The legacy of longtime Penn State football coach Joe Paterno is already a shambles. After all, it is beyond dispute that he knew his longtime defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, molested children. Indeed, Paterno himself admitted just before his death in 2012 that he should have gone to the police himself about the now-infamous 2001 shower incident.
But if it were possible for the Sandusky saga to get more debauched, it did. According to testimony that was unsealed on Tuesday, one of Sandusky’s victims claims that Paterno blew off his claim that Sandusky molested him in 1976–more than 25 years before Paterno claimed under oath to have known about the abuse.
The victim, known as “John Doe 150,” gave a sworn deposition in October 2014 as part of a lawsuit Penn State filed in 2013 against its liability insurer, PMA Insurance, when PMA balked at indemnifying Penn State for millions of dollars in settlements to Sandusky’s victims. PMA contends that Penn State knew about Sandusky’s debauchery sooner than it initially claimed. For that reason, PMA didn’t think it should have been on the hook for the money.
John Doe 150 received one of those settlement checks. He recalled that he was showering with a number of other boys at a football camp when he was 14. Out of nowhere, Sandusky jammed his finger up Doe’s rectum. The next day, Doe says, he told Paterno about it. According to Doe, Paterno callously replied, “I don’t want to hear about any of that kind of stuff, I have a football season to worry about.”
Under questioning from a lawyer for PMA, Doe said that he was “shocked, disappointed, offended” at Paterno’s chilly reaction. He added that when he asked Paterno if that was “all you are going to do,” Paterno “just walked away.”
Doe’s allegations were first revealed in May. However, his deposition is the first time that these allegations have been aired out in any detail publicly. They form the basis for PMA’s claim that Penn State was aware of Sandusky’s crimes as early as 1976.
In May, state court judge Gary Glazer ruled that Penn State would have to pay for any abuse claims made between 1992 and 1999–the great majority of Sandusky’s four-decade rampage–out of its own pocket. However, he could not find any evidence that any incidents prior to 1992 were reported to Penn State’s “executive officers”–the president or the board of trustees. For that reason, Glazer allowed Penn State to seek coverage for any pre-1992 allegations.
Translation–if Doe is to be believed, either Paterno sat on this, or athletic director Ed Czekaj learned about it from Paterno and sat on it. Either way, if this is true, calling this a travesty would be being extremely kind. The Paterno family rushed out with a burning statement denying Doe’s claim, saying that a number of anecdotes “defy all logic” and have “never been subjected to the most basic objective examination.”
At first glance, Doe’s claims do sound incredible. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports wondered how Doe could have managed to get a private audience with Paterno, or how he could have sat on this for 40 years. Well, from what I recall about Paterno, he was a very hands-on coach in his prime, so it’s not implausible that Doe could have collared him alone. Moreover, by this time, he was already an icon in much of Pennsylvania. Combine that with the general dismissive attitude about sexual abuse at the time, and it’s understandable that Doe would have kept quiet.
Tom Kline, a lawyer for one of Sandusky’s victims, thinks Doe’s claims sound credible. Doe, like many of the other victims who testified about being molested, already had his check, and thus had very little incentive to perjure himself. He believes Penn State only has itself to blame for this becoming public, saying that it should have “weighed (the) consequence” of suing PMA in the first place.
If you’ve read my commentary on this scandal either here or at Daily Kos, you’ll know that I’m inclined to be hard on Paterno. If he had gone to the police himself when he learned a child had been molested in 2001, he would have retired as a hero. When you take away all the hyperbole, you are left with one undeniable fact–Paterno didn’t do nearly enough to get a child predator off the streets. That would be true whether he first learned about it in 1976 or 2001.
