By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
One of the most enduring questions of the child rape scandal at Penn State is what role did head football coach Joe Paterno play in the decision to grant his ex-right-hand man, Jerry Sandusky, carte blanche to prey on children. In a statement immediately after the scandal broke last November, Joe Paterno claimed that he reported what little he knew, did what he could, and that he wasn’t fully aware of the gruesome particulars:
“As my grand jury testimony stated, I was informed in 2002 by an assistant coach that he had witnessed an incident in the shower of our locker room facility,” Paterno’s statement read. “It was obvious that the witness was distraught over what he saw, but he at no time related to me the very specific actions contained in the Grand Jury report. Regardless, it was clear that the witness saw something inappropriate involving Mr. Sandusky. As Coach Sandusky was retired from our coaching staff at that time, I referred the matter to university administrators.”
And that’s where he left it — with the intended impression that a good (but not fully informed) man did what the university’s protocol dictated and hesitated to do more because he didn’t want to jeopardize the process. Law enforcement was quick to say that Coach Joe was not being charged for failure to report the crime and this seemingly official exoneration gave PSU fans reason to breath after the heinous allegations caused them to hold their breath. St. Joe may not be the smartest 80-year-old coach around but he was clean!
In an article in the Washington Post, Paterno again demurred saying, “I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was, so I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”
For good measure, Paterno even gave us the doddering, old coach routine telling us that … dadgummit …:
“… I don’t know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it.”
Me get involved to protect my program? Nope, just following the protocol. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He’s just doodling “X”s and “O”s. Nothing to see, here.
JoPa’s family was quick to his side saying the old coach was a character guy with little familiarity in the ways of the modern world — like emails which he never used — nor of sexual perversions that never plague the pristine sidelines that are his kingdom. Joe was everything good about college football — integrity, victory with honor, and players graduating on-time. Old players came from every direction to talk about the man and the smear campaign against his ideals and of those who would topple his station as America’s college coach for their own undisclosed but obviously jealous purposes.
ESPN football analyst and former NFL player and executive,Matt Millen, spoke for the Penn State alums:
Penn State’s program has always been above everything else, largely because that is what Joe espoused and lived. Was he perfect? No. Corrected them and owned up to them. That is what set him apart.
All of that might have sold gladly to the Nittany Lion faithful had not a damning series of emails recently come to light uncovered by former FBI chief, Louie Freeh’s ex-G-men, whom the university hired to investigate the tragedy. Seems Vice-President Gary Shultz, whose responsibilities included overseeing the university police, kept a secret file with emails about the dilemma of “What to do about Jerry?” after the grad student’s report of child rape in the Penn State locker rooms. As discussed in my previous post, university administrators were in unanimous agreement to turn Sandusky over to authorities until AD Tim Curley ( A Paterno protege’ and former Penn State QB) had a heart-to-heart with old, feeble, above-the-fray, Joe. Miraculously, the plan changed from following the law to following your heart and giving Sandusky a chance to reform. It’s all about redemption and “humanizing the university” as former PSU President Graham Spanier might say. Though, even “Erasmus” Spanier was enough of a realist to recognize the danger of the plot. “The only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we become vulnerable for not having reported it,” he softly protested.
But an article today in the Chronicle of Higher Education shows that JoPa could wield an rusty, iron fist when he needed to, and could use emails when it suited him. The emails, leaked by someone investigating the fiasco, show that Paterno considered himself the final arbiter of justice when it came to the Penn State football program. Paterno deftly used an associate’s email account to establish the boundaries of his power with PSU officials with just enough ambiguity to make his supervisors blink.
The story begins in 2007 when as many as two dozen PSU football players launched a melee against other students in the off-campus Meridan Apartment complex resulting in six players facing nine felonies and 18 lesser charges for battery and assault. Penn State’s Office of Judicial Affairs (OJA), who investigated the fight, called it “brutal in nature. ” The brawl was about retribution. “We went there for revenge,” one player said. “We had a reputation to uphold,” another player said, according to the documents at the OJA. (Obviously, these two missed the Matt Millen lecture).
