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.
idealist707:
“Bill,
Do you believe any system of high level sports is ethical? Or we can limit that to college football if you wish”
ASPECTS may or may not be ethical. Since most people are quite willing to cross lines and disregard the little man on their shoulder whispering ” that’s wrong, don’t do it” – I’m not sure just how much ethics can be expected, but
I would favor much stronger sanctions – not outright, total elimination of intercollegiate athletics competition.
ID707
I’m interested in your perception of rape charges in Sweden and how that might impact the charges against Julian Assange.
ID707
Mother Teresa believed in suffering – that it was a gift from God to share in Christ’s suffering. No painkillers were permitted. Her orphanages were not great places for kids. Maybe she kept them from dying, but there was no shortage of physical abuse. Donations were directed to opening more convents – not improving the care of the sick and dying. It has been suggested that her medical care was “haphazard at best”. She did not support any medical education by her nuns. In my opinion, she was a woman of the 16th century who had awfully good pr.
If Freh does a complete job he will probably find that there is an active sex trade that reaches to Harrisburg. It’s more likely that he will limit the investigation to Penn State.
Bill McW.,
I just watched the last half of “The Shawshank Redemption” again. During the scene where state police and district attorney were closing in on the corrupt warden, I could not help but think of Penn State. I had this fantasy of prosecutors knocking on the door of the top dogs there and how they might react.
Bill,
Do you believe any system of high level sports is ethical? Or we can limit that to college football if you wish.
I support Barkin’s last suggestion on annihilation of all collegiate sport—as I understood it.
Good night, it’s 2:15 AM.
I am sure that for your two voices there arm many others, by the millions. These are the fruits of paternalism, equally ugly in all parts of the world.
There are other women here who have defended women’s right to abortion, contraceoption, to their own bodies.
They and others could also speak and strengthen your voices
Bu fighting from below is a tough position when it goes against all you have been trained since birth.
Just as it is or men who must also decide, bow the
neck or starve, including your family too. But some start early as bullies, learn how to bully, and know that women are the ultimate slave to tell what to do.
You know what the last 100 years have meant for women: suffrage, etc. But there is in terms of the informal barriers so much left to change.
What a revolution WW2 was for women who made money then. And after a brief romance with homemaking aftet that, they were forced out on the market, competing with men. Force to actually and calculated by t¨he corporations. Mothering and the homes castle counted for nothing on the corporate scales.
And since then the race has never ceased.
A woman has to be twice as good as men to get the job.
Fortunately, that is not too difficult. Old saying.
But for justice, the woman has the whole paternalistic steered community against her. And that is simply impossible to beat. Like a Hollywood farce. A new genre? Or is it on the tele now?
Speaking of stats, we were not. How are the stats on the number of women lawyers compared to men over 3 decades say?
I leave the word back to you who know. I was never integrated in the American system. But I have a naive sense of justice. It has not died yet. Go to it.
What other unethical aspects of the Penn State athletic programs are likely to become exposed? IMO, much more.
Idealist, a woman can walk OUT on a man AND report him for abuse, or she can walk out on him and NOT report him for abuse, if she has no kids with him. But his own KID cannot walk out on him, whether making allegations or not making allegations. And a wife cannot walk out on a husband, abusive or not, if she has kids with him. It turns into an “undivorce” in which HIS RIGHTS and HER “RIGHTS” and the child’s “rights” are in a three-way (at least) conflict, and the kid essentially has no reliable way to get out of the situation if it turns bad. That is the reason that there can’t be any trustworthy way for kids to report abuse.
Escape CAN be the only way to deal with certain abuse. Kids don’t get that. I’m sure some of Jerry Sandusky’s victims escaped because they were not his own kids. For some kids, there is no escape. Sometimes identification with the aggressor, and Stockholm Syndrome, are the only ways.
707, yes. Why do women not stop it? There is a strong sense of retaining family secrets. The shame of it. The likelihood of not being believed. Of being blamed for not stopping it. The odds also suggest that she may also have been abused and the shame that she still carries can blind her to what’s happening in her own family – too many wicked memories that she still cannot deal with. And, too, too many women simply don’t have the resources to tell. Will her own family back her up or will they doubt her, after all, he’s such a nice guy. If she persists, she will have a nightmare of dealing with social workers, police, maybe the courts if she is believed and there is no guarantee that she will be believed. Now he is really anger with her for outing him and she will be further abused, emotionally and financially, if not physically. I’ll save my anger for the perpetrator.
