Hot on the heels of yesterday’s news about Harvard’s iCorpse house of horrors, the New York Post ran this unbelievable headline: “Penn State Professor Themis Matsoukas Accused of Performing Sexual Acts With His Dog: ‘I Do It To Blow Off Steam’.”
I’ll tread carefully; this is a family blog, after all.
Themis Matsoukas, 64, is a longtime Penn State chemical engineering professor and also an Elizabeth Warren donor, unsurprisingly. Matsoukas was arrested this week after an Alan Seeger State Park trail camera — recently installed to nab some pesky hand sanitizer thieves — caught the award-winning professor wandering around buck naked (he kept his shoes and socks on), masturbating in the open spaces, and — worst of all — molesting his border collie.
He was just trying to get closer to nature.
Recovered video also showed Matsoukas trying to self-record his eclectic adventures using a silver iPad. So the rangers organized a canine rescue mission and got a subpoena to search the professor’s house. According to the police report, when officers arrived and served the subpoena, Matsoukas seemed nervous. And when they asked for the silver iPad, the transgressive professor broke down crying.
“I’m done, I’m dead, you don’t understand, I do it to blow off steam,” he emotionally explained to the investigators. As the officers pressed Matsoukas to produce the incriminating tablet, the situation worsened: the award-winning professor actually begged the officers to kill him.
“What do I have to do to get you to shoot me? I need to die,” he pleaded.
According to unnamed authorities, evidence collected from his home showed the Penn State professor has been doing this sort of thing since at least 2014. Court records show the professor was arrested on Monday and charged with one count each of sexual intercourse with an animal, cruelty to animals, indecent exposure, open lewdness, and disorderly conduct.
He will first appear in court on July 19th. In the meantime, he’s been suspended from teaching at Penn, and his dog has a new home.
There are several takeaways here. First, as we saw in the Harvard story, the good news is society has not yet descended into utter depravity; law enforcement treated this abhorrent bestiality seriously and brought Matsoukas to justice. It seems clear his arrest was a blessing to everyone including himself.
Unfortunately, as with the Harvard story, nobody’s calling it evil, perverted, or shameful. The New York Post did call his behavior “sickening displays,” which was on the right track.
I’ll say it. Penn State’s award-winning professor’s behavior was evil, perverted, shameful, and was ALSO a sickening display.
It was curious that Matsoukas begged for death. Ironically, he was asking for Biblical punishment. Bestiality is covered in the Bible — so it’s clearly been a problem for a long time — and death is the immediate Biblical remedy. (Lev. 20:15-16.). But we are more enlightened these days, or something, so the professor will only get jail time instead of capital punishment.
More interesting, to me, is the question of how the highly-regarded professor who had everything most people ever want could mentally descend to the point he was asking the cops to kill him. Not only did Matsoukas de-humanize himself, but he was also begging to get caught. I mean, he was doing it in PUBLIC.
The question that preoccupies me most is: What is stopping whatever happened to Matsoukas from happening to anyone else?
You cannot write him off as crazy, because he functioned extremely well in all other areas and concealed his conduct for years. Crazy people can’t hide their illness, not for long. Ditto for some kind of biological imperfection. It’s totally unrealistic to say a tumor or brain malformation would only affect THIS particular taboo temptation.
Nor can you say the science professor had his own values and thought what he was doing was okay. He clearly knew it was wrong. For one thing, he tried to hide it. Plus, the reports of his behavior upon arrest perfectly describe a man so ashamed he’d rather die.
Matoukas knew it was illegal. He knew exposure would be utterly humiliating and career-ending, if not life-ending. He was a highly-educated member of the élite class. He was a scientist. He had a great life, apart from his sordid, criminally hedonistic pastimes, that is.
If he knew it was wrong, and he wasn’t crazy, and he knew the stakes, but he couldn’t stop and was obviously trying to get caught so someone else could stop him — what was going on? WHY?
I don’t have a theory, not any scientific one. To explain this, I would have to lean into my faith and say the guy was possessed by a demon who toyed with him and then destroyed him. It was unglamorous, self-destructive, abject evil.
Still, I’m open to secular explanations. What do you think?
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