Paterno wanted it gone and renewed his demand that PSU’s rule penalizing students for off-campus transgressions be repealed. It wasn’t. However, even as President Spanier was perplexed about what to do, Coach Paterno had a clear vision about the crisis. In an April 7, 2007, email sent via his assistant, Sandi Segursky’s account, to the Prez, Paterno decreed:
“I want to make sure everyone understands that the discipline of the players involved will be handled by me as soon as I am comfortable that I know all the facts.” It was signed “Joe.”
Spanier dutifully sent a copy of the email to Vicky Triponey, then vice president of student affairs, whose department was investigating the alleged attack by players and who had weathered Paterno’s demand two years earlier to drop the off-campus conduct rule. Triponey, who has now come out publicly about the undue influence Paterno wielded in Happy Valley, was stunned.
Triponey wrote back to the president, saying, “Thanks for sharing. I assume he is talking about discipline relative to TEAM rules (note: he does not say that). Obviously discipline relative to the law is up to the police and the courts, and discipline relative to violations of the student code of conduct is the responsibility of Judicial Affairs.”
“This has not always been clear with Coach Paterno so we might want to clarify that and encourage him to work with us to find the truth and handle this collaboratively with the police and the university,” she went on. “The challenge here is that the letter suggests that football should handle this and now Coach Paterno is also saying THEY will handle this and makes it look like the normal channels will be ignored for football players.”
“Can you remind them of police and University responsibility?”
Ouch? Old doddering, unsophisticated in the ways of the world, Joe, not knowing where his authority stopped and the police’s begins. The same guy who follows university protocol and then puts his head down and goes back to work molding young minds, fully confident that a crisis that threatens everything he’s worked for for fifty years will all be handled without him? That, Joe? THAT Joe! Say it ain’t so, Joe!
So what happened to the alleged miscreant players? Well, the county criminal blotter reports that the courts dismissed all counts against four players and allowed the remaining two to plead guilty to misdemeanor offenses. Some received short suspensions from the team. Paterno refused to let players attend the university’s disciplinary hearing as witnesses, threatening in a perfectly modern blast text message to throw them off the team if they attended. Instead, he made the affected players perform 10 whole hours of community service. He also forced the entire team had to spend two hours on Saturday afternoons cleaning the stadium after home games.
Thereafter, some commentators hailed Joe as a hero — and Vicky Triponey was fired.
Sources: Chicago Tribune; Penn Live; Daily Beast; Chronicle of Higher Education; ESPN and Collegian On-Line
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Correction: The previous version of this blog post listed the secret file containing lost emails as being possessed by AD Tim Curley. Actually, it was Gary Shultz, university VP, who maintained the file and turned it over to Louis Freeh as part of the university investigation into the matter.
UPDATE: ESPN reports the Freeh Report on Penn State will be released next week and that it “will be tough on Joe.” The Penn State Board meets Thursday. Read ESPN here.
Raff, speaking of exceptional people and the Medal of Honor, does anyone know that we have had one President who earned the MoH for heroism above and beyond the call of duty when he was a soldier? And what are the odds of both father and son receiver the MoH? Bravery must have run in the family genes.
http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/medalofhonor.htm
Here’s a question maybe for all, maybe for Dredd and his knowledge of the amygdala.
What causes love? What gives us happiness when we think of those we love? What makes us happy at the thought of other people’s children.
What makes us happy when we see other people happy.
How can an isolated soul be united with the rest, or at least a part?
What part of the brain? What signal substances?
Whar basic urge fulfillment? And how can its flow start, and be kept flowing throughout a person’s life?
I had one idea where a system in a neo-natal department could help new borns. Do you have ideas?
Raff, I agree completely. And I say that as someone who has a distant cousin who received that award. He did not survive, but then, most MoH “winners” do not survive.
There’s a lot of condemning going on here. And I join those who condemn the abuser.
