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Amazon Users Reacted Strongly To Jerry Sandusky’s Unfortunately-Titled Autobiography

Remember a week ago, when a comment frenzy erupted below an ESPN.com post about Tim Tebow with a near-constant flow of “[x] > Tebow comments,” to the point people started calling it OccupyTebow? Well, we might never see a comment torrent of that magnitude again, but we couldn’t help but think of it when we looked at this.

That’s the Amazon page for the autobiography of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State defensive coordinator who was recently charged with some of the worst crimes imaginable. The autobiography – unbelievably, considering the nature of the allegations against Sandusky – is called Touched. It hadn’t attracted much attention from Amazon users until the charges against the author made national news. And then, “reviews” started pouring in. Naturally, many played on the sad irony of the title:

100% false advertising by Mr. Sandusky. Not a single page in this book “touches” on how to appropriately gain the trust of young, at-risk boys, and then use that trust to perpetrate horrifying sexual assaults on the very children who turned to you for guidance and support.

When it comes to touching, there’s nobody I know of that can better call upon 40 years experience of bad touch than one Jerry Sandusky. Stay hard Jerry. You sick piece of excrement. JoPa you aren’t clean either buddy.

Seriously? What a slap in the face to all of his victims! A book titled “Touched” written by a pedophile.

If the decision makers at Amazon have any morals, they’ll make this book unavailable.

In prison….Jerry will be the one getting touched. This guy won’t make it a year in prison before the other inmates take him out.

There are 34 reviews in all. Most of them are one star. The highly-rated ones aren’t sincere. And all of them – as well as the book’s page on Amazon, period – are still up. The discomfort that Sandusky could actually profit from the selling of this book while standing accused of heinous crimes is understandable, but on the other, this page is one of the most raw outlets we’ve seen for the disgust so many feel.

That, though, still might not be enough. It’s entertaining in a sick kind of way to see just how harsh people can be toward a person who for all the world appears to deserve the worst people can dish out, but the tradeoff is…again, this is a page for Sandusky’s book. For the most part, the fact that this book was actually named Touched has brought Sandusky even more negative attention, but it’s still more attention for something on which Sandusky could potentially profit. He doesn’t deserve that attention, and if we were at Amazon, despite the fact that we were also serving as something of a living document to the backlash against Sandusky, we’d be leery about giving that attention to him.