How does anyone, and I mean the woman who dares report a man for sexual abuse, dare do so. Certainly women talk to each other: wife to wife, mother to mother, parents to children, single girls to ….etc.
Certainly they know what is do-able in their set, sect, community, church, rich, poor, churched or unchurched, etc.
And the consensus is probably “just forget it”. Poison the guy, but sue? Forget it.
There are quite simply too many threads leading out of these Gordian knots to even think of cutting it with the sword of justice.
A simple person has no chance against the community.
The stench of opened pustulence is too strong for the community to tolerate. So the accuser is punished, not the abuser. Be so sure. Testimony here seems to affirm this. I have no clue. Just pushing an idea.
Can only say that here in justice’s sacred halls in Sweden, the police give rape victims a hard time. The only ones who are accepted generally are victims of outdoor assault by generally nutty guys.
I could go on but this will suffice as an intro of Swedish rape cases.
And an opinion on USA societal effects on justice, which we have discussed before.
Darren Smith, you have said it so well, and I thank you.
I have personally advised probably 100 therapists, mothers, other family members, and even lawyers, to AVOID ALL ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL ABUSE IN ALL CUSTODY BATTLES NO MATTER WHAT HAS HAPPENED. When a therapist asked me, “But the law says I have to report any suspicion of abuse,” I have said, “Do not disobey the law, ever. But remember, you don’t have to explain why you do not suspect abuse.”
Actually, I believe tings were better in the old days when kids did not have all this “We care about you” and “you’re special” and “nobody’s allowed to mistreat you” and related bullsh*t. Then, when they got molested, they shut up about it, and maybe when they were 30, 40, 50 years old if they chose to deal with it, maybe they would be able to. Maybe they would have to give up living lives THEY considered “normal” or “good.” But would they get mauled in a fake system of appalling lies and elaborate cover-ups? Would they end up having contributed to the destruction of their protectors, and having to kowtow and kissfeet to their abusers? And would they end up having to adopt the “identify with the abuser” because that is all that works 99% of the time?
20+ years after the fact, a young woman living in Washington DC and working as an aide for a Congressman does not CARE that Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, is now required to behave as if he believes members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn must be treated like the rest of Brooklynites if they commit child sexual abuse. She no longer cares about anything except getting her way, dominating people she can dominate, pushing people around, hurting people if that will help her rule her little world where only control matters, and why? Because back when she alleged incest, she was treated to a ten-year course in: “DO what we abusers do and SAY IT IS RIGHT and DO WHAT WE DO to your mother so that you will not be tarred with the same brush that we are using on HER” and this young woman adopted a life in which it was perfectly all right to do as much damage to her mother, Amy Neustein Ph.D., as Hynes believed it was perfectly all right to do.
“Justice is Mine” still doesn’t mean anything.
Otteray, Malisha, MIke, et al:
Yes, most definately it is the case of someone being ruined by a false and retaliatory or extortionate sex offense. Luckily I’ve only had a couple of these as well. It often is evident in the beginning that something is not right about these cases but not always. One certainly has to take into account the who spectrum before going for a prosecution. Like I said earlier, never jump a conclusion at the beginning of any investigation, lest you arrive at the wrong conviction. I agree with all of you entirely.
Though consider this. How does a state weigh three aspects: The need to prosecute the guilty, protecting the accused from baseless and fraudulent charges by going after the accuser for false reporting, AND facilitating and protecting a witness/victim to allow her/him to come forward with the information without fear of reprisal or civil liability?
I would not like to see a situation where a true victim or witness has to debate whether or not to come forward for fear the real molester would be found Not Guilty by some strange reason and then the state or civil court would come after them for doing reporting it. This would certainly deter most people from trusting or having faith in the law.
Malisha stimulates ideas, not always truly on thread. But it is corruption essentially we are speaking of.
Reflect! The eskimos have 20 words for snow of different kinds. Arabs have 30 for sand. Jews how many for forbidden things, as do the RCC, and Hindus, etc. etc.