If, as OS briefly implied, we are dealing with a figure who has not matured, who can not relate successfully with adults, but emotionally desires contact with those nearer his emotional age, then what is the final solution?
Steriization? Done that. Therapy? Done that.
Lists? Done that. Occupational blockage/screening? Done that.
It would seem that prevention is an untried method. As yet with an unknown method of preventing the stunting of the growth of people, assuming it is an environmental factor and not genetically caused.
This stunting of people probably expresses itself in many of our ills in society. We have mentioned many. And repair is a very expensive and long process done by a very few of the many. Remember when therapy was a no-no subject?
I have mentioned the “don’t believe you are anything” tradition of Sweden (jäntelagen). So America is not alone. Every nation is afflicted, that and incest being the two universal sexual taboos.
My solution: I say love is the answer to most of our ills. I say replacing love of money, power, position, admiration, approval, caché, ie whatever you desire other than love, anything that obscures or replaces your need for love is a sickness of the soul. And that means a lot of us are sick.
Can we help each other out of our sickness?
I think so.
We come back to that word. Agape. A good muslim, and they are very few by their own admission, practices it every day he prays with others. He practices it when he give sakkat. And he practices it when he prays alone.
And I don’t believe the muslims have a patent on that either.
But it must become secular, scientific, and accepted.
It will require intervention. And it will take miracles—perhaps.
Do our therapists have anything to offer?
OS,
I agree with you placing the correct emphasis on important things like Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, but I would like to add one more “prize” to your important list. The Medal of Honor winners are an elite club like the Nobel prize winners.
I did not dismiss the arts as being unimportant. I also said they contributed to our lives by providing entertainment of various types. There is a Nobel Prize for literature. There is a Pulitzer Prize for news reporting.
There is not a prize of the caliber of the Nobel for sports, and some of the arts. Perhaps it is because music and visual arts are so subjective. There are those who would pick one of the modern rappers over Bach or Mozart, so maybe it is just as well to not go there.
I like sports of most types, but would still rather spend time with one of my physicist friends than with most athletes. And BTW, I went to high school with a Cy Young winner, a couple of All American football players and a musician who is in the Country Music Hall of Fame. And a guy who should some day be awarded the Nobel in physics.
OS
Will you reconsider your dismissal of the arts as being unimportant? Mozart? Shakespeare? Faulkner? Picasso’s Guernica? Bach? Botticelli? Tolstoy? Mann? Austin? Melville? Steinbeck? Marquez? Borges? O’Neill?
Whole family is abused in many ways by the dad. Mom finally gets them all in counseling. Dad is arrogant and uncooperative, refuses to participate. Mom and kids continue counseling. Mom gets enough support and self-esteem to kick him out. Divorce proceeds. He gets pretty much everything. Child custody time: he denies any abuse whatever. Psychotherapist disputes this. Before trial GAL talks with opposing attorney about his conversation with one of the boys who said dad sexually abused him but mom seems to have put him up to it. The sexual abuse actually occurred but boy did NOT say that in the call. I was in the room and boy said “dad abused him”. There are many forms of abuse. Boy was NOT specific. Mom wasn’t present during the call. During the trial Mom is allowed only her own attorney (not a good one since dad had access to all funds and she had none). Her family was not allowed in the court room. His attorney kept them out b/c he might call them as witnesses! Dad had his new wife, and whomever he wanted there to support him. Dad fought for two boys, not his adopted step-daughter. He changed his mind when he found that he would have to pay child support for her. Anyway, joint custody was “reluctantly” determined but judge put mom through more verbal abuse. Child support was never up-to-date (amount was decided on income he declared but most of his income was under-the-table). Visits were not supervised. Daughter refused to visit. Mom decided that the boys were big enough to fend for themselves, after all they had been practicing for years, chasing each other with knives and other weapons.
Gindy54, Good question. All seem to be keeping their heads down.
