PROBABLE CAUSE

As if college sports needed another black eye, now we have the Penn State sexual abuse scandal and the alleged cover-up, apparently orchestrated by deposed Penn State president, Graham Spanier.

Not only did Spanier fail to report the brutal rape of a child in the football locker room on Penn State’s campus in 2002, he then testified before the grand jury that he was told only that the boy was engaged in “harmless horseplay” in the shower with former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. This claim was contradicted by the testimony of Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant who said he directly witnessed the child being raped and testified under oath before the grand jury that he told Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno as well as the athletic director, Tim Curley, and the vice president for business affairs, Gary Schultz, what he saw.

Now an email from McQueary has surfaced saying that he stopped the alleged attack in the team’s showers and went to police. So what version of McQueary’s story is correct, the one in the email, or the one he told the grand jury? And if he did report the sexual assault to the police, what did they do about it?

Head football coach Joe Paterno told the grand jury that he reported the incident to Spanier as a “sexual assault,” thereby calling into question Spanier’s testimony. The grand jury ultimately determined that Curley and Schultz committed perjury. But if Curley and Schultz lied, it seems apparent Spanier lied, too. So why hasn’t he been indicted for perjury? Also, Pennsylvania state law required Curley, Schultz and Paterno to report the charges to the police, which they didn’t.

The whole sordid affair also calls into question Joe Paterno’s judgment and responsibility or lack of it, since twenty of the current charges against Sandusky occurred while he was Paterno’s defense coordinator at Penn State. After McQueary reported the sexual assault, Curley and Schultz told Sandusky that he could no longer use Penn State football facilities while accompanied by children. Now that’s punishment benefiting the crime.

Yet, as late as 2009, Sandusky was on campus running a sleep-away camp for boys as young as nine years old. One alleged victim told the grand jury that Sandusky brought him to a Penn State preseason practice in 2007––a full five years after Paterno was made aware of the shower rape.

Spanier admitted approving the actions taken against Sandusky, including taking away his keys to the locker room. But if Sandusky was engaged in nothing but “horseplay” why was he forbidden to use the campus and its facilities? It strains credibility to assume Sandusky’s conduct was not sexual given previous reports of inappropriate sexual conduct with children, including the sexual exploitation of two boys in the Penn State locker room showers in 1998. In his testimony to the grand jury, Spanier claimed he knew nothing about the 1998 investigation, despite the fact that the incidents were investigated at length by outside law enforcement officials.

But the alleged lies and cover-up may go even higher than Spanier.

Current Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett took the case on a referral from the Centre County district attorney in early 2009 while he was serving as attorney general. So why has the investigation taken nearly three years? Part of the problem may be that only one trooper was assigned to the case after the state took it over in 2009, according to a report in the Patriot-News of Harrisburg. After Corbett became governor early this year and his former investigations supervisor in the attorney general’s office, Frank Noonan, became state police commissioner, seven more investigators were assigned to the case, the newspaper said. Again, why the delay?

Some have suggested that the case was kept under wraps until after Joe Paterno broke Eddie Robinson’s record for victories by a Division I coach last October. Given this case’s shocking history and the win-at-all-costs-mentality that dominates sports today, I’m not surprised.