Former FBI Director Louis Freeh released his report on sexual abuse at Penn State, and it was scathing. Via State College:
Louis Freeh, the former FBI director, left nothing to the imagination in his much-anticipated presentment Thursday morning.
There was an effort made by the four most powerful men at Penn State to conceal a child sexual predator.
Former president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, retired vice president of finance and business Gary Schultz, and, yes, beloved patriarch and former football coach Joe Paterno are all to blame for not stopping the raping the children by Jerry Sandusky as far back as 1998, according to the 267-page Freeh Report.
A 56-word email sent by Schultz to Curley, with Spanier CC’d, and dated June 9, 1998, changed Penn State forever. It caps a campus police investigation that yielded no charges against Sandusky at the time.
It reads:
“They met with Jerry on Monday and concluded that there was no criminal behavior and the matter was closed as an investigation. He was a little emotional and expressed concerned as to how this might have adversely affected the child. I think the matter has been appropriately investigated and I hope it is now behind us.”
Of course, it wasn’t.
About the only good thing that can be said of Penn State is that it hired Freeh to do the investigation. That does very, very little good for the kids who were abused, but at least the truth is coming out.
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Like I said when this first came out, penn state should be leveled to the ground and the proceeds from the sale of the land should go to the victims.
Every single management donk should be tried for child abuse.
Penn State has to pay dearly for this. Whatever happens, it needs to be enough to make universities everywhere gasp. The NCAA needs to take severe action, too, also enough to make athletic departments everywhere gasp.
Penn State can kiss its billion-dollar endowment goodbye.
It’s really hard to believe that Penn State, so admired from the outside, was such a cesspool on the inside.
What is the matter with our institutions in this country? The Secret Service, the Catholic Church, a leading university. What is going on?
I’m not surprised at the sleazy behavior by Penn State. After all, these boobs also hired Michael Mann.
I wonder if this is over? There’s a missing prosecuting attorney who was in the thick of things investigating Sandusky. The trustee have got to be blamed as well. I’m from PA and read in my local newspaper two years ago that Sandusky was arrested. If the trustee could get rid of Paterno, why didn’t they do something about Sandusky?
Just read Freeh’s report and was once again reminded of the twisted logic than assumes a cover up is better than truth. How many examples do officials in any position need to see? From Watergate to Fast and Furious it should be clear the plain and simple truth is the right road to any corrective actions. Detectives should have been called in at once to explain the law rather than rely on some self protecting “horsing around” definition to rationalize a coverup for some imagined “greater good”.
Shame on the entire bunch.
History is full of examples where folks did horrible wrongs and rationalized their behaviour with “just following orders” and other denials.
If there is one good thing to come of this, it’s that more men raped as children will come forward, seeing that other men and teenagers have done so. Silence is an abuser’s best friend.
Agreed….but with the caveat that since most adult abusers were once among the abused, when will this ever be over?
I’ve recently become acquainted with several abused men. Of the ones I know, not one has abused a child or a woman, for that matter. In point of fact, these men tend more to be walked on, than vice versa.
That’s heart-warming and a good point to make. But there was no claim all abused victims will re-abuse, only that of adults that abuse the huge majority are former abuse victims.
A very close family friend and his wife are Penn State alumni. He in particular had been trying his best to mitigate this. He’s dead against child molestation, of course, but he has really struggled to accept the moral bankruptcy of the school administration. Until recently he could defend only the deceased Joe Pah, a saint to Nittany Lion fans and alums, arguing he must have been kept in the dark, unable to accept the possibility of his complicity in the cover up. And now we learn Paterno helped lead the cover up. Our friend is not an unreasonable man and he’ll accept this report by Freeh, but he will be crushed.
I seem to remember a large number of Penn State students protesting in favor of these pedophiles and their enablers mainly because they won football games.
And don’t forget that pathetic spectacle not long ago as the verdicts were being read against Sandusky. One lone person in the courtroom (I assume it was a current or former student), chanting “Joe-Pa, Joe-Pa, Joe-Pa..”, as if he were in a cult…
Did anyone smack him silly and yell, “Snap out of it, you idiot? Children’s innocence was ruined here and all you think about is Paterno?” Boy, I just wish someone had done that. It would have kept people grounded on reality.
Even scarier, many of those very same students enjoy the right to vote in national elections. What could go wrong?
Even worse…. they get to vote in local elections even though they will never be around to pay for the expense of their vote or live with the results.
