We Didn’t Know: The Lie That Keeps America Sick

Over the weekend, the U.S. launched strikes on Iran. Another flashpoint, another escalation. Another in a series of unnerving signals that we’re living inside an accelerating machine, too fast to grieve, too loud to think. Every week brings something new to react to, and still, somehow, the things we don’t talk about are the ones that shape us most.

That’s where this post begins.

I watched the new HBO documentary about Ohio State University and the decades-long abuse Dr. Richard Strauss inflicted on thousands of young men during his tenure as a professor, team doctor, and head of the student health center. Like so many others, I thought I already knew the story. But the documentary did something different: it centered the victims and their voices. It forced a reckoning, not just with what happened there, but with a pattern we’ve seen again and again.

Penn State. Michigan State. The Catholic Church. Evangelical megachurches. These aren’t isolated failures. They’re proof of a culture—a distinctly American one—where abuse isn’t just ignored. It’s protected. It’s denied. It’s buried beneath institutional polish and public discomfort.

We’ve all heard the lines. “They didn’t know.” “They did everything they could.” “What more could they have done?” But that question is rarely sincere. It’s not curiosity, it’s a script. A shield to protect comfort at all costs. Because if we actually stop and examine it, the answer is almost always the same: they knew. And they chose not to act.

At Penn State, Jerry Sandusky was seen by a staffer sexually abusing a child in a university shower. That staffer didn’t stop it. He didn’t call the police. He waited and told Joe Paterno later, in the comfort of the head coach’s living room. And Paterno, one of the most powerful men in college football, did the same thing: nothing meaningful or even rational. He kept coaching and working alongside Sandusky for years. And when it all finally came out, all he could say was: I told my supervisor. I don’t know what else I could have done.

First of all, if you witness a sexual crime against a child, who thinks, “I should tell my supervisor”? That’s not a normal response. That’s not what you do when you see a child being harmed. And even if that instinct somehow felt appropriate, let’s be honest: nobody supervised Joe Paterno. Joe Paterno was Penn State. He was the king of Happy Valley. He didn’t need permission. He didn’t need a chain of command. I guarantee you he had the chief of police’s home phone number on speed dial.

After his sudden passing, his family took up the same line. His wife and his son Jay hired their own investigators, held press conferences, cried on TV about how unfair it all was. Joe didn’t get his day in court. Joe didn’t get due process. But here’s the thing: they never once asked what the victims got. They never asked what justice should look like for them. They never once stood beside them and said, I’m sorry that the perpetrator and his family won’t even give you the dignity of admitting what happened.

Because the priority was never healing. It was legacy. It was about preserving reputation and controlling the narrative, even when the truth was staring them in the face.

And that’s the part that makes me sick—because I know what it means to be on the other side of denial.

I was sexually abused as a child by a daycare worker. For years, I didn’t have the language to say it out loud. When I finally found the words in my late teens and early twenties, I was met with confusion, doubt, and outright denial. Christian counselors (unlicensed, church-referred) told me I probably imagined it. That it couldn’t have happened. That trauma like that almost always happened differently than we remember.

Because I had also expressed to my parents that I was attracted to other boys, I was referred to Christian male counselors who claimed they could help young men “stay straight.” That was the phrase. As if queerness was a cliff you could be pulled back from. As if it were a disease you could be talked out of with enough prayer and shame. And those same counselors told me that the reason I was attracted to other boys was because I had been abused. That somehow the trauma I couldn’t even get them to acknowledge had not only defined me, but distorted me. So first they told me it didn’t happen. Then they told me it explained everything. There was no truth in any of it. Just a cycle of denial, blame, and confusion disguised as counsel.

And here’s the part that would be laughable if it weren’t so cruel: many of those counselors openly admitted they had ‘struggled with same-sex attraction’ themselves. That’s how they were positioned as qualified. They’d “overcome it.” They were “living proof” you could too. Except they hadn’t overcome anything. They were still drowning in the same internalized shame and repression they were trying to pass on to me.

Instead of healing, I got humiliation. Session after session, I was expected to confess, to describe my urges in detail, to perform shame on command under the guise of spiritual guidance. But the truth is, some of those men weren’t there to help. They were there to feed on it. One in particular asked questions that veered from counseling to voyeurism. I could tell he wasn’t listening to help. He was enjoying, fetishizing it. And while it never crossed into outright abuse, the exploitation was clear. I was in my early twenties by then, and thankfully I had the sense to walk away before it got worse.

