Penn State scandal!

[buddha]

What does everybody think about this one? Man, is there NOTHING sacred? The following is from ESPN:



Penn State AD, school VP leave posts
 
Two top Penn State officials charged with covering up allegations of a child sex abuse scandal related to an ex-defensive coordinator stepped down after an emergency meeting of the university's board of trustees. The resignation of Joe Paterno was not discussed.Tags: college football, PSU, resignation, Penn State. Joe Paterno, Jeremy Schaap


STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Two top Penn State officials charged with covering up allegations of an explosive child-sex abuse scandal related to former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky vacated their positions Sunday after an emergency meeting of the university's Board of Trustees.

Penn State athletic director Tim Curley requested to be placed on administrative leave so he could devote the time needed to defend himself against perjury and other charges, university president Graham Spanier said. Gary Schultz, vice president for finance and business, will step down and go back into retirement, Spanier said. He declined to comment to reporters after the meeting.

Resignations of famed football coach Joe Paterno and Spanier were not discussed at the meeting, which was arranged Sunday and lasted two hours, university spokesman Bill Mahon said.

Curley and Schultz were charged Saturday after a grand jury investigation of Sandusky, who has charged with sexually abusing eight boys over 15 years. Lawyers for all three men have said their clients are innocent.

Joe Paterno releases statement
 
If true, the nature and amount of charges made are very shocking to me and all Penn Staters. While I did what I was supposed to with the one charge brought to my attention, like anyone else involved I can't help but be deeply saddened these matters are alleged to have occurred.

 Sue and I have devoted our lives to helping young people reach their potential. The fact that someone we thought we knew might have harmed young people to this extent is deeply troubling.

 If this is true we were all fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things, and we grieve for the victims and their families. They are in our prayers.

 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. 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. I understand that people are upset and angry, but let's be fair and let the legal process unfold.

 In the meantime I would ask all Penn Staters to continue to trust in what that name represents, continue to pursue their lives every day with high ideals and not let these events shake their beliefs nor who they are.

Sandusky, once considered Paterno's heir apparent, retired in 1999 but continued to use the school's facilities for his work with The Second Mile, a foundation he established to help at-risk kids. Curley and Schultz are accused of failing to alert police -- as required by state law -- of their investigation of the allegations.

"This is a case about a sexual predator who used his position within the university and community to repeatedly prey on young boys," state attorney general Linda Kelly said Saturday.

In a statement, The Second Mile said that to "our knowledge, all the alleged incidents occurred outside of our programs and events." The group also said it never was made aware of the allegations against Sandusky in the grand jury report.

Kelly and state police commissioner Frank Noonan are expected to hold a 1 p.m. ET news conference Monday a few miles from the Harrisburg district court. The arraignment of both Curley and Schultz is scheduled for 2 p.m. ET.

Paterno, who last week became the coach with the most wins in Division I football history, wasn't charged, and the grand jury report didn't appear to implicate him in wrongdoing.

In a statement issued Sunday night, Paterno said he was shocked, saddened and as surprised as anyone to hear of the charges.

"If this is true we were all fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things, and we grieve for the victims and their families. They are in our prayers," Paterno said in a statement issued by his son, Scott.

Curley was named athletic director on Dec. 30, 1993. Senior associate athletic director Mark Sherburne will serve as interim athletic director until Curley's legal situation is resolved, board chairman Steve Garban said.

Schultz served as senior vice president and treasurer from 1993 to 2009. He returned to the job this year to fill in until someone else could be found. The Board of Trustees named a child care center on campus after Schultz in January 2010.

The allegations against Sandusky, who started The Second Mile in 1977, range from sexual advances, to touching, to oral and anal sex. The young men testified before a state grand jury that they were in their early teens when some of the abuse occurred; there is evidence even younger children may have been victimized. Sandusky's attorney Joe Amendola said his client has been aware of the accusations for about three years and has maintained his innocence.

A preliminary hearing scheduled for Wednesday likely would be delayed, Amendola said. Sandusky is charged with multiple counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, corruption of minors, endangering the welfare of a child, indecent assault and unlawful contact with a minor, as well as single counts of aggravated indecent assault and attempted indecent assault.

The first case to come to light was a boy who met Sandusky when he was 11 or 12, the grand jury said. The boy received expensive gifts and trips to sports events from Sandusky, and physical contact began during his overnight stays at Sandusky's home, jurors said. Eventually, the boy's mother reported the allegations of sexual assault to his high school, and Sandusky was banned from the child's school district in Clinton County in 2009. That triggered the state investigation that culminated in charges Saturday.

 But the report also alleges much earlier instances of abuse and details failed efforts to stop it by some who became aware of what was happening.