Forgive me for being somewhat cynical about this report, but the Board of Trustees got what they paid for… a report that fundamentally lets the board’s leadership on only a very small hook. You cannot tell me that the board’s leadership, which Spanier courted assiduously, wasn’t aware back in 1998. The board’s leadership was tight with Sandusky’s Second Mile and PSU was doing business — with the board’s approval — with Sandusky and Second Mile well beyond 1998.
And allow me to point out that Freeh has a history of providing the desired outcome of investigations… Ruby Ridge and Waco, anyone?
Remember, too, that Spanier’s academic background was in family therapy. You would think, perhaps, that the damage Sandusky was doing would have been something that Spanier would have recognized and properly acted upon, wouldn’t you?
And if you’re talking about the missing DA, he had a history of being less than friendly to the university. Why did he refuse to push the 1998 charges?
This report leaves a whole bunch of unanswered questions that somebody didn’t want to be answered. The board’s leadership, perhaps??????
In order to go from Penn State to State Pen all you have to do is turn your sweat shirt inside out and drop the “n”.
Forgive me for being somewhat cynical about this report, but the Board of Trustees got what they paid for… a report that fundamentally lets the board’s leadership on only a very small hook.
As I pointed out to you on another thread elsewhere , this is a mind-boggling statement. As proof of the epic fail that this theory represents I posted a sample of yesterdays headlines:
Freeh Report: Lack of oversight by Penn State board of trustees to blame in Jerry Sandusky scandal
or:
Penn State’s Freeh report highlights leadership failings of university’s board of trustees
or:
Freeh report: Penn State trustees did not demand enough info from Graham Spanier
At the presser, the BOTs were being bombarded with questions about if they were going to resign. How is that a “vary small hook”?
Tom, are they going to be forced out? No. That includes Garban, who has been on the board since 1998 and was one of the leaders of the board for years. Individual board members quite likely knew what was going on and are just as culpable, in my view, as the PSU employees who knew.
The scope and breadth of the investigation and the directness of the conclusion that names names and spells out failure in concise, unequivocal language, is something we’re not used to in our culture of “it’s not my fault”.
No, this investigation and report shows a dysfunctional island of culture in a sea of worship-induced group-think. This culture of personality around Joe Paterno created an environment where it was risky to even consider reporting a prominent Paterno assistant, even when people knew he was committing sexual abuse of children! They saw that people who did report, to whatever extent (i.e. “I told ____ about it.”), were largely ignored. It went nowhere. Apparently, JoePa was either too weak and blinded by loyalty to confront Sandusky, or it was one of those situations where JoePa said something, hoping Sandusky would just quietly stop.
I have friends who are Penn State fans and alumni, and even they have been in varying states of denial. Most went along the lines of, “Oh, I can’t believe JoePa would let something like that happen. There has to be a side we’re not seeing.” Yes, there is, my friends.
Your beloved JoePa stopped being a leader and became a tin-god a long time ago, and somewhere in that transformation, he became an enabler of a monster.
The awful thing about deifying people is that the next step in the evolution of a mortal god, is what the Greeks called ‘Hubris’. [Greek hýbris, insolence]
“I have friends who are Penn State fans and alumni, and even they have been in varying states of denial. Most went along the lines of, “Oh, I can’t believe JoePa would let something like that happen. There has to be a side we’re not seeing.” Yes, there is, my friends.”
Your friends better get themselves used to the idea that their beloved Penn State will soon be no more.
The legal liability against the university as of this moment is just too great for anyone to think that institution has any future whatsoever. The football program will the the first one to go into the dust bin of history. The lawyers are just licking their chops and getting ready for the money banquet that’s going to come out of all of this. I’m sure a few of them are already calling for special orders on luxury yachts…
As for the current students, feel sorry for them. One they’re out of there, they are going to have one Hell of a time finding a decent job in view of the damaged reputation of the school. If I were the parent of a prospective student, I’d tell my child to forget about Penn State and find another college to pursue a degree in.
Penn State is damaged goods.
Think of it this way: in the future, you will see a Penn State alumnus serving cocktails at the luxury yacht of one of the attorneys who will become millionaires because of this college’s lack of give-a-rat.
Or maybe, an alumnus who will invoke something similar to the TX “Clean-Slate” Law in order to redo his college degree and wash himself off the Penn State “stain”.
The “current students” and 500,000 grads had nothing to do with this. Any employee who would hold anything against an innocent graduate of Penn State because of what happened, would be an idiot.
