[O]ne of Penn State’s insurers has claimed “in 1976, a child allegedly reported to PSU’s Head Coach Joseph Paterno that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky.”The order also cites separate references in 1987 and 1988 in which unnamed assistant coaches witnessed inappropriate contact between Sandusky and unidentified children, and a 1988 case that was supposedly referred to Penn State’s athletic director at the time.
I realize this is thin: “claimed”, “alleged” — however, Sandusky was on Paterno’s staff from 1969 to 1999. He has been convicted of molesting children between 1994 and 2008. According to the Freeh report, Paterno knew from 1998 on that Sandusky was a child molester. So, it’s not a major leap of faith to assume that Paterno knew long before then that something was up with Sandusky.
[email protected]
It is beyond an insurer claiming it. If it is included as the basis for a court order, it has been found to be a fact for the purposes of the coverage case.
WJS
How does anyone not understand that Penn State University enabled this man to spend decades in charge of a football program that shielded a pedophile from scrutiny? And how the hell did they “quietly” restore all those wins to his coaching record–as if that was the only thing that mattered.
You cannot separate Paterno from Penn State because they had a sick, symbiotic relationship that went beyond just football and revenue for the university. He was a power unto himself and acted without regard for anyone beyond his program. He knew that Sandusky would be the end of him and so he covered it up and was complicit in a crime. It was a textbook example of what can happen when no one leads, no one is in charge, and no one does the right thing.
But, yeah–football is the only thing that matters so shut up, right?
Keith P.
Clinton’s next commercial playing Trump quotes in 3…2….1….
LAO
I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in the early ’90s and when people used to ask where I went to undergrad, I would always say “Penn.” The response I would invariably receive, about 50% of the time, was “Paterno is the best.” I never corrected anyone — because, really who wants to be that douche.
Today, if it came up, I’d correct them.
Jerzy Russian
1976? Damn.
DanF
Thanks goodness that NC HB 2 law will keep creeps like Sandusky out of the girls bathrooms! Oh … wait a minute …
Anonymous At Work
And it’s even worse for the Paterno clan. They overturned the NCAA Settlement (to avoid a major program losing its only real money-maker) in order to get some wins back for their dead patriarch. Now, all wins since 1976 are on the table, not just a few dozen, but literally hundreds.
Anonymous At Work
@WJS: The family sued to overturn the portion of the Penn State-NCAA Settlement that applied to Paterno’s wins. They won and went away quietly. Now, this may bring it back and the NCAA may decide that it needs to strip more wins. I certainly would.
Gin & Tonic
@LAO: 50% of the time is not “invariably.”
Yes, I do want to be that douche.
LAO
The allegation, dating from 1976, may be thin but at best, it and those that were outlined in the Freeh report, demonstrate Paterno’s willful blindness to Sandusky and his egregious behavior. In other words, if he did not know, Paterno worked awfully hard to maintain his ignorance.
LAO
@Gin & Tonic: go right ahead.
lethargytartare
we should just nuke State College from orbit. it’s the only way to be sure.
Snarki, child of Loki
What did (former Gov, former State AG) Tom Corbett know, and when did he know it?
What really happened to the prosecutor in the district that includes PSU, that ‘disappeared’, leaving his laptop (without harddrive) in the Susquehanna River?
There’s something rotten in Happy Valley.
? Martin
@WJS:
PSU leadership changed constantly during such a long tenure and Paterno could increase his level of independence during this period. Once he had determined to hide this information, his independence made that easy. A serious organizational challenge is chain of trust. Paterno’s trust was established by earlier administrations, evidence by his independence. Later administrations extended that trust not because they trusted Paterno but because they trusted the earlier administration. It’s possible (not likely, but possible) that the administration never know of these claims, but a successful establishment of trust early on got inherited to successive administrations. We see that all the time in corporations and government at all levels.
Most likely all administrations knew of these claims, some (wrongly) dismissed the claims as unwarranted, and others trusted those dismissals. On top of that you have an institution comprised of individuals that aren’t particularly attuned to these kinds of issues. University administrators might be experts in social policy, but are pretty unlikely to be. One of the big complaints about the cost of universities is the cost of administration, but recently a lot of those administrative hires have been experts in mental health, public policy, and so on to fill in for the many gaps that inevitably develop in university leadership. Universities are small cities and need to carry many of the same levels of expertise as a small city. Historically they have not.
So, this isn’t really a defense of Penn State so much as an explanation for how these things can happen even with well-intentioned leadership. I refuse to accept that PSU leadership is evil in some way. Incompetent, sure – certainly at various times over that 30+ years, in various ways, and certainly some covering up took place, but there was probably a fair degree of institutional ignorance in the mix as well (and I’m not excusing that, just noting that it’s likely a lot of people that should have known and might have acted likely didn’t know).
? Martin
@LAO: That’s too generous to Paterno. Paterno knew. How much others knew is hard to say, but Paterno definitely covered this up. That’s the only way this could have stayed a secret for so long – it was compartmentalized in the athletics program, probably almost entirely in Paternos org chart. Too much independence to the athletics program is a fair criticism of PSU and universities in general here.
