'Untold': Behind the BIG Story with ESPN Magazine's Tom Junod

Henry Schein is pleased to support Fast Chat and its outstanding contributions to inform and inspire consumers while sparking important and positive change through its award-winning conversations.

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Today we are so fortunate to have with us Tom Junod from ESPN Magazine, and we want to talk to Tom a little bit about long-form journalism, which he is one of the masters of, but also we want him to take us behind the scenes of his latest piece called Untold. So Tom, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, Jaci.

No, we're thrilled to do it. So you just did a massive piece for ESPN. Now I want you to kind of give the elevator pitch of what Untold is about because you know the story best.

Well, it's about a serial sexual predator who played football for Penn State in the 1970s who attacked— he has 5— he attacked 5 women that we know of in Penn State, and then, um, when he was able to come back to Long Island, he attacked 7 or 8 more.

Okay. All right, so what made you tell this story when you did?

Well, when I was, um, 21 years old, it happened, and I was living on Long Island. I was working on Long Island. And I knew some of the players in the story. I knew Todd Hodney, is the name of the football player, and I knew him as an opponent in the Catholic High School Football League. I played for Holy Trinity. Todd was a superstar player at St. Dominic's in Oyster Bay. There were some social interactions between Holy Trinity and St. Dom's. I knew one of Todd's girlfriends. I knew someone who was related to him through marriage, so I knew about Todd, and I still remember the shock of reading the Newsday article that said that he had been arrested for a series of rapes notable for their brutality on Long Island. All I had known about Todd Hodney at the time was that he had left St. Dominic's in glory and had gone as a linebacker to Linebacker U, which was at the time. Penn State. And, you know, I expected him to become a big star, and he became a serial sexual predator instead. So that story itself hung with me for a really long time. I don't know, you know, I wasn't even a writer at the time. I was thinking of becoming a writer. I was, you know, starting to keep a journal. I was doing a lot of reading. But I had really no feasible plan to become a writer. And in fact, I became a handbag salesman right out of college, and I moved down to Dallas, Texas. But I kept writing, and I kept, you know, kept keeping that journal. And a couple of summers ago, when I got Lyme disease up on Long Island, took a look at some of my old journals, and there was a note in the journal I made in 1981 to one day write about Todd Hodne. So it was, it was definitely a story that had stuck with me for a really, really long time. And then in 2020, when I heard that he died in prison, Mm-hmm. I decided to try to write something about him. My first idea was to write an essay about all the prisoners who were dying of COVID in New York at the time. I had understood, or I had heard, that Todd had died of COVID But so I started doing a little bit of research, and I talked to another St. Dominic's player who had also gone to Penn State. And when I asked him to tell me about Todd, you know, my question was, what was Todd like before the crimes? And his answers— his answer was, which crimes? Um, and that's when I first found out what I didn't know, what really nobody knew because it wasn't told, which was that Todd had committed a series of crimes while he was at Penn State, while he was, um, still on scholarship with the football team.

Got it. Okay, so that began what turned out to be a 30,000-word story. Which is a massive commitment, both in time and resources, both on your part as well as ESPN Magazine. So was there, you know, I look at this and I say, okay, right now in the world we're living in, the average news story is about 400 words. So you're unlike the others right now, you know. Did you have to sell ESPN on doing this?

Well, there was a a couple of things that happened.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, one, you know, I had just come off leave. I had taken a short leave to try to finish a book that I've been writing. Did not succeed in finishing that book during that leave, but I came back to ESPN and was starting to look for stories. And so I was in really constant contact with my editor, Eric Neal, who, you know, was looking You know, hard for a story that I could sort of sink my teeth into. I don't think that they— anybody understood or foresaw that the story that I started that in the summer of 2020 was going to be the story that it turned out to be. But that question of what he had done and why the story had gone untold, why nobody knew it, given the number of the crimes and also the seriousness of the crimes, was really the question that drew me further and further along as we kept going. So much so that ESPN, you know, gave me a partner in the story, which— who is Paula Levine, who is a great investigative reporter who has broken many, many large stories about sexual abuse and athletic departments at Michigan State, at Baylor, and at other schools. And I had worked with Paula on a couple of things before. We had, we had worked on a story about sexual abuse in the Auburn softball program. So we knew each other, worked well together, and You know, Paula is a force of nature as a reporter. So I, you know, I had to keep up with her and she had to keep up with me. We really formed a great team.

