The anonymous Victim One in the Sandusky case has withdrawn from his high school because of bullying. Why? Read it and weep:

Officials at Central Mountain High School in Clinton County weren’t providing guidance for fellow students, who were reacting badly about Joe Paterno’s firing and blaming the 17-year-old, said Mike Gillum, the psychologist helping his family. Those officials were unavailable for comment this weekend.

The name-calling and verbal threats were just too much, he said.

And people still wonder why it takes molestation victims years to come forward. Lord have mercy. Central Mountain High School, the shame is yours.

This is the dark side of small town life. The same kill-the-messenger phenomenon, but without the sex, could be seen 30 years ago in the small south Louisiana town of St. Gabriel. A local pharmacist, Kay Gaudet, noticed something odd and troubling:

First she started tracking the number of miscarriages in this tiny Mississippi River town. Then came the newsmen and the publicity. And at that point, her business slowed to a trickle.

“It was like you could notice it overnight,” she said.

What Gaudet found out was startling. In this community of 2,100 people, 63 women suffered 75 miscarriages in a three-year period from 1985 to 1988. One woman who lives next to a benzene plant has had four miscarriages in a row, including twins. Gaudet began to ask if there might be a relationship between the miscarriages and the smoke that belches from the petrochemical plants along the river. Others now wonder that as well.

I helped produce a segment for German television on this case. You would think that the town would have been thankful to Gaudet for exposing the possibility that they were being poisoned by petrochemical discharges from area plants. Just the opposite happened. People didn’t want to know it. Those plants were the economic lifeblood of their community. The community pressure on Gaudet and her husband got so bad, she told our TV crew, that their priest asked them to leave the parish.