Another child, known only as a boy about 11 to 13, was seen by a janitor pinned against a wall while Sandusky performed oral sex on him in fall 2000, the grand jury said.

And in 2002, Kelly said, a graduate assistant saw Sandusky sexually assault a naked boy, estimated to be about 10 years old, in a team locker room shower. The grad student and his father reported what he saw to Paterno, who immediately told Curley, prosecutors said.

Curley and Schultz met with the graduate assistant about a week and a half later, Kelly said.

"Despite a powerful eyewitness statement about the sexual assault of a child, this incident was not reported to any law enforcement or child protective agency, as required by Pennsylvania law," Kelly said.

There's no indication that anyone at school attempted to find the boy or follow up with the witness, she said.

Curley denied that the assistant had reported anything of a sexual nature, calling it "merely 'horsing around,' " the 23-page grand jury report said. But he also testified that he barred Sandusky from bringing children onto campus and that he advised Spanier of the matter.

The grand jury said Curley was lying, Kelly said, adding that it also deemed portions of Schultz's testimony not to be credible.

Schultz told the jurors he also knew of a 1998 investigation involving sexually inappropriate behavior by Sandusky with a boy in the showers the football team used.

But despite his job overseeing campus police, he never reported the 2002 allegations to any authorities, "never sought or received a police report on the 1998 incident and never attempted to learn the identity of the child in the shower in 2002," the jurors wrote. "No one from the university did so."

The board chairman said Sunday that he would appoint a task force to conduct an independent review of the university's policies and procedures related to the protection of children.

University representatives released a statement from Spanier on Saturday calling the allegations against Sandusky "troubling" and adding that Curley and Schultz had his unconditional support.

He predicted they will be exonerated.

"I have known and worked daily with Tim and Gary for more than 16 years," Spanier said. "I have complete confidence in how they handled the allegations about a former university employee."

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

ESPN Conversations

My take on this: Sandusky needs to do hard time in a place where the term "cover your a$$" takes on a whole new meaning. He seriously needs to be somebody's wife in the joint.
Paterno should be fired. From reports I read on this Paterno was informed by an intern who walked in on Sandusky in the process of abusing a kid. Paterno then told the AD and let the matter drop.
Penn State's football program should be scrapped for, maybe, 10 years. "The Second Mile" program which was started by Sandusky to help "at risk" kids (gee, Jerry, could they have been any more at risk?) should be shut down. All the funds from these 2 organizations should be seized and paid, along with any other payments from Penn State, to the victims.
The DA who overheard the phone conversation between Sandusky and the mother of one of the victims wherein Sandusky basically admitted what he had done and made a statement expressing his wish to be dead should join the other pedophile in prison. Maybe they could be soul-mates! Or maybe they could both be meat for hungry lions.

[buddha]

Here's another entry from The Nation magazine entitled "College Football's Logic: WhyJoe Paterno and Penn State would shield a child molester".



After forty-six seasons coaching at Penn State University, coach Joe Paterno now faces a crisis that could burn the storied football program to the ground. And if recent charges are true, his legacy deserves to burn along with it. For those who haven’t heard, longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky, 67, who coached the vaunted Nittany Lions defense for twenty-three years, has been charged with forty sex crimes against boys dating from 1994 to 2005. All of the minors were under the care of Sandusky’s charity for impoverished youth, The Second Mile Foundation, which Sandusky founded in 1977. As the grand jury presentment stated: “Through The Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of boys, many of whom were vulnerable due to their social situations.” Sandusky is denying all charges through his attorney, but the grand jury report is a damning and detailed account of a man exercising his power and authority to rape young boys.
 
On one level, it’s a horror story we’ve heard before: vulnerable children become targets for the very people trusted with their care. But this case is far, far worse, because it could have been stopped in time to spare future victims. It could have been stopped, but it wasn’t because the image of Joe Paterno Nittany Lion Football was deemed more important than the children at risk.
 
The grand jury summation describes one scene where Sandusky was caught raping 10-year-old “Victim Number 2” in the Penn State football team shower. The graduate student who witnessed it was “distraught” and “traumatized.” Did he go to the police? No, he went directly to Joe Paterno’s home. Paterno immediately turned the matter over to athletic director Tim Curley and, for reasons I don’t understand, Gary Schultz, the senior vice president of finance and business. Curley and Schultz conferred and acted. According to the grand jury report, they sat Sandusky down and said that he could no longer use Penn State football facilities while accompanied by Second Mile children. That’s it. Pennsylvania state law requires Curley, Schultz and Paterno to have reported the charges to the police. They didn’t. (Curley and Schultz are being charged with perjury and obstruction. Paterno is not.)
 