Okay. If it hadn't been for Paula, how do you think the story would have turned out? I'm wondering, you know, what part of the story you handled and what part she handled. How did it come together?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question because, I mean, we both, I would say, you know, shared, you know, even the reporting work, quite equally. But, you know, Paula is extraordinarily well-versed in the process of getting publicly available documents through, you know, FOIL and FOIA requests. She's, you know, she's a veteran of that system and she knows its ins and outs. So she, you know, did a lot of that work. But the place where Paula really, really contributed was Once we found out through some of those public documents about the names of the victims, Paula was able to make those calls. And she was, she was, you know, I mean, not just this, but she was brought in to make those calls. You know, I mean, that was when we realized that there were victims alive, and that it was going to be our obligation to call them.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, that was— that went right to Paula, and that was always meant for Paula. And she had a remarkable success rate at getting women to talk to her.

Mm-hmm.

There, there were, um, 8 victims still alive because, you know, time has passed. It was, it was, you know, age and the depredations of age that had, you know, taken some of them. Um, but there were 8 of them, all, all but one called her back, and 6 of the 8 talked to Paula, and then the husband of the 7th talked to Paula. So, I mean, that's extraordinary. And I would have made those calls.

Mm-hmm.

But I don't think that I would have made them like Paula. I learned a lot from Paula during it, 'cause we worked together on the story for— For almost 2 years.

Okay.

And during those 2 years, um, I learned a lot about calling victims and allowing victims to tell their stories from Paula. It was, it was a really important experience for me as a journalist. I mean, I've been doing this a long time, but, you know, you still learn and you still find out stuff. And I definitely learned a lot while doing the story.

Is there a way you could describe her technique of what she taught you?

Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, the big— the biggest difference is that I would have made those calls, but I know that I would have felt bad about making those calls. I would have felt that I was re-traumatizing women who had suffered terrible trauma some 40 years earlier. I mean, these were crimes, you know, these, these women had been attacked by Todd Hodne when they were, you know, really most, most of them in their 20s. There was one teenager. And there was one woman in her 50s who had since passed away. But, you know, these women were mostly attacked in their 20s, and now mostly in their 60s. And they had, you know, borne this burden for the vast part of their lives. And I would have gone in there thinking— I would have been guilty. I would have been guilty and somewhat apologetic about it. But Paula just didn't look at it that way. She looked at it that she was giving them the chance to tell their stories after all this time. And they did. And it's what made— you know, it's what makes the story to me, you know, really so significant is that their voices— there's so many voices in this story. And they, you know, many of them speak of the attacks as if they happened yesterday.

Really?

And it's the, you know, it's the chorus of voices in that story That made the story what it was.

Yeah. Now, this was what, a 2-year commitment?

2-year commitment. I made, I made my first call to Tony Capozzoli, who was the St. Dominic's quarterback who had gone on to Penn State around the same time that Todd did. He knew Todd back at— back in the St. Dom's days. And from— that was in June of 2020, and it was published on April 11th, 2022.

Okay. At any time in this process, did you think this story just isn't going to happen?

Many times. Yeah, yeah, there's many— there was many times in the process we were working really hard on finding out what happened in State College, what happened at Penn State, and why didn't anybody know about it, and why wouldn't anybody talk about it. And there were moments when we just, you know, we just thought that Everything had been destroyed because every time that we called anybody about it, we either were not allowed the documents or we were told that they had been purged as part of, you know, sort of routine retention programs, or received documents that were so redacted as to be worthless. And We received, you know, so the— our first— the first phone call was in June 2020. Our first big break in reporting was when Paula did a FOIL request with the State College, or the Centre County Courthouse. We got a bunch of documents that gave us the name of one of the victims because she had gone to court against Hoddon and succeeded. in bringing a case against him. So we got her name, but we also got a piece of paper that Paula, I think, as she has described it, she had to beg for. And it was about a detective going to the athletic dorm, or what was really the functionally athletic dorm since Penn State prided itself at the time as not having athletic dorms. It was just the dorm where all the athletes happened to live. But it was about a detective going to that dorm, talking to Patad's roommate, and asking him about 5 different women on 5 different occasions. And it was just in there, and everything was redacted. We had— we got essentially no information. Even the player, even the, you know, the roommate's name was redacted. But we knew it had happened. From that, we knew, we knew that there had been other attacks. Going on at Penn State while Todd was on scholarship there. So it took us another— that was October of 2020. We finally found the names of everybody and the dates of the attacks in late May 2021. I got those through the man who had prosecuted Todd Hodney for the murder of Jeffrey Hirsch when he got out of jail on parole in 1987. He prosecuted Todd Hodney. He became a judge, but he was so convinced of the danger that Todd Hodney represented that he kept track of his investigative files. And he offered me his investigative files, and it contained everything. And then we were able to do the, the final sort of stretch of the story, which was involved, you know, Paula calling every single victim whose names that we had.

