It's a full court press from the Paterno family. From Sue's letter to the lettermen released on Friday to the release of their rebuttal report "The Failure of the Freeh Report this morning to Sue Paterno's interview tomorrow on Katie Couric's show -
Forget the young men who testified the horrors of abuse at the hands of Jerry Sandusky, forget the cover-up discovered in Penn State's bought and paid for Freeh Report - the TRUE INJUSTICE HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED TO JOE PATERNO. (I think I speak for both Rebecca and myself - clicking on this link will show our true feelings of Joe Paterno).
But in reading through all of this, something was nagging at me. Their "expert" - Dr. Fred S. Berlin. Where had I heard his name before?
So I did a little internet research...
Dr. Fred s. Berlin was the premier apprentice of Dr. John Money, whose work is included in the foundations of NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) - from their now defunct website (via cache):
"If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who's intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way."
~ John Money, Professor Emeritus of Medical Psychology,
Johns Hopkins University, in an interview in
Paidika, Spring, 1991.
Dr. Paul McHugh's served as an Expert Witness for the US Catholic Bishops in 2003
[McHugh] is a member of the National Review Board, which the bishops created in 2002 to also oversee the implementation of their new policies. It's the same board that commissioned a landmark 2003 study on the prevalence of abuse, which found that more than 4,000 priests, or about 4 percent, were accused of abusing close to 10,000 minors in 1950 to 2002.
(McHugh is a colleague of Dr. Fred Berlin and, as Dr. Reisman argues, while McHugh tries to distance Berlin from his previous mentor, Dr. Berlin has never repudiated his mentor publicly).
Money and Berlin were founders of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins. McHugh ran the Sexual Disorders Clinic for years before his retirement.
John Money, professor emeritus of psychology at Johns Hopkins University, gave an interview to Paidika about "genuinely, totally mutual" sex between boys and men. In the introduction to a Dutch professor's 1987 book called, Boys and Their Contacts With Men: A Study of Sexually Expressed Friendships, Mr. Money wrote that opponents of pedophilia are motivated by "self-imposed, moralistic ignorance."
Reference: Robert Stacy McCain, THE WASHINGTON TIMES. Washington Times [Washington, D.C] 19 Apr 2002: A02.
Dr. Fred Berlin serves not as a witness for sex abuse victims or for the prosecution, but rather for the defense in cases such as child molester,Rabbi Jerrold Levy, Jeffrey Dahmer and more recently Cary Stayner
Dr. Fred Berlin, a psychiatric expert in sexual disorders, testified Levy’s attraction to teenagers was a preoccupation he couldn’t control. An obsessed Levy — who spent up to five hours a night on the Internet — knew what he was doing was wrong, but it was as if he had a gun to his head, said Berlin, founder of Johns Hopkins University’s sexual disorder clinic, in Baltimore.
Berlin, who examined Stayner, 41, for about four hourson Oct. 1, described him as a pedophile who was obsessed, and sexually aroused, by images of children in sex acts that ran like a feature-length movie through his head.
During the 1980s, the
Money-Berlin clinic guaranteed sex criminal applicants that nothing they did while they were clinic patients would be reported to the authorities.
Throughout his career, Dr. Berlin has treated patients or been an expert witness in highly visible cases, ranging from those of the most notorious child molesters and serial killers to a former university president who pleaded guilty to making obscene telephone calls.
For that, and his vocal defense of the confidentiality of patients' criminal activity, Dr. Berlin has earned the scorn of child advocates, victims' rights groups and prosecutors who point to what they describe as the clinic's "failures." They cite patients and former patients who have returned to deviant, and most often illegal, behavior.
[Dr. Berlin] has been a consultant to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse since its inception.
An interview was conducted in 1997, excerpts of which are below
Q. How many victims does an abuser usually have?
A. We can't give a single answer to that. I have seen the entire spectrum from abusers who have had contacts with literally hundreds of children to those who had contact with one child and never repeated it. So any statistics that say that all abusers victimize either a very low number or a very high number of children need to be looked at, in my opinion, in a very critical fashion.
Q. Do you find that this applies to priest abusers as well?
A. Yes. We also have to be careful about what we mean by abuse. All of it Is wrong, but if, for example, the pattern of the individual is to pick up teenage prostitutes standing on street comers three times a week and this has been going on for 10 years, that adds up to literally thousands of victims. However, that is not the same as introducing a naive child into sexual activity.
Q. What would be the range of sexual activity that you would find in priest pedophiles? A. "In priests, we rarely see the physical or assaultive kinds of behavior. It’s very rare to
see rape other than statutory. The most common thing we see with priests is that they
enjoy the company of youngsters, like the companionship, want to do good for them, and then, unfortunately, as a bond develops emotionally, begin to feel sexually tempted and persuade the youngster to go along with sexual activity. That’s the most common
scenario that we see in a priest. Of course the youngster, in respecting the priest and in feeling that the priest is not going to lead him astray, is at a tremendous disadvantage
[italics added].
Q. Do you see a difference in how the Catholic Church deals with this problem now as compared to the early '80s when people began to learn that sexual abuse of minors existed in the Catholic Church?
A. I have met a number of extremely conscientious and dedicated priests who are absolutely determined to do everything they can to deal with this problem as effectively as possible. I personally believe there has been too much Church-bashing. The Church has made mistakes -- we've all made mistakes -- and sadly there may still be mistakes that individuals will make as time goes along. The notion that somehow priests in general don't care about the well-being of children, or that they're insensitive to their parishioners, or that they would turn a blind eye and allow children somehow to be harmed -- that's not true. From what I've seen of all the hard work, there's a tremendous dedication to doing everything possible to minimize these kinds of problems and, to the extent that they can be eliminated to try to do that as well.
And, in his
own words Commentary on Pedophilia Diagnostic Criteria in DSM-5:
Human beings differ in sexual makeup. Most adults are not sexually attracted to prepubescent children, but some are. Societal values can be of relevance in determining whether such a difference is considered to be a psychiatric condition. Were a society to believe that adult-child sexual interactions should not be prohibited, such a difference might not be viewed as a disorder
This is just one of the "experts" in defense of Joe Paterno.