Years later, I found out that same counselor had been caught in an inappropriate relationship with one of his male patients. Threw his wife and family into chaos. He lost the platform he never should have had in the first place. And I wasn’t surprised. I had felt it. That gut instinct had been real, and I had gotten out just in time. But here’s what stunned me: no one said a word. Not the pastors who had sent me to him. Not the church leaders who vouched for his authority. Not even my parents. No one came back to say, “We’re sorry.” No one checked in to ask if I was okay. No one acknowledged that what happened was wrong, or that I had been right to walk away. The only people who did were my friends, the ones I had told at the time, who later heard the fallout and quietly reached out to say, “We knew something was off.” But no other adult or person in power. No one who helped orchestrate those sessions ever took responsibility for the harm.

That’s the thing people miss. These men don’t operate in secret. They are seen, they are felt. People talk, but no one acts. Because acting would mean admitting the truth. And admitting the truth would mean holding someone accountable.

I know that script because I lived it. When I spoke my truth, I was told to be quiet, to question myself, to protect the people who hurt me or wouldn’t believe me. That same dynamic was playing out at Ohio State.

Jim Jordan, now a sitting member of Congress, was a coach during the years Dr. Richard Strauss was abusing athletes—hundreds, possibly thousands of them. According to multiple victims, Jordan knew something was wrong. He took part in locker-room conversations where Strauss’s behavior was openly discussed. It was common knowledge: if you went to see the team doctor, no matter the injury, you’d be asked to drop your pants.

And when the story finally broke, Jordan didn’t offer support. He didn’t express shock or remorse. He didn’t apologize. Instead, he insisted he knew nothing. When victims asked him to stand with them, he shrugged off their pleas, doubling down on his denial. When they called him out for knowing, he called it a political smear campaign. Then he did something even worse: he reached out to some of the same men who had accused him of staying silent and asked them to publicly defend him.

What kind of man responds to other people’s trauma that way? What kind of man turns to the people he failed and begs them to protect his reputation?

Maybe the kind who has his own ghosts. There are black-and-white studio portraits of a young Jim Jordan in a wrestling singlet, taken by none other than Dr. Strauss himself. Strauss often offered “free” photo sessions to athletes, promising headshots, modeling exposure, or help landing sponsorships. Several former students recalled how those sessions went: how Strauss would encourage them to remove more clothing, how the sessions blurred into something else, how his camera became just another tool of exploitation.

So no, I don’t believe Jim Jordan was unaware. Whether as a student-athlete or later as a coach, there is no way he didn’t see it, no way he didn’t feel the discomfort in the room. The truth was right there in front of him, and like so many others in positions of power, he made the same decision to protect the brand, protect yourself, and call the victims confused.

We have a sickness in this country.

And it’s not just abuse. It’s the refusal to confront it. The instinct to protect the powerful, deny the wounded, and treat truth as if it were the threat.

That’s what nationalism has become. A fortress built on deflection. In Happy Valley, residents mourned the loss of a statue more than the pain of a generation. One resident in the documentary scoffs about a reporter “probably from New York,” as if coastal geography discredits someone calling for accountability. It’s MAGA logic. Big city reporters. Outside agitators. Fake news. The real threat isn’t what happened, it’s who told you about it.

But that posture didn’t start with MAGA. It’s the same one white America has taken with slavery, with Jim Crow, with police violence and reparations and redlining and every chapter since. The story is always the same:

“I didn’t do that.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“It’s not my fault.”

And because no one wants to be blamed, no one takes responsibility. The guilt gets passed down, but never the reckoning. The harm lives on, but the accountability does not.

Look at the pattern. Sandusky never admitted what he did. His wife and children still deny it. Paterno’s family still insists he did nothing wrong. No one in power has modeled what it means to say, this was wrong and here’s how we begin to make it right.

And while they spin their excuses, truth itself becomes a pawn in their game. We’re bombing nuclear sites in Iran, and our leaders say we’re not at war. Jim Jordan lies to his victims’ faces and gets promoted to Speaker Pro Tempore. The people in power bend reality until it suits them, and then dare us to question it.

This is why accountability matters—not just for the past, but for the future.

Accountability doesn’t mean punishment alone. It means telling the truth, acknowledging harm, and showing what repair looks like, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it is.

Because until we stop choosing comfort over courage, myth over memory, and legacy over life, we will keep repeating the same harm. We will keep failing the people who need us most. And we will keep living in a country too afraid to tell itself the truth.