You working with your editor, I mean, you didn't just hand him 30,000 words and say, here you go.

Yes, Eric Neal is, is my editor. And we, you know, we've always worked really closely. We— I'm not an outliner. But, you know, Eric and I— so we worked— there was a team of 4 people that did the story. So ESPN, I mean, I give them massive props on this. They invested a lot in this story. They invested me, they invested Paula, they invested Eric, and they invested another editor named Laura Pertell, who did just a wonderful job as well. So it was a team of 4. And we were working together pretty much all the time and having pretty frequent meetings. And then in, you know, in September of 2021, there was like one of those meetings and we were like, okay, we got what we got, let's outline the thing. And so we, you know, over an hour and a half, we spent that time outlining it. And I don't outline, I'm not an outliner. But this story, we already knew that this story was going to be long. And so We outlined it, and then in the beginning of October, I wrote a— in a couple of weeks, I wrote a really, really long first draft that came back, and it was, you know, it was greeted with polite enthusiasm, I guess, you know. And then polite enthusiasm is definitely not what you want when you've invested all of this time and—

Yeah.

And resources in a story. So I took another shot at it and another 30,000-word draft. It didn't, it didn't get any shorter. And then that 30,000-word draft went, was, uh, went online as a Google document that everybody could kind of take a shot at.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. And say, you know, when I mean everybody, I mean the team of 4. And it was just one of those things. It was From, from the point of view of the guy who wrote it, the original draft, it was just torture.

You know, it was like, you know, this needs work and that needs work and this needs work and that needs work.

But, you know, from that came a really good working draft. And then Eric did his edit. And then we spent the next 2 months like tweaking every line.

Okay. And I assume legal counsel took a look at it too?

It is, it is a story that has been lovingly handled from, I mean, from the first word to the, to the very last.

Yeah, okay. So let's fast forward to since it's been published. Have you gotten any reaction to it?

Yeah, it got a, it got a really strong reaction. It got, um, I didn't, you know, you, you go and you, um, publish a story that is over 30,000 words long, and that is about a series of crimes that took place in the late 1970s.

I mean, you don't know how many people are going to read it, but it turns out that a lot of people read it. It— I was amazed by how many. It was— it really had a large and very engaged readership. And there was also something that came out of the story that was— It wasn't unexpected, but it was like a grace note.

And that is, you know, in—

inside the story, there is the story of, um, Betsy Sailor and Irv Pankey.

Mm-hmm.

Now, Betsy Sailor was one of Todd's victims, and she— and she was one of Todd's victims in State College. And of all the women who were attacked in State college. She was the one who was able to bring Todd to justice. And the price she paid for doing that back in 1979 and bringing a football player to court was isolation. And one night when she was in her dorm room, there was a knock on the door. And as she described it, Wonderfully.

She's opened the door and literally the biggest man that she had ever seen just doorway from one side of the doorframe to the other.

And he stuck out his hand and he said, hello, my name is Irv Pankey. I want to tell you that I went to court the other day and I saw you and I believe every single word you said. And you will never have to be on this campus alone again. I will escort you where you need to go and I will protect you. And, uh, Paula got that story in her interview with Betsy. I called Irv and he confirmed it and, you know, elaborated on it.

Yeah.

And in September of 2021, we brought Irv and Betsy back together in State College for a documentary film called Betsy and Irv. And they had not seen each other. They were not romantically involved at the time. They had not seen each other since 1979, since it happened. And they were united, reunited. And Nicole Norin from ESPN made a film called Betsy and Irv. And it's a short film and it's really beautiful. And so we posted that along, you know, with the story. And in a Twitter thread, I told the story of Betsy and Irv, and it went viral. It was really a wonderful experience. I mean, things go viral for bad reasons often on Twitter, but this was something that went viral for good reasons on Twitter. And we got like over 100,000 likes, 20,000 retweets, and this and that. And for a while, there was a time when it became like a Twitter catchphrase was, be like Irv. So that was, you know, it's a really, you know, you've read the story. It's a really graphic and dark story. I mean, we don't blink at anything. And the attacks that Todd Hodne perpetrated back at that time were really, really brutal. And then plus, when he gets off on parole, he kills a cab driver with 4 children. And that's all in the story, but there is this sort of, you know, moment of goodness, and, um, people, people really responded to that as well. So they responded to the darkness, but they responded to the light, and you can't really ask for much more than that as a writer.