LAO
@? Martin: That’s fair. I certainly believe he knew, I was only offering a “best possible defense” argument.
I also agree that the lesson of PSU, is that administrators grant athletic programs too much power within universities.
Kay
People always say this about child abuse. It’s always a “master manipulator” who fooled them, not some obvious hack who would fool lesser folk. Then you look at the facts and you’re thinking “hmm, I don’t know how ‘master’ he was- this looks pretty blatant”. I’ve come to believe it’s a way of not looking at why “no one” knew- how much deliberate ignoring was going on. It’s really consistent.
WJS
@? Martin: They have laid the groundwork for plausible deniability, haven’t they?
burnspbesq
@[email protected]:
Go read the linked article, which quotes the order. You’ve jumped to an unfounded conclusion.
WJS
And it’s not just Penn State. The irreplaceable Charlie Pierce explains how Ken Starr and Baylor University are reaping their own God-given whirlwind…
burnspbesq
@LAO:
Ironic, because Al Bagnoli was everything Paterno claimed to be but wasn’t
EBT
Honestly, Penn should be banned from all NCAA events for all sports for life.
patroclus
The NCAA should have given PSU the death penalty when it had the chance and certainly shouldn’t have backtracked on the sanctions it did give. SMU got the death penalty for allowing its players to sell tickets and paying them small amounts of money while they played and then afterwards to keep them silent. Paterno covered up molestation for several decades and then allowed Sandusky to continue to have access to university facilities where he continued to commit crimes and there was never any institutional control. If they had received the death penalty for a year, they would have had the opportunity for a clean slate, a fresh start and later allegations (like this) wouldn’t have really mattered (to the university). Now, having gone relatively easy on the institution the first time, the issue has arisen yet again in this insurance claim and the whole issue of sanctions should be re-examined. But it probably won’t be. SMU gets the death penalty for repeated minor corruption; Penn State gets a brief bowl ban (to which they wouldn’t have qualified anyway) and some scholarship reductions for a year or so for covering up major crimes. This sends a bad signal.
burnspbesq
FBS football destroys almost everything it touches.
gvg
@Kay: I have only had a few encounters with documentation on child abuse but some of them did appear to be master manipulators in the earlier years and less so later. In one case that stuck in my mind, the abusive dad was a lawyer and originally very sucessful professionally and at convincing investigators that nothing was going on. However he was also outsmarting a poor system and moving counties and school districts whenever things looked like investigators might act. According to the documentation we saw, he was mentally deteriorating as time passed and eventually the courts actually removed the kids. The most convincing to the investigators was apparently 3 different girlfreinds in a row reported him. I can’t tell if the manipulators change or just a long trail makes lies less believable.
Another factor that annoys me is that many people just don’t want to know families aren’t all so nice or safe. Foster care here seems to really want reunification no matter what and it seems to be tied into many organizations religion. I really disapprove of Florida subcontracting out this work to private organizations that are nearly all run by specific churches. The results are too subject to group think and not cross examined enough. I have speculated that Paterno is of a generation that in my experience was too prone to flat not believing certain things happened, but that may be too generous to him. He should have known.
MattF
@Kay: In fact, there was a master manipulator in this case: Joe Paterno. He played the game so well– humble, devoted to football and to family values and to Penn. Why, exactly, did anyone believe him?
Kay
@gvg:
There’s a huge class thing going on with child abuse. Educated or better-off people are simply given a much longer “benefit of the doubt’ period. Part of it is they “speak” social worker and lawyer. They know what to say. They also have fewer state people in their houses or around their families because they don’t receive food stamps, etc.
LAO
@EBT: @MattF:
For the record, it’s PSU — not Penn. Penn is a whole different university. (I have finally become that douche).
D58826
@LAO: Being a Temple Owl, I would not have been one of them. Penn was and is always associated with Univ. of Pennsylvania./
Eric U.
If anyone doubts that Sandusky was a master manipulator, they just are ignoring the obvious. He took it to a whole new level. Having said that, Paterno always looked like he was eating a lemon when he was interviewed with Sandusky, so I think that proves the point. I have no idea why he put up with it though, that just baffles me. He had the pick of the best assistant coaches in the country, he didn’t need Sandusky.
I wish the NCAA had given Penn State the death penalty. I try not to say that to my students though.
People don’t give the institution itself enough credit for what was done afterwards. Short of sending out death squads for Spanier, I’m not sure what more they could have done. I would say Penn State has a better program in place now than just about any other similar institution. The alumni on the other hand, have a lot to answer for.
MattF
@LAO: So sorry. I really should know better (and I’ve got some Ivy League documents to prove that I should know better).
Kay
@MattF:
I’m not judging them for saying it but I do think it’s protective. They should maybe consider the possibility that something else played into why they were fooled, if for no other reason than some people weren’t fooled. Some people reported.
glory b
@Snarki, child of Loki: I saw the snarling, semi-hysterical response Corbett gave to a press conference question about why, when he was AG, his office sat on this information for years.
I thought , “Uh huh.”
