Tag Archives: Penn State

Penn State Cover Up

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It comes as no surprise to anyone who has been following the story that Penn State administrators were well aware of and participated in a cover up of former coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children. Sandusky is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of 45 criminal counts for abusing 10 boys.

A just released report includes a series of emails among school administrators following two accusations against Sandusky in 1998 and 2001. The emails make it perfectly clear that top administrators knew about the abuse, yet were more worried about negative publicity for the college and a possible scandal than the abuse suffered by the victims.

The emails also indicate that head coach Joe Paterno was aware of a 1998 case in which Sandusky was confronted about showering with another boy. The Hall of Fame coach died of lung cancer in January at age 85, without presenting his side of the story.

The report follows an eight-month inquiry by former FBI director Louis Freeh, who was hired by university trustees. Freeh concluded that Paterno, president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, and vice president Gary Schultz “failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.”

Had Penn State administrators acted on the information and banned Sandusky from bringing young boys onto the campus after the 1998 incident, they might have prevented more sexual abuse. Freeh called the officials’ disregard for child victims “callous and shocking.”

The NCAA is considering penalties against Penn State, and the Department of Education is examining whether the school violated the Clery Act, which requires reporting of certain crimes on campus, including ones of a sexual nature.

While the scandal has rocked the university and cost administrators their jobs, are penalties or sanctions against the university enough to change a culture that is out of control? When is society going to gain some perspective on the relative insignificance of sports?

The monetary rewards for collegiate athletes and their universities––and for professional athletes and the billionaire owners who pay them extraordinary sums of money to play a game––far exceed their value and contribution to society. Until we address these issues, we’re going to continue to see deplorable behavior surrounding athletes, coaches, and sports.

Success Without Honor

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Joe Paterno won 409 football games during his coaching career, but he lost the two most important battles of his life.

He had little choice in his losing battle with lung cancer. By all accounts, he wasn’t a smoker. Some have suggested that radon might have caused the tumor in his lung. High levels of radon are found in the area in which he lived. But whether the tumor was caused by genetics or something in the environment, poor choices didn’t cause or contribute to his death at 85. But he did make a poor choice in his second losing battle, and it’s a choice he’ll always be remembered for.

While at Penn State, detractors claim that his players often received special treatment, and some feel he stayed on too long, simply because he wanted to win more games. But neither of those arguments diminishes the positive influence he had on many young men, and the large amounts of money he donated to improve the Penn State campus.

Yet, for 10 years, while preaching his credo of “Success With Honor,” Joe Paterno let his former assistant, Jerry Sandusky, have access to the football facilities and to more young boys, which Sandusky molested.

Paterno first learned of Sandusky’s sexual abuse in 2002, when graduate assistant Mike McQueary reported seeing Sandusky with a young boy in the showers of the football complex. Paterno waited a day before reporting the incident to his superiors and did not go to the police. And he never confronted his friend Sandusky––nor did he ban him from the facilities. While administrators at Penn State covered up the incident, the abuse continued, and Joe Paterno continued to look the other way.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that Paterno actually did more damage to his and to Penn State’s reputation, than he would have if he’d come forward with the allegations in 2002 and demanded accountability for Jerry Sandusky. But he didn’t.

A credo is only as good as the person behind it. Joe Paterno, despite all his victories and accomplishments, ignored what he preached to his players, and in so doing, he lost the most important battle of his life. And he should rightfully be remembered for it.

Penn State Cover-Up

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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.