Point?
How many words and phrases do we have for corruption of justice, rights, whatever?
Within finance and banking 100? Realty 50? Agency operation 200? Justice system 500? Corporations 1000?
We can take wagers: MikeS can hold the bets, GeneH and ElaineM can do the counting, etc etc. I’ll do the kibbitzing.
Oh yes, forgot prime example. The Danes have 50 for boring.
Paterno said, “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.”
Now, at the time that he said this, he thought he could get it obeyed and he thought that was all he would have to do. Turned out he didn’t get it to go down as he wanted, but somebody ELSE got punished for that. He did as much as he could to interfere with the proper process. He lied, cheated, hurt others, did whatever he pleased with the power he had and so did many others (among those, some who will now have to pay a price, but among them also, many who never will pay any price). Victimized people ALWAYS PAY THE PRICES.
This reminds me of what is currently attracting my emotional and intellectual attention right now. The Board on Professional Responsibility in the District of Columbia has a “prosecutorial” division called “Bar Counsel” that examines claims of wrongdoing by attorneys. Bar Counsel has a complaint in front of them about two DC attorneys. One of them refused to turn over papers that are the possession, legally, of the client. The other one actually made a deal with the adversary and acted as a lawyer in a state where she was not licensed, BEFORE she was even on the case with client permission. So Bar Counsel has sent some of these kiss-off letters that, to be honest, should have said, instead: “we will do whatever we will do when we are satisfied that we should do something and we will be sure that we understand all the facts and blah blah blah blah blah blah because we are a fake agency we are a sham we are pretending to be doing something just like Joe Paterna blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…but you are nothing and we can do whatever we want blah blah blah blah blah…..”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we have for a society, for a government, for a culture, this is what we have. It is the MYTH of “rule of law” and it is the MYTH of justice. It is a disgrace, a shame, and the only thing worse than this is the many instances of frank murder that we both endure and tolerate.
OS,
Thanks for the info on Teddy Roosevelt’s MOH! I wonder if my Congressman, Joe Walsh would call Teddy a hero??!
Curious,
Curious you mention those two.
I am surprised they did not ask Obama to give his back.
That would have embarrassed their own king, so a no-no if not self-respect in play.
What can you say about MT? According to one journalist who happened to be in the flooded villages when she and her helicopter brigade landed full of politician and willing journalists, she was a terror. Implacably unapproachable. Completely unmoved. But guess she believes they have sinned thus this is their punishment on earth. Do you know?
I celebrate those who win Nobels and Pulitzers. However, they are awarded by men and men make mistakes. I give you Obama and Mother Teresa.
Be the first State in your nation to abolish inter collegiate sports in all of your state named, sponsored or accredited colleges or universities. In Pennsylvania you could dub it the Joe Pa Act.
BDog,
Amen to that abolishing. I love sports but detest the phony amateur distinction. If people are to make money off of one’s sthletic ability, then that athlete should be paid. That they are already is yet another hypocrisy everyone ignores.
Corporal punishment has its place. Pennsylvania is busy trying to take the votes away from folks without drivers licenses right now but maybe than can change their criminal statutes. Eye for an eye is too strict. But an anal rapist of a child should be dealth with at the source of his perversion. So, on offense for the kid in the shower witnessed by the red haired coach, i would say cut off the Sandusky testicles. For the next subsequent offense it would be the penis. Then, right hand, left hand, and finally, capital punishment, his head. Corporal punishment also has a role for the corporate facilitator. Here the University of State Penn would lose the locker room, shower, stadium on offense number one where it is shown that they covered it up. Offense number two, they lose their accreditation. Relegate State Penn to University of Phoenix. [Yeah, I know its already there in the eyes of IBM]
Pedophilia prevention: First offense, remove the predator from the facility. Second offense prevent any child from attending the facility. In the case of the Catholic Schools, they would have to be closed and all pedophiles removed [all priests] before reopening under another auspices like the Mormons. For State Penn: Remove all of the offending predators and their handlers (good word here) such as Joe Pa and the head of sports and the Superintendent or Dean or whatever name the top dog had. Second offense, close it down and give all the students vouchers to go to anywhere but Penn State (ABPS), that has no sports program and teaches math and science.