OS, I agree with you and I have, believe it or not, run across AND BUSTED two cases where there actually were false allegations of sexual abuse brought for reasons other than child protection (although the reasons were not the common ideas of “vindictive ex-spouse”). One of the reasons was that a guy who had molested his own children and was about to be busted wanted to throw the blame onto grandpa! He had a very passive wive who would never have figured out what was going on to start with but he had twins who TOGETHER went to a school authority and busted him, so he threw the blame like a ventriloquist throws his voice. The other was even more weird, because a kid made knowingly false allegations — at age 13 — against a school psychologist to cover up a sex act that had taken place between him and the baby-sitter’s son. We never could figure out whether that sex between the two boys was consensual or not and nobody wanted to try to deal with it anyway, but the falsely accused guy went through Hell.) My point is that, although television and even common wisdom believe that most child abuse allegations made in the context of custody and divorce disputes are “obviously false,” that is not the case and should not be presumed.
JoePa was beloved and saints can do no wrong, in this case, even when they are proven (by the emails, etc) to be sinners. I am sorry he did not live to see the inside of a court and maybe a jail too.
One question I have not seen brought up has to do with why a talented coach like Sandusky was not hired by some other college or university as soon as he was available. Is it possible this “secret” was well known outside of Penn State? That more than one administration or athletic director knew of Sandusky’s predatory ways? I only ask because if no one else knew, why wasn’t he hired?
I have a long-time friend who is a private investigator. He drifted from general investigations into specializing into false allegations of child abuse. He makes an excellent living at it, and has managed to exonerate many people, both male and female who were accused of abuse or molestation. If, during the course of his investigation, he finds his client actually did it, he dumps them like the sack of garbage they are. Most of his cases seem to arise in the course of a bitter child custody battle; however, some of the more interesting ones arose from out-and-out attempted extortion.
There was one case where an executive of a small pharmaceutical company got a gigantic bonus when one of their drugs was found to be more effective than anything else on the market. Overnight, he went from being solid middle class to a millionaire. The family who lived across the street and had a teenage daughter hatched a plot to have the daughter spend the night at a sleepover with the gentleman’s daughter. A day or two later, her parents accused him of molesting her, but said for a million dollars they would not report him to the police. He refused of course, and they accused him. It ended up in court where he fought it and eventually won. It cost him more than a million dollars defending himself, but the family across the street were proved to be grifters. He would have sued them, but they had no meaningful assets, which is why they were trying to squeeze money out of him in the first place. The point of this is, my detective friend has found this kind of thing goes on more often than many people realize.
Darren and OS,
The most rewarding of the 32 years I spent at the NYC/HRA were the 8 years I spent working in Child Welfare. With every fiber of my being I hate those who would hurt a child in any way. What my colleagues found most surprising about me was that this Hippie/Radical was somewhere to the Right of Attila The Hun when it came to prosecuting abusers. However, I note your expression the need to follow all the rules when conducting an investigation, since I also had to deal with people presumed guilty by the system who were innocent.
Mark,
Thank you for giving us the information that puts the final nail in the coffin of Joe Paterno’s status as a Demi-god of College Football. Besides winning and bringing so much revenue to Penn State (the sole purpose of college football),
Paterno’s reputation was as the most highly ethical coach in football. Paterno became the most powerful person at Penn State and we now see that far from a paragon of ethics, he was but another power-driven egotist, whose chief interest was his own reputation. All big time college sports are a sham and can only exist by exploiting the athletes. That some athletes prosper from it does not make it any more meritorious.
“The wives were not assessed formally, but our impression of them generally were that they were dependent, and rather like the battered wife who is afraid to leave the husband because she is more afraid of being alone with no one to support her.”
She may be afraid to leave the husband because she is “more afraid of being alone with no one to support her” or she may be cowed and abused herself, like Dottie Sandusky appears to be, or she may be brainwashed into thinking her man can do no wrong and the kids must be lying against their good daddy, or she may be afraid of any number of things.
Turn this around. Say she’s not “dependent, and rather like the battered wife who is afraid to leave…” and say it has nothing to do with having someone “to support her.” Say she supports the children’s claims of abuse and walks out on the guy and alleges sexual abuse and maybe even other kinds of abuse.
