VIEWPOINT | The cost of silence: A conversation about accountability in South Dakota
Guest column by Everett Palmer
Denny Sanford recently died at the age of 90. He lived a long, full life and leaves behind a legacy measured in billions of dollars given away. You cannot overstate the impact he had on South Dakota. You do not have to look far to find his name on a hospital, university, scholarship or building development. Nearly every South Dakotan has, in one way or another, benefited from his philanthropy. His generosity helped improve countless lives, and those contributions deserve to be acknowledged.
But philanthropy is not the only thing Denny Sanford should be remembered for. His legacy is more complicated than that. It is important to say that out loud.
In 2019, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received a cybertip involving an email account owned by Denny Sanford. The information was forwarded to the South Dakota Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and the Division of Criminal Investigation. Investigators identified 36 image files of child sexual abuse material in his email account. The images consisted of three unique photos, repeated several times, of three girls estimated to be between the ages of 8 and 15 years old.
