Interview: Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod on the Untold Crimes of a 1970s Football Player

Burn It All Down

Sports

4.5 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

***Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions sexual violence.** In this episode, Jessica Luther speaks with ESPN reporters Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod about Untold, their recent feature that dives deep into a Penn State football player who terrorized women in State College, PA and near his home in Long Island, NY in the late 1970s. We talked about how they came to this story, why it was important to tell four decades after the fact, the complications of memory, the long lasting effects of trauma, and what, if anything, is different now than in 1979. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. For show notes, transcripts, and more info about BIAD, check out our website: www.burnitalldownpod.com To help support the Burn It All Down podcast, please consider becoming a patron: www.patreon.com/burnitalldown For BIAD merchandise: https://www.bonfire.com/store/burn-it-all-down/ Find us on Twitter: twitter.com/BurnItDownPod; Facebook: www.facebook.com/BurnItAllDownPod/; and Instagram: www.instagram.com/burnitalldownpod/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to burn it all down.
0:02.5	And I'll set you out.
0:04.5	And I'll play with your babies to the screaming shout.
0:08.4	Oh, yeah.
0:09.5	Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need.
0:13.4	Jessica here.
0:14.7	I know before we get started, today's interview will contain descriptions of and discussion of sexual assault and rape.
0:22.0	So if you're not up for this right now, you might want to skip this interview.
0:25.4	Today I'm joined by two award-winning journalists Paula Levine and Tom Jinnow.
0:29.8	Last week, they published a long investigative piece for ESPN titled simply Untold.
0:35.3	It's about a Penn State football player, Todd Hodney, from the late 1970s,
0:40.1	who raped multiple women in Happy Valley before being convicted for one of those crimes.
0:44.9	But a judge, Richard Sharp, let him go, post-conviction, pre-sentencing, and Hodney returned home
0:50.6	to Long Island where he committed another slew of horrible violent rapes.
0:54.6	He served prison time, got out, and harmed again, eventually spending the rest of his life behind bars.
0:59.8	This piece is harrowing, a warning for all who will read it after hearing this.
1:04.1	But it's brilliant, both the reporting and the writing.
1:07.3	It's about football.
1:08.3	It's about Penn State.
1:09.3	It's about Joe Paterno.
1:10.7	But it's also about memory, about who and It's about Penn State. It's about Joe Paterno. But it's also about
1:11.7	memory, about who and what are forgotten and why, and about what it means to tell a story decades later.
	...

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