Identity theft: Who am I?

Infringing on someone’s personal space, threatening or doing wrong to a family member, or stealing someone’s identity – all of these can leave one feeling violated. My husband and I have experienced different types of identity theft in recent years that have unsettled us and left us raw.

About eight years ago, my credit card was hacked by someone in the State College area who had $600+ worth of ATV equipment mailed to an Ohio address. It was an easy fraud to spot on my statement. The credit card company canceled the card, sent me a new one, and advised me to notify the local police, who suggested I put a password on my identity. That meant that if I traveled out of the country, I would need to provide my password to get back in, so that no one could steal my actual identity.

I decided to do that, then promptly forgot about it, so when a year later I was pulled out of line on a trip home from Toronto and told to go to Passport Control, I grumbled without remembering why. Despite an empty office, I was told to sit. I waited nearly a half hour before an agent called my name, then asked dispassionately “What’s your identity password?” I froze. I had forgotten all about it. I responded meekly, “Is there a hint?”

 “No hints,” she hissed back. “What’s your password.”

And then, like those eureka moments in classic cartoons, the word appeared like a light bulb going on and I blurted it out. Somehow, I had pulled it from the dark recesses and was able to resume my journey – well, not immediately because this delay had caused us to miss our flight.

I had the police remove that tricky identity precaution as soon as I got home.

***

The credit card identity theft was more of an inconvenience than something that felt personal. That was put into perspective even more when I sacrificed a job for my husband’s job only to have his supervisor treat us as pawns in a game leaving us both questioning our identities.

When my husband was asked eleven years ago by his chairman to take on an additional role to serve as orthopedic consultant to the Penn State football team, we talked about it. He didn’t really want the job, but his chair was desperate because he had told my husband that the Penn State athletic administration had required him to remove the current team doctor, and he, the chairman, didn’t have time to take on that duty, which left my husband as his solution to this sticky problem.

Because they had always had a good working relationship and my husband respected his chairman and considered him to be a friend, he decided to take the position. It meant that in addition to three days of clinic and surgery in Hershey as well as administrative duties as head of the Bone & Joint Institute and the Sports Medicine specialty and associate directorship of the residency programs, he would now be adding four days a week in State College taking care of the football team.

 A year later, his chairman asked him to take on another role as Director of Athletic Medicine for all 31 sports at Penn State. Since I taught composition and ESL full time at Penn State’s Harrisburg campus, this meant we were spending only three days a week together now. Scott lived out of a State College hotel the other four days.

In 2016, after three years of this crazy lifestyle, we decided to purchase a condo in State College to make it more comfortable and convenient for Scott to be more accessible to his Penn State duties, and so that I could spend more time with him there. That meant quitting my full-time teaching job at Penn State Harrisburg.

 Time to reinvent. I’d been teaching college composition and tutoring since the early 2000s after having gone back to school when my nighttime newspaper editing career didn’t fit well with raising our then school-aged kids. Suddenly, I was an empty nester and also jobless.

 While in Hershey, I volunteered as a graduate support director for a middle school for disadvantaged inner-city boys in Harrisburg, tutoring and advising their graduates at seven local high schools. While in State College, I volunteered as an ESL tutor and eventually also worked as an academic tutor at Penn State’s Morgan Academic Center for student athletes.

 For six years, Scott and I led double lives – his by far the more taxing as he worked seven days a week attending to all of his duties both with Penn State athletes and at Penn State Health in Hershey. On top of that, he also still covered many PIAA state championship events. He worked tirelessly while I stumbled along trying to feel relevant without a full-time job.

This non-stop life came to an abrupt halt in late January of 2019 just after we had returned from a trip north to visit our daughter who was working in Saratoga Springs. The day after our return, Scott’s chairman called him into his office to inform Scott that he was being removed from his Penn State athletics positions because the athletic director said if he wasn’t removed, they would contract with providers outside of Penn State.

Ostensibly, he was being removed because he didn’t live full time in State College, but Scott believed otherwise since he had never once been asked to move to State College full time nor had his chairman relieved him of any duties in Hershey so he would have more time in State College. It was, he contends, because he stood up to coaches who wanted him to change his medical decisions.

***

 Scott didn’t fight his dismissal, but he did create a list of recommendations that would prevent coaches from interfering in medical autonomy to help protect student athletes from coaches driven by wins, big pay checks, and sponsorship contracts. He asked his chairman for feedback and to help enact them, but his chairman never did anything with the proposals. He never agreed to talk about these issues, and instead, he put the former team doctor that he’d been “forced” to remove in 2013 back into the job again.

Scott had worked hard to change the medical culture for Penn State athletes including improving the conditions for the many athletic trainers who covered the teams as well as for the athletes by bringing doctors to their training rooms instead of requiring athletes to go to the doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospital. Now, with no response from his chair, he had to watch as everything he had worked so hard to improve began to unravel.