Curley even admitted to the grand jury that he “advised Sandusky that he was prohibited from bringing youth onto the Penn State campus from that point forward.” Yet as Deadspin.com reported, even this “punishment” was fictional. 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. This is why it’s hard to take seriously Paterno’s statement on Sunday, where he said, “If this is true we were all fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things, and we grieve for the victims and their families. They are in our prayers.”
 
We are past prayer and into the realm of criminal negligence (and the major players are circling the wagons. Sunday night, after an emergency meeting of the Penn State Board of Trustees, Curley requested to be placed on administrative leave so he could devote himself full-time to his defense. Schultz also announced he would be retiring, effective immediately). I agree with the Washington Post’s Mike Wise, who wrote, “They would all be party to a worse crime than any crooked, pay-for-play booster at Miami, Ohio State or even SMU ever committed: guilty of protecting a program before a child.” But at the same time I would argue that the connective tissue between benign booster scandals and this monstrous state of affairs are more substantial than people want to admit. It’s connected to the Bowl Championship Series, “conference realignment” and all the ways in which college football has morphed over the last generation into a multibillion-dollar big business. This isn’t about Sandusky. This is about about a culture that says the football team must be defended at all costs: a culture where the sexual assault of a 10-year-old is reported to Paterno before the police.
 
This is what happens when a football program becomes the economic and spiritual heartbeat of an entire section of a state. The Nittany Lions football regularly draws 100,000 fans to Happy Valley. They also produce $50 million in pure profit for the University every year and has been listed as the most valuable team in the Big 10 conference. Another economic report held that every Penn State game pumps $59 million into the local economy: from hotels to kids selling homemade cookies by the side of the road. It’s no wonder that Paterno is revered. He took a football team and turned it into an economic life raft for a university and a region. When something becomes that valuable, a certain mindset kicks in. Protect the team above all over concerns. Protect Joe Pa. Protect Nittany Lions football. Protect the brand. In a company town, your first responsibility is to protect the company.
 
Penn State has never been an “outlaw program.” It’s what every school aspires to become. Think about that. Every school aspires to be the kind of place where football is so valuable that children can become collateral damage. If the allegations are true, if the school in fact knew this was going on, then the program should be shut down. If the allegations are true, Joe Paterno should be instructed to take his forty-six years and 409 wins and leave in disgrace. It’s tragic that it’s come to this for a legend like Paterno. But it’s even more tragic that protecting his legend mattered more than stopping a child-rapist in their midst. Damn Sandusky. Damn Paterno. Damn Penn State. But above all, damn the fact that the billion-dollar logic of big-time college football leads to decisions as venal as those made in Happy Valley.

[Laser Man]

I've been a fan of Joe Paterno and the Penn State program because I thought it was a level above so many others.  I'm utterly dismayed and disappointed at the whole situation. 

As in so many things, the crime is bad, but the cover-up makes it so much worse.  Had this been properly handled right away, Penn State would have had some damage to its reputation, but would have done the right thing in everyone's eyes.  Now it's just an awful situation for everyone involved.  The only good that comes out of this is that a sexual predator has been stopped.  If only it had happened years ago... 

[D.A.L.U.I.]

The issue here, as in the similar case of the Roman Catholic Church, is the apparent failure of responsible parties to report and possibly to cover-up reasonably suspected criminal activities to the police promptly and to eliminate any possibility of harm or danger to children in the meantime.  Thus the school officials are clearly targets.  Whether Paterno owned a duty to monitor the other two officials can't be determined without more knowledge about the processes that Penn should have had in place when they instituted a program for young people.  The perp--unbelievable that so much time as lingered without this being fully aired. 
The act was bad, the failure to promptly deal with a possible criminal act raises it to a whole new level.  Penn will not come out of this without a real beating. 

[Arnie]

It's probably going to get ugly in the stands to...not that their opponents'  fans verbal insults and cheers/jeers compare to the alleged damage done.

[warhawk]

the penn state scandal  is very disturbing.  how can one look the other way when U actually witness a 10 year old get sodomized by a than 58 year old man in the showers???  my 1st reaction would B 2 save the kid from that evil, unforgiving act!!!  how can one just look the other way???

and that was just one incident.  GOD only knows others that happened in the penn state scandal.  i couldn't read anymore of this disturbing story.  so.... very sad that this happened.  my prayers go out 2 the victims and families.

this story just sickens me in the worst way.  this will definitely B the worst sports scandal ever.  again... may GOD bless the victims and their families.

WARHAWK

[schro]

Sickened beyond sick.