I’d argue a prospective employer has a fiduciary duty to his company to select only the most promising candidate(s). Where theduchessofkitty’s point will be proven is when choices are made between multiple candidates from various universities. There comes a point when every thing else is even the “why take a chance?” card will be played to a PSU alum’s detriment. Might not be fair, but neither is life.
Why would they be taking a chance if the Penn State grad had the qualifications for the job? There might be a few employers who would think like that (and it’s a very distorted way of thinking), but I would hope that the majority of employers have more sense than that. Penn State has definitely lost their fine reputation, but in no way have the graduates lost theirs. If anyone thinks that way, then they’re being totally unfair and probably had something against Penn State to begin with.
I’m a PSU alum. I didn’t play football, had no interaction with the athletic department other than attending various sporting events, and I graduated 20 years ago. How exactly are you “taking a chance” with me? I’ve heard people say that my fellow alums will find it difficult to find a new job because of this scandal several times since the scandal broke, and it makes no sense to me. Hell, Spanier got a new job that impacts national security after being fired! If anyone from PSU should be suspect, it’s him.
EllisWyatt, when did you speak up that something at your university was horribly wrong? Did you speak up in 1998 when charges were pressed and then dismissed against Sandusky? After the prosecutor Ray Gricar vanished? When campus police asked for that investigation to be shut down? After they banned Sandusky from bringing children onto campus in 2002? After they started their hush-campaign against victims in 2010?
If you or other Penn State alums and students did, great, but I never saw it. I saw a very large group of students rioting when paterno was fired. I *still* see students going to games as if nothing were wrong. I see a bunch of people more concerned with NCAA rankings than unspeakable crimes. I see the complete lack of concern for the victims, to this day, and denials from students and alum. Peek at twitter, and the vast majority of tweets about paterno are in support, and they come from Penn State alums and students.
“The “current students” and 500,000 grads had nothing to do with this.”
Nope, but those who see their degree parchment will always have questions in regards to what the students really learned from that place from now on.
Have you ever heard that “A bad wound can heal; a bad reputation never does”? Maybe you should take heed of this little Spanish proverb, because it is truer than true. Even Ray Donovan, who was Reagan’s Labor Secretary, realized that (“Where do I go to get my reputation back?”) after he was cleared of corruption charges.
I can guarantee you that even the Duke Lacrosse players who were unjustly accused (and then proclaimed innocent by NC’s Atty General after DNA samples and other evidence proved otherwise) of raping a woman who was proven to be an irremediable liar (and a major slut, to boot, but that’s another story) are still dealing with the consequences of a bad accusation and its resulting bad reputation. Even though they were cleared. Do the three deserve it? Not at all. But there are people out there who still take the view of the Duke 88 who signed that vile document supporting a false accuser they consider as innocent as a white rose – who is now standing accused of the murder of a boyfriend of hers. Is she getting what she deserves? Absolutely! But those of Duke’s faculty who defended her against the players still need to pay for what they did. Is that fair? Nope.
Bad reputations are like bad accusations: even if you had nothing to do with it, they follow you like a ghost. Joe Paterno had a stellar reputation, akin to that of Knute Rockne – until he took part in the cover-up. He could have put a stop to the whole thing by doing it right and reporting that pervert to the cops before the college got itself into an ever worse bind. But he chose not to – and now Penn State and their alumni are going to pay the price. Is that fair? Nope.
The heartbroken alumni from Penn State will prove JFK’s ditty: “Life isn’t fair.”
Personally, I would never even think to hold anything against a Penn State graduate for what has happened. I guess that’s why I can’t see it happening. A Penn State graduate would be much better off not be employed by someone who thinks that way.
Yes, the three players WHO WERE ACCUSED will have to deal with this from here on in. But all the other alumni should’nt be worried about their job prospects.
“Personally, I would never even think to hold anything against a Penn State graduate for what has happened.”
Neither will I. In fact, I do know at least one Penn State grad. I cannot imagine how he feels right now that his school is going down into the mud pond…
Personally, I’d be outraged if that were my school.
I dropped by had a couple of beers with a friend and his wife, both PSU alumni and two of the deniers I mentioned, above. Both are shocked at the findings. My friend’s wife said that Paterno was an almost mythic figure in the minds of several generations of alumni and fans. She said that this kind of realization seems so unreal that it has to work its way to the surface. Both are not only heartsick for their state and Alma Mater, they feel betrayed by both the man and the myth. Mostly, she said – and he agrees – they feel angry and sick that this could’ve been stopped years ago, but for system that allowed one man to become an institution. I’m not sure I agree, but she has a point. The feelings that came through is one of betrayal and abandonment.
