Story of sexual abuse victim’s efforts to overcome demons spotlighted on Dan Le Batard podcast - PennLive

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The reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal appeared on the Dan Le Batard & Friends South Beach Sessions podcast this week to discuss a new project focusing on a young man who said he was a victim of Sandusky’s serial pedophilia.

Sara Ganim told Le Batard that her goal is to shine a light on a piece of the Sandusky story that, 10 years later, struck her as dramatically undercovered: The long-term ramifications of childhood sexual abuse for the victims, and seeming lack of accessible treatment options that address the intersections of trauma and addiction.

The resulting podcast, “The Mayor of Maple Avenue,” was the result. The podcast, which debuted last week in partnership with PennLive and Meadowlark Media, was the result of a call that Ganim received several years ago from Marianne Sinisi, a grieving mother from Altoona who, unable to save her son, was now trying to help others with similar demons.

• LISTEN TO MAYOR OF MAPLE AVENUE: Apple Podcasts, Spotify

Her son Shawn self-identified as a Sandusky victim shortly before the former Penn State football coach’s 2012 criminal trial, but spent the last 13 years of his life unsuccessfully battling the drug addictions that had taken hold as he tried to cope with the trauma of the abuse.

He died from an overdose in a Pittsburgh McDonald’s restaurant in 2018. He was 26.

“I knew as soon as she called me that it was a part of the story that we hadn’t really considered,” Ganim told Le Batard’s “South Beach Sessions.” Le Batard is a former radio host for EPSN, podcaster and co-founder of Meadowlark Media.

“What are victims of all of these movements, all of these headlines that we so eagerly write about and read about — what are the victims dealing with after the bad guy goes away?” Ganim said. “I had not considered all of these consequences and I felt like that was an important story to tell.”

Ganim, a former PennLive reporter and CNN correspondent, said she found that too much of society still tends to look at addicts as people who made bad choices for themselves.

And within the therapeutic community, addictions are too often siloed into a one-size-fits-all treatment approach that doesn’t give enough consideration to the underlying traumas that cause some to turn to substance abuse for escape in the first place, she said. Layer in low standards for care and leaky regulatory oversight, and there are a lot of cracks for the vulnerable to fall through, she said.

Shawn Sinisi had a chance to get the right kind of help, many believed, in 2018, when a firm hired by Penn State to provide counseling services to people who may have been abused by Sandusky agreed to send Shawn to a highly regarded rehab center — one that treated both trauma and addiction.

But Shawn was expelled from the program after one week.

“What if the first rehab he had gone to 10 years prior had that philosophy (of trying to treat the underlying causes of the abuse)? Had those resources?” Ganim asks. “I think you would have had a different outcome to the story.

“At the end we blame the victim,” Ganim said. “Just another addict who got caught up in a dark underworld and made a choice. That’s what you hear all the time - made a choice to do drugs and had this coming to him. I’m hoping to peel back that oversimplified look at addiction and trauma and... reframe it quite a bit and see it with more nuance.”

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Story of sexual abuse victim’s efforts to overcome demons spotlighted on Dan Le Batard podcast - PennLive
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