[b.driscoll]

            It is time for Paterno to go, not to mention the sick sob's associated with this crime.........................and cover up. For Paterno to say that he did what he was supposed to do angers the sh*t out of me. He knew of at least  one assault of a child.............and told his supervisor??? . How about following through you old senile bastard??? Penn State football should be shut down for now, but it won't because of the $$$$$ it generates. Paterno and his friend and admin personnel should all be fired at the very least and maybe do some time in the big house.  What a sick situation that should have and could have been stopped.

[b.driscoll]

    Saint C,       ''whether paterno ''owed '' a duty to monitor the officials''...............?. What Penn State had in place should not matter in the least. A criminal act was basically kept quiet by ALL involved. Paterno and these admin people are a disgrace and  all of them need to be fired.  This act and cover up is mind boggling.

[Sly Joe Leo]

As someone who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse (by a parent), one important lesson I've learned is what one hides, represses, and/or denies ALWAYS finds a way out (and it tends to come out sideways).

I've also witnessed, FAR too many times in my life, that some people ignore what's right in front of them because they are too weak/scared/ignorant to face it. I call it the "It's not happening" mentality. What does this say for those we hold up as the "tough, strong, and fearless ones". Once again the facade collapses under the weight of its own BS.

This is yet the latest example of what happens when people turn a blind eye and let their egos hide behind lies. This won't be the last "sacred institution" to fall from grace.

Take it from someone whose trust was obliterated as a child, the vigilance never dies, and facing the truth AND the pain takes more courage than the so-called tough guys can handle.

The Nittany Lions are silent tonight...

[bennett11]

Some years ago my wife worked in the office of the AD of Syracuse U.  Paterno often called in to talk to the Syracuse AD.  My wife found him the most arrogant person she had ever had to deal with.  My wife simply told him Jake (Syr AD - she used his last name which I can't spell) would call him back as soon as he is free.  "This is Paterno get me connected right now"   Sorry - Paterno was furious.  Jake would tell my wife the way to go. 

Football coaches tend to live in another world.  The coach here at Texas gets a $4 million  salary a year.  The president of the Univ - $800,000.  What are our priorities.

[Mikekoz13]

I live in the great state of Pennsylvania and there is a lot of local talk about this of course. I'm not a Penn State grad, never attended school there, and have never been a fan of Penn State atheletics (I grew up in Maryland).

I was actually phone interviewed on the phone by one of the local news stations last night (random survey). They asked all the questions that I suspected they would. From the chatter I'm hearing, almost everyone will answer as I did. This will NOT be good for Penn State or Paterno.

Personally I think Paterno should be charged with a crime too for NOT reporting this to the police.

Penn State is a State funded school and there is already talk of the State politicians getting involved. The board of trustees will announce on Friday how a special committee that is being put together today will address this. The school , of course, has to cover it's ass from legal implications.

My guess is that Paterno won't last more than another week.

Last night over 1000 Penn State students marched thru the streets chanting support of Paterno. They had to be cleared by the local police. This leads me to this question..... What the Hell is wrong with these kids to support this man?

[buddha]

Take it from someone whose trust was obliterated as a child, the vigilance never dies,

No, it never does.

I even remember, as a kid growing up, the image of Penn State being a class organization. In my whole life I don't recall them ever being involved in recruiting violations or paying athletes through the alumni organization or any of that kind of stuff. That doesn't mean that those things never happened, it just means that I was not aware of them. So I had this picture of Penn State being in a class by itself with regard to integrity.
And then comes Jerry Sandusky and the scandal.
I heard Matt Millen interviewed on ESPN and I heard him say something along the lines of his reaction to seeing this thing happening and "doing something about it yourself". I didn't have to wonder what he meant by that.
Aside from my fervent wish that Jerry Sandusky should hang himself with his own filthy underpants before too many days pass the thing that really hits home for me is how the image I had of Penn State and Joe Paterno has crumbled. Like Koz I was never an avid follower of the team but, like I said earlier, I never heard anything about them being corrupt, either. And I guess that should have been a tipoff. Anytime somebody looks THAT clean they have got to be hiding something. And it's a shame that I look at the world in this light but I have my reasons. And it's crazy to be of the mindset that the cleaner I think anybody is the more likely it is that they're dirty but that is how I see the world.
And this whole Penn State thing has done nothing to change that.

[tomgallagher]

Happy Valley is not going to be happy again for a long long time.

[b.driscoll]

  I saw video today of Penn State students outside Paternos home yelling encouragement to this fool. One student said  ''this shouldn't happen to our program '' we believe in Joe Paterno ''.  Penn States football program is in the toilet where it belongs and these students need to realize just how serious this crime is.