Late Night: Jon Stewart rips Jerry Sandusky’s interview
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So far late-night comedians have tread lightly on the sex-abuse scandal at Penn State, but Jerry Sandusky’s interview earlier this week with NBC’s Bob Costas proved too much for Jon Stewart to bear.
On Tuesday’s ‘Daily Show,’ he unleashed scorn on the former Penn State coach and accused pedophile. He began by criticizing Sandusky’s decision to conduct the interview over the telephone: ‘It seems to me when you’re accused of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, you may not want to literally phone in your defense on national television.’
Asked if he was sexually attracted to young boys, Sandusky repeated the question back to Costas. Not a good move, according to Stewart. ‘Everyone knows the only time when you answer with a question is when you’re guilty,’ he said. ‘You can’t even bring yourself to lie emphatically. It’s like in that phone conversation you’re fighting the urge to come clean.’
Sandusky claimed that Mike McQueary had misinterpreted some innocent ‘horseplay’ as sexual abuse, but Stewart wasn’t buying it: ‘Horseplay is wrestling your friend out of a pillow fort, throwing your nephew in a pool, various other things that would never be mistaken for rape.’
But the host reserved his harshest words for Sandusky’s lawyer, Joe Amendola, who insisted that, yes, he would allow his own children to be alone in the presence of his client. Stewart suggested that Amendola, who once fathered a child with one of his teenage clients, might not be the best person to answer this kind of question. ‘What kind of creepy guy club do you both belong to?’ he wondered. ‘If you’re accused of sex with minors, maybe your criteria for finding a defense lawyer shouldn’t be ‘also has issues with sexual boundaries.’’
In the end, Stewart found it ironic that Sandusky, a defensive coordinator, was so lousy at coordinating his own defense. ‘It’s easy. You could have called the prevent defense, or the prevent-me defense,’ he said. ‘When the ball snaps, pull all your [bleeping] lineman, and send everybody to prevent you from moving 50 yards within a kid.’
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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— Meredith Blake