Because you do talk of light and darkness, which makes me think of the story. To your mind, what makes a good story? What are the elements that you need to really capture people?

Well, I mean, I am— I have always been really, really interested in, you know, moral ambiguities in a story. And this story was very much about that. I mean, it's very clear-cut that Todd is the bad guy. I mean, but there are a lot of people in the story, including Joe Paterno, the coach of Penn State, who You know, have a role in it. And what— I mean, Todd Podnie tested everybody.

Mm-hmm.

He tested the women he attacked. He tested the coaches, you know, who found out about the attacks. He tested his, you know, roommates, who were aware that he was doing something, but couldn't quite say what it was or wouldn't quite say what it was. So he tests everybody, and that's what really the whole story to me is about. It's about people's assumptions about themselves being tested by the presence of evil. And that's why the— that's why it was so important for, um, Paula to be able to talk to the victims. I mean, that they survived him—

Right.

—is miraculous. I mean, he came at them with— I mean, he was 240 pounds. He was known as a very, very hard hitter on the football field. And he came at them with viciousness and desperation and cruelty, with everything he had. And that they survived him makes them, to me, the heroes of the story. And that we were able to talk to all these women who were able to summon who they were then and who they are now, who they became in order to surmount that, is the story's You know, to me, to me, it's, it's, it's, it's a big achievement.

That is a great moment in storytelling, isn't it?

Yeah.

To be able to bring that out. Now let me ask you though, as a former handbag salesman, you spoke at your alma mater recently.

I did.

So what did you tell the students there?

Well, um, I told— it was really about the importance of telling a story and having a story and knowing that you have a story and And I was even able to bring the story of Irv Pankey and Betsy Saylor to the podium. I mean, the other thing that was— that the commencement speech included was a recounting about how I got started, how I made it from being a handbag salesman to being a magazine writer, and then also a little bit later on about my friendship with Fred Rogers. handbag salesman to writer, Fred Rogers, Earth, Penky, and Bessie Saylor. Those are my 3 kind of primary ingredients. But really, it was about the importance of, you know, why, why are stories important? You know, uh, what's— why do we like to hear them? Why do we need to hear them? Why is it important to understand that We each have our own story. And, you know, I came to the conclusion Irv Pankie presented Bessie Saylor, which you are not alone. I, you know, I think that that is the most important part of storytelling and story consuming, the, you know, the knowledge that we are not alone in this world. And— but that also that things can change at any moment. And you never know how the story is going to end. I was a handbag salesman. I wanted to be a writer. I didn't know if I was going to be a writer. I had no idea how to pursue a writing career. But I got held up at gunpoint in my hotel room when I was in Los Angeles on a business trip. And it was a harrowing experience. came close to being executed. And after that, I was no longer a handbag salesman. I was a person with a story. And the first thing I— the first nonfiction thing I ever really wrote was an account of that night. I never published it. I never tried to, but it was the thing that started me as a writer. So I told that story. I told Fred, I told Irv, and I said, I think my last line was, uh, you are not alone. So that's, that's what I wrote about.

Well, thank you, Tom Junod. We're already out of time.

Okay, wow, I was just getting warmed up.

Any last comments you want to make though before we sign off?

The thing that, the thing that I, I, well, I mean, I get— I have a comment about the story and I have a comment about Writing. And this— the thing about the story that makes the story important was that people had a chance to stop Todd Hodne and didn't. I mean, this is— I know that you, you are in Long Island right now, and I know that you probably have a fairly large listenership in Long Island. No, he, he terrorized Long Island in the spring of 1979, but he terrorized Long Island After he was convicted of first-degree rape, first-degree— I mean, a bunch of very, very violent crimes, and he was somehow set free, after which he escalated his attacks and really was a— was, um, you know, one of, one of the more brutal, um, sexual predators that Long Island has ever seen. And And a lot of people had the chance to stop him and didn't. And that's really what, you know, the other thing that the story is about other than people being tested. Well, that's part of their being tested. And so my, my, you know, it's a, it's sort of a cry for, for people taking responsibility when they know that something is amiss.

And I would think that resonates today, especially with so much going on in this world.

Right, right. So that's the one thing I wanted to get in about the story. And as far as, you know, storytelling, I think that this, you know, the story also proves that people will read long stories. I mean, the readership was, I think, was stunning to me, but I think it was also stunning to ESPN. And that's a really good thing. The fact that— the fact that people at this stage of the game will sit down in large numbers to read an extremely long and extremely detailed and graphic story was heartening to me about the future.

The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization Advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org.

This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-suite-radio.com.