What are her chances now?
Perhaps she has borderline personality disorder!
Perhaps she is a liar and brainwashing her children!
Perhaps she is trying to get leverage in a bitter divorce!
Perhaps she is making false allegations of sexual abuse to destroy a good man whose only crime was not doing her bidding, the b*tch!
Perhaps she is strident or a feminist or something and has her panties in a twist!
Perhaps, as posited by Dr. Richard Gardner, she is sexually frustrated and therefore imagines sexual misconduct everywhere she looks!
Perhaps she is “obsessed or perhaps she is damaged goods” [quote from another thread on another subject]
Perhaps she has Munchausen by Proxy Disorder!
Perhaps she is a parental alienator!
Perhaps she doesn’t have a good lawyer — god help her!
Even if she DOES have a good lawyer — god help her!
A very wealthy and powerful woman in NY had someone call me once, because she was married and had a child with a guy who physically beat (pummeled!) her and his grown son (by another marriage) molested her daughter on visitation. Boom, they were in the midst of a nasty custody battle with bomber lawyers on both sides and evaluations by the top forensic psychologists in the divorce mill trade in Manhattan. Mom had brought a photograph of her face, after the last beating, to show the forensic guy. She had a black eye, split lip, bruises ALL OVER HER FACE like a prize fighter. She was 5’2″ and weighed a pretty 112 pounds. We met in a pizza place and she told me she was in shock already and the process had only started — three or four months into the case. She said the psychologist had asked her, when she showed him the picture, “What did you do or say to provoke this kind of a reaction.” Since she was rich and was brought up both rich and sheltered, she responded: “Tell me what someone would have to do or say to make YOU beat them like that!” The psychologist had concluded that although he thought the father was “not owning up” to his own violence, that it was also possible that the mother was “domineering and challenging” and that this might have been the cause of the problem. Therefore, he concluded, the father was not being “straightforward” and neither was the mother, so no conclusions could be reached about who was either more honest or the better parent. He then went on to say that veracity of the story of the child being molested by the grown son could not be assessed, since everybody in the family seemed to have their own axe to grind.
End of story.
And that mother was not passive, and the allegations were not made against a father, and the situation was not that complex.
Courageous post Mark.
It illustrates what happens when societies fall prey to the bully religion, to bully worship, i.e., part of the bully realm is sexual predation.
There are so many instances of the practice in our society that I fear we have fallen prey to it ourselves in the U.S.eh?
OS: We have no way of knowing how many pedophiles are lone wolves, and how many there are who are being enabled by their institutions, such as Penn State or the Catholic hierarchy.
I would add, “…being enabled by their institutions, such as Penn State or the Catholic hierarchy, or THE FAMILY or THE COURTS.”
Thanks, OS. Your friend’s study comports with the cases I’ve seen.
I remember a pro se mother questioning a guardian ad litem in Iowa. The GAL had chosen to block all investigation into the possible sexual abuse of his client because he had decided that the entire investigation was “not necessary and simply a sign of the mother’s mental illness” in spite of the fact that there was PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF PENETRATION of a five-year-old girl. So the pro se mom had the GAL on the stand in a juvenile court disposition hearing and he had opined that the reason he stopped the investigation was that “the father was not a pedophile.” Since the Mom had asked for forensic testing of the father and herself, specifically, a plethysmograph of the father, and since the GAL had blocked it, the mom asked her next series of questions:
MOM: How have you come to the conclusion that [the father] is not a pedophile?
GAL: There’s no evidence that he IS.
MOM: Anything else?
GAL: It’s preposterous. He’s not.
MOM: What do you know about pedophiles?
GAL: Not very much, fortunately.
MOM: Have you brought in any consults on child sexual abuse?
GAL: No.
MOM: Have you read any studies about the personality of pedophiles?
GAL: No.
MOM: So please tell us everything you know about pedophiles.
GAL: They need a lot of help.
[Of course, the GAL was at that very time GIVING a pedophile a lot of help.]