D58826
@WJS: Charlie should tell us how he REALLY feels.:-)
LAO
@MattF: No worries. I thought it was funny in light of my earlier comment (#4).
scav
@patroclus: Well, on the whole, as I don’t think they demonstrate a lot of real concern about the long term physical well-being of their players — and the players academic standards are an even thinner charade — the college sports infrastructure commitment to mere non-players (sexually abused women, children) and what happens to them seems par for the course. The tickets etc, well that involved the movement of small green pieces of paper. Players are a renewable resource, the mere public only of interest if they plop money down for seats and teeshirts, but paper, green paper.
Jerzy Russian
@Eric U.:
This also baffles me. Had Paterno simply thrown Sandusky under a bus when he (Paterno) has first heard of any abuse, no one would have thought less of him.
narya
I don’t understand why the punishment is “taking away” wins. That makes no sense. The games were played, the score was what it was, and no one was cheating to win the games. Declaring that they somehow don’t count doesn’t change history.
scav
@narya: To a degree, baffling as it may be, the proof that it was a punishment of some obscure sort is their reaction to it: screaming and frantic little efforts to restore the paperwork.
D58826
@MattF: Based on the original time line, i.e. 1998 and 2003, I was willing to give Paterno a bit of the benefit of the doubt for the 1998 incident. Conservative, old school Catholic upbringing where even normal sex is a taboo subject. In addition the public at large was still in a sorta lets not talk about it stage. I know he had an entire university of legal, medical, PR experts to turn to and relieve him of the uck factor but people make mistakes. But by 2003 with the Boston priest scandal exploding it was a totally different situation and he should have gone up the chain of command and reported it to the university. Given his position of defacto head of PSU the administration would have had to act or he would gone public.
With this new allegation in 1976 and two more in 1988/89, you have to wonder how many more children were abused in those years. I can’t imagine that Sandusky just took a vacation from abusing kids between 1976 and 1988. In the end Paterno is just as big an enabler and co-conspirator as Cardinal Law in Boston.
As to the burning PSU campus question of what to do with his statue – grind it into small pebbles and use them for something useful like spreading on the snowy winter roads.
Hal
I remember a clip of Sandusky’s wife when one of his adopted kids was on Oprah being interviewed. She was a piece of work, and I still can’t decide if she’s in total denial or just as sick as he.
D58826
@Jerzy Russian: I have always said that if in 1998 (and now 1976) Paterno had gone public he would now be looked at in the same way as with Betty Ford and breast cancer and subsistence abuse awareness. He would have made it an acceptable and legitimate topic of public discussion
Mnemosyne
@patroclus:
IANAL, but that seems to be the most important part of the story, at least as far as PSU is concerned. It’s not just that Paterno knew Sandusky was a child molester, but that he let him keep using university facilities to do it. Makes one speculate if Sandusky had some kind of blackmail material on Paterno, or if it was just the fact that if you let a criminal get away with his crimes for so long, eventually you become a co-conspirator, and revealing that person’s crimes will reflect just as badly on you … which is, of course, exactly what’s happened.
WJS
@Eric U.: Joe Paterno was entirely about control. He wanted control over the program, control over how things were presented, and control over the athletic facilities at PSU. He wanted to run things his way without interference from the school or the media. In order to do that, you have to surround yourself with sycophants. Sandusky was no threat to him, but imagine what things would have been like if Paterno had retired in the mid-1990s and if Sandusky had taken over.
Bob In Portland
Sandusky must have been a really good assistant coach.
Lyrebird
Ugh.
And apparently some of the charges against Spanier have been reversed:
http://articles.philly.com/2016-01-24/news/70015302_1_elizabeth-ainslie-spanier-lawyer-graham-b
Frankly I don’t follow sports, and I don’t care about the number of wins… I figure the kids on the field won those anyhow. But I read some of Spanier’s emails, and if I were on a jury, I would be voting guilty for sure. Can’t find the link to quote… something like, gee we could call the police, but what might that mean for the university.
I said then & will say now, I apparently grasped more about mandated reporting as a two-bit substitute teacher than Spanier – a professor of family studies?? – ever has.
Anonymous At Work
@narya: Paterno was dead and punishing the school with more scholarship losses would be punishing people other than Paterno. NCAA rightly identified the item in Paterno’s legacy that would mean the most, his win total, and went after that.
Dadadadadadada
@Jerzy Russian: I bet Sandusky had some dirt on Paterno.
smintheus
The Inky has an inside source who states that Penn State settled with the kid who told Paterno in 1976 that Sandusky had molested him.
No One You Know
I grew up outside Philly, and now work just a few miles from “Paterno” building at Nike’s global headquarters.
One of my previous bosses stopped by my desk one day to ask why this “thing with Penn State” really mattered.
I couldn’t speak for a moment.
He’s from Louisiana, where football is a religion.
I finally said, “Why would God honor a Hail Mary pass at the price of a child’s safety?”
I left a few months later.
bystander
@Bob In Portland:
That’s why I’m wondering if he might be out in time to be Trump’s Veep.
Bob In Portland
@bystander: Ouch.
HelloRochester
I hate living deep in the midst of the football cult. The shameful behavior of everyone unwilling to take Paterno literally and figuratively off the pedestal makes me ill.