The woman who laid down for Louis Freeh.

With the Freeh Report being more publicly discredited every day most recently by Tim Lewis, a former federal judge and prosecutor representing former Penn State president Graham Spanier, who characterized the report the same way its been characterized here for weeks, as a dishonest, biased, incompetent factless document with biased preconcieved conclusions drawn solely by its author, with no evidence to substantiate them, its a good time to remember that a few weeks ago, at the outset of the release of the Freeh Report, another in a long line of incompetent, dishonest and unprincipled journalists, this one, Ann O'Neill writing on CNN's web site, wrote a piece called "The Woman Who Stood Up to Joe Paterno".

The woman Ann O'Neill was talking about was Dr. Vicky Tripony who was head of Student Affairs at Penn State for a short time and, as her interview with Freeh made clear, deeply resented that she was not able to administer what many considered her outrageous, Draconian, sledgehammer ideas of discipline that she leveled at other students, onto Paterno's players as well.

 O'Neill, showing the same lack of journalistic competence or integrity that permeates the news media as a whole,  nevere  bothered to even try to interview anyone else in a position to know before writing her factless "me too" article, if for no other reason,  to see just how much truth, if any, was contained in the Freeh Report's presentment of Tripony's view of things.

But like the others in the torch carrying mob known as the media who were intent on using the Paterno name for their own ends, whether it was to call attention to themselves or to ring the cash register, the truth mattered little.

Reading O'Neil's article its clear she never considered the fact that Paterno had been at Penn State for 60 years and that there were heads of Student Affairs before Tripony and after and none of them had the problems Tripony whines about. We know this because Freeh didn't include anyone in Tripony's position other than Tripony herself in his report, substantiating the charge that Freeh had an agenda and Tripony was able to advance it and others wouldn't. We know this for a fact because it was corroborated by Tim Lewis who reported that many of those he interviewed to who were in turn interviewed by Freeh, told him that Freeh was not interested in any facts or information that didn't support his preconceived ideas of how he wanted the report to read and any attempts to present facts contradictory to what he wanted was met with hostility.

 So O'Neill's entire piece was based, not on any facts, not on anything she actually knew, not anything she found out as a purported journalist, not on any information she learned first hand, but on a set of factless assumptions she made based on the Freeh Report which she seems to have read with the critical eye of a Druid reading the Book of Kell.

When the Freeh report came out and Tripony's interview was highlighted by news organizations, I received a lot of email from former Penn State students who had experience with Tripony, students who are now Ph.D.'s or practicing lawyers or in other professions. They painted a picture of Tripony as something of a cross between Nurse Ratched the sadistic nurse in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and Annie Wilkes, the Cathy Bates character in Stephen King's "Misery". She never took a sledgehammer to anyone's knees as Wilkes did but a lot of students seemed to think she would have liked to.

Though obviously not definitive in and of itself, no one who sent any emails had anything good to say about Tripony who according to reports, tried to rule Student Affairs like a burgomeister in an occupied European town in WWII. She closed down long standing protocols that had existed for Student Affairs, like the ability of students to appeal her decisions to a board made up of faculty and students. She also threatened to close down the university student radio station unless it was placed under her complete control where she and only she would decide what it could say and what it couldn't. She gave students two choices -- relinquish all control to Tripony or shut the radio station down. Under Tripony, Radio Free Penn State came to an end.

 In short Tripony had issues. And in reading her interview in the Freeh Report one could tell she was clearly livid that Joe Paterno, who did in fact have much more prestige and power than Tripony, refused to allow his players to be subjected to Tripony's tyrannical and Draconian ideas of discipline, and insisted that he would discipline players who violated rules himself.

 By all accounts Paterno was not lenient with his players when they were guilty of infractions or violations. But Tripony seems to be infuriated that she couldn't pull her Annie Wilkes act on Paterno's players as she did on other students. The sense one gets from her interview with Freeh is that her frustrations were based more on her feeling thwarted in her desire to punish Paterno's football players and having her authority to do so diminished than anything else.

 Tripony didn't last long at Penn State and based on other articles written about her as far back as 2002, never did have a great reputation among students in her previous job at UConn either. Eventually she was told by Penn State that she would be better off finding employment elsewhere and was shown the door.

 This is who Ann O'Neill decided to portray as a hero based solely on her reading of the Freeh Report and like any factually deficient journalist, too lazy to find things out for herself . Instead she did what most journalists have done whether its about Paterno and Penn State or Washington DC and politics and policy -- lay down for an authority figure. O'Neill bought everything Freeh had to say without bothering to check facts, and simply joined the mob so she could pile on too and pretend that made her a good person. It didn't.

 Ann O'Neill, who decided it wasn't necessary to talk to any Penn State students, never talked to any heads of Student Affairs who were at Penn State before Tripony or after about their experiences with Paterno, never did a moment's research on her own, simply decided her assumptions which were based on a report concocted by a man with a 15 year documented history of dishonesty and investigative corruption, mattered more than finding out facts for herself.

 Ann O'Neill became one more in a long line of journalists, lacking in journalistic integrity or journalistic competence who, like others before her, laid down for Louis Freeh. And as the saying goes, when you lay down with dogs you get up with fleas. And no doubt Ann O'Neill is still scratching.

NOTE: The  new animation satirizing the Freeh Report can be seen clicking on this link.