It’s going to take a while to right that ship.
If I was trying to fill a position, came down to two final candidates who were equally well qualified, and one of them had graduated from PSU, there are two things that I’d weigh among the intangibles before I made my final hiring decision.
First, at a point after the scandal broke when everybody in the country who wasn’t associated with PSU was convinced that Paterno had known Sandusky was raping children and had done nothing about it beyond the bare minimum required by law and his contract, thousands of PSU students rioted in the streets at the prospect that Paterno might be held accountable for his role in the debacle. Meanwhile, every PSU alum I met was making excuses for him. I realize a lot of college sports revolve around a cult like worship of a legendary coach, but I don’t think you can come up with another example where it was taken to that extreme. I’d rather not have an employee who was educated at a university where critical thinking is to be ignored if it exposes the inadequacies of a coach.
Second, if the highest levels of leadership at PSU will hide a rapist for over a decade, what won’t they lie about? And keep in mind, this is the same university that still employs Michael Mann after a “nothing to see here, just move along” internal investigation of the Climategate e-mails. Is there any reason at all to believe that if there was academic fraud being perpetrated there, the university would risk public scrutiny by engaging in a thorough investigation? From this point forward, unless they burn the place down and rebuild it from the ground up, there’s no reason to trust in the integrity of anything that comes out of PSU.
None of that means I wouldn’t hire a PSU grad, but they’d have to be hands down better qualified in every demonstrable way than any other candidate I had for the job.
Your statement about judgment hits home. How to decide to hire or not to hire a Penn Stater?
Simple. If it were me, I’d mention — in a sorrowful, sympathetic, noncommittal way — that the candidate is a Penn State alumnus, and what an awful thing happened there! The response will speak volumes.
The deluded ones will go on a rant, however polite and soft-spoken, about injustice and poor ol’ Joe Pa. They won’t be able to help themselves.
The honest ones will respond in sorrow and regret, as normal people do when something beloved takes a huge hit.
It’s too bad these men were put into this bad situation. None of us would have wanted to be in their shoes.
That being said, they failed miserably.
I wonder how Mike Nifong could/can sleep at night. I wonder how these men can sleep at night.
Your career and an institution’s reputation over children being molested?
No career should mean that much to anyone.
Fear, rationalization and denial. The same way a small, purple-stained child denies eating the missing chunk of berry pie.
Yep.
Hindsight is always 20/20. They had a chance to prove their quality to the world by calling the cops on that pervert and made it clear to the world that Penn State will NEVER TOLERATE that kind of thing on their campus from anyone – faculty, students, staff, or even their sports programs. Sure, there would have been as many questions asked then – but there would have been the benefit of upholding some kind of “honor” for the school. It would have worked great then, and Paterno would have looked a million times better than he looks now.
“Winning-est Coach” would have been nothing compared to “Defender of the Innocent.” But he and the “leaders” at Penn State chose poorly.
It is amazing to me how many people are running around with 20/20 hindsight claiming what they would have done and what others should have done. Do any of you parents trust that a coach or administrator can or will look out for your kid in all situations and at all times without fail? I sure don’t.
Evil exists! Maybe that should be the first take away from this. But, instead we are creating a culture where reporting is the safety net for our kids. But that creates a false sense of security for everyone. Our sex crazed country hides the hideousness of such men as Sandusky and it confuses our kids over acceptable behavior.
So many of these big-time college coaches meet a bad end.
It’s a cautionary tale about the power of tin gods. If only people will heed it.
As we type, there are activists lobbying the APA psychology and psychiatry groups to normalize and de-pathologize ‘intergenerational’ and ‘minor-oriented’ sexual orientations…and for the establishment of ‘childrens’ sexual rights.’
It would be fun to tie some of these lobbyists up in a garden shed with Lorena Bobbit.
Oh – and the same year the Episcopal Church installed their gay activist alcoholic bishop, the State of Kansas legislators entertained the idea of lowering the age of consent in Kansas to 12. In Hawaii, the AoC is only 14.
Have the guardians of our society gone mad with permissiveness and amorality/immorality?
Wow! Progressives in positions of power failed to do the right thing and innocent children got horribly hurt.
This is how leftists run organizations. They were more concerned about themselves and the organization than anything else.
I thought EVERYTHING was for and about THE CHILDREN! Unless their buddy is raping them.
This really makes me want to vomit!