From as early as 2015, Scott had begun recording his concerns about coaching interference in medical decisions up his chain of command to both his chairman and the athletics integrity officer at Penn State, a position to independently examine claims that had been required after the Sandusky scandal and that Penn State chose to keep after the NCAA sanctions were removed. Scott had met regularly with the integrity officer, and after his removal, reported that and his beliefs that he was being removed because of clashes with the football coach over medical care. The integrity officer told him that his investigation was favoring Scott. Then … nothing. Penn State hid the investigation report behind the cloak of attorney-client privilege.

Scott decided the only method he had left to help draw attention to a need for medical autonomy and physicians who would stand up to coaches was to sue for wrongful dismissal from his duties. He feared that his removal could put the student athletes at risk. With his proposals to fix the system ignored by his chairman, an investigation that went silent, and no one else to turn to, he made the extremely difficult decision to file the lawsuit.

*** 

Suing the university he had always loved created a conflicting loss of identity for Scott. I had always joked that Scott “bled blue.” As a former national champion wrestler for Penn State, he had a lifelong allegiance and appreciation for his alma mater. He was proud to work for Penn State Health and to take care of athletes from high school through college and professional levels as a Penn State provider. He always joked to our children that they could “go to any campus of Penn State they wanted.” Our son did go to Penn State for architecture, while our daughter went to Wilson College for a veterinary degree not offered at Penn State.

 It pained him to file the lawsuit. It was also difficult for his attorney, a former national champion gymnast at Penn State. Both of them shared a love for the Nittany Lions, but now, they had to climb a mountain and walk into the Lions’ den.

*** 

The trial originally opened on March 11, but it ended almost as soon as it began when in her opening statement, the Penn State Health attorney mused about why Scott hadn’t sued the football coach, before pausing, “Oh, he did, but it was dismissed.” Scott’s attorney immediately objected, the judge called the attorneys to the bench, and before you could blink, a mistrial was called. Why? Because she had not explained that the suit against the football coach and Penn State athletics had been dismissed over a filing technicality – it had missed the deadline for a whistleblower suit by three days. This omission could create a prejudice in the minds of the jury who might assume it was dismissed because the suit held no merit, which was not the case.

In the brief part of her opening statement that she was able to get in, the Penn State attorney had started a character assassination of my husband, which she only continued in the trial that was held May 20-29 at the Dauphin County (PA) Courthouse. She called my husband someone who seeks the limelight, who seeks to be photographed on the sidelines, who enjoys prestige, who was a bad communicator, and much more – all things that Scott’s attorney was able to easily refute with every witness, even the hostile witnesses.

Although her accusations against Scott were almost laughable, it was yet another attempt to distort his identity – our identities – everything we are and stand for. It was all I could do to sit quietly as she fired off these mischaracterizations with disdain. It became the backbone of our attorney’s case to show how wrong she was.

***

Around the time the trial started, I realized that I was no longer getting the credit card text alerts sent to my phone that I had signed up for years ago to stay on top of any possible fraudulent charges. I signed into my account online to discover someone else’s email and someone else’s phone number there. We had been hacked again.

 We changed our account password. My husband called to check into this and had the fraudulent email and phone number removed. The bank closed out that card and sent us new ones a few days later.

 We activated the new ones when they arrived, only to get a call a day later from the credit card company asking about suspected fraud on a charge for $2,500 to a shop in Sheffield, England. Nope, that wasn’t our charge. Yes, it was fraud. They closed out the new card, and said they’d be sending another new card.

 A few days later, the second set of new cards arrived. Before we activated them, we checked our account online and again saw the same fraudulent phone number listed. This time when my husband called, he canceled and shut down the account.

 How ironic that during the middle of a seven-day court trial in which my husband was fighting to protect student athletes and medical autonomy, and also to vindicate his character and identity, we again were the victims of identity theft.

 I’ve struggled with my identity for many years now. Nothing feels more like a violation than being robbed of a livelihood and an identity. Who am I? Do I even matter anymore? Those were questions I’d asked myself frequently in the nine years since I had quit my full-time teaching job.

My husband’s loss of identity was even more of a violation. He had never asked to be put into the position he took only to help lighten his chairman’s burden. What he learned during testimony in his trial was that he had been played like a pawn. His chairman testified that he had never wanted my husband in the job and he’d always intended on returning his friend (the former team doctor) to that position.

I hope his former chairman comes to see how he affected not only our lives, but also the lives of student athletes and other medical staff members. Really, what he did was even worse than credit card fraud. He played with our lives and by doing so, he took our identities and our livelihoods from us. As the jury verdict in favor of my husband proved, his former chairman is the real fraud.

 For press coverage on this trial, go to https://www.pennlive.com/sports/2024/06/fired-penn-state-football-doc-hopes-525m-verdict-reminds-nittany-nation-integrity-comes-first.html?outputType=amp or https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/40242103/penn-state-scott-lynch-doctor-james-franklin-verdict or https://local21news.com/news/local/former-penn-state-football-doctor-wants-players-health-to-be-top-priority-not-scoreboard#