have burst out everywhere.

Sandusky has been viciously scarified in the media, and his trial relegated to a needless formality.

Stepping into this breach is Sandusky's lawyer, Joe Amendola. Joe's qualifications for the gig include impregnating (as the Americans so quaintly call it) his 16-year-old client (it's OK cause she later became his wife) when representing her in an emancipation petition.

Part of Joe's media strategy was to do a studio TV interview with Bob Costas (a seasoned sportscaster and talk show host) on NBC. 

Joe then volunteered to get his client on the phone, and the interview went ahead with Joe and Bob present in the studio and Sandusky on the line answering questions while the camera dwelt on Joe's face.

Picture this little exchange with long hesitations by Sandusky before he gave his answers, or just slip into court on the first day of trial where it will be the centerpiece of the prosecutor's opening statement:  

Costas: Are you sexually attracted to young boys, to underage boys?

Sandusky: Am I sexually attracted to underage boys?

Costas: Yes.

Sandusky: Sexually attracted, you know, I enjoy young people. I love to be around them. But no I'm not sexually attracted to young boys. 

Talking heads everywhere were aghast at Amendola's apparent incompetence.

Amendola: unlikely to be a third roundJoe evidently did not share their view and promptly proffered his client for a second interview with New York Times journo, Jo Becker.  This was not just a carefully scripted exchange, but several interviews all recorded, and partly filmed as well. In Joe's house.

Sandusky explained his answers in the Costas interview saying:

"I am attracted to boys, girls too ...", before Joe interrupted, "Not sexually attracted."

Of course not.

This led to a fresh round of chastisement by the talking heads ("you do the cam, you do the can")  and another video clip for the prosecutor's opening.

Creepily entertaining as all this is, I suspect even Amendola will hesitate to do a third round.

One can sympathize with his frustration, if not his judgment.

*   *   *

Litigants in Australia are afforded a much more comforting measure of protection.

Other than anodyne reports of the court proceedings, the media is gagged from discussing pending criminal trials or else be held in contempt of court.

In civil matters, the courts will sometimes oblige with a suppression order if a litigant wants to hide some nasty contretemps from the hoi polloi. 

Rinehart: plenty of staying powerGina Rinehart had to endure day after day of unpleasant revelations about her payments to witnesses in the inquest into the death of her father, Lang Hancock.

At least in that instance, she had campaigned relentlessly for the inquest herself. She had desperately sought to pin her father's death on her step mother and litigious foe, Rose Porteous.

Not only was she unsuccessful, but the solicitor general was forced to consider whether there may have been criminal misconduct in relation to the inquest.

Thankfully, he concluded nothing could be done and since then Gina has thrived after settling with Rose.  

Now, three of Gina's children are suing to remove her as trustee of a family trust set up by Lang Hancock for their benefit.

They allege misconduct by Gina in the trust's administration. The case would seriously undermine Gina's bottom line. 

Gina persuaded Brereton J of the NSW Supreme Court that the agreement between the parties made in 2006 to keep their disputes confidential entitled her to an interim suppression order. 

He kept that going for a while, then lifted it. Gina got a stay. Tobias AJA looked at it and reinstated the suppression order. An appeal court of three, including the Chief Justice, overturned Tobias on Monday (Dec. 19). Today she got another stay from Margaret Beazley JA, pending a special leave application to the High.

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, a spate of media portraits on Gina is about to emerge after being extensively legalled. Gina has not cooperated with any of them. 

The sudden interest is provoked, in part, by a Citigroup projection published in June (making a host of challengeable assumptions) that Rinehart will become the richest person in the world. 

It's just all so unfair. 

Pillsbury Flom reporting