Penn State Assistants May Have Seen Jerry Sandusky’s Debauchery (WITH VIDEO)

Jerry Sandusky on his way to court (image courtesy Mark Pynes, The Patriot-News)
Jerry Sandusky on his way to court (image courtesy Mark Pynes, The Patriot-News)

The Penn State child sex abuse scandal exploded back into the national headlines in a big way this week. Allegations surfaced that former head coach Joe Paterno may have known about the debauched behavior of his defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, well before he initially claimed to have known. However, NBC News stumbled on another disturbing anecdote. As many as six of Paterno’s assistants saw Sandusky molest boys as far as the late 1970s.

Penn State is locked in a tussle with its former general liability insurer, PMA Insurance, over who should foot the bill for $60 million in settlements with Sandusky’s victims. Part of the dispute centered on when Paterno and others at Penn State knew that Sandusky was a serial child molester. PMA contended that Paterno, who died in 2012–just a few months after being fired for mishandling the Sandusky affair–a child personally told Paterno that Sandusky molested him in 1976. Paterno long contended that he didn’t know about any abusive behavior by Sandusky until 2001 at the earliest.

On Friday, NBC News learned that six of Paterno’s assistants recalled seeing Sandusky engage in “inappropriate behavior” with boys. Watch more details here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDqfHp8-uqM

According to sources close to the court proceedings, one assistant saw an incident during the late 1970s. Three others saw Sandusky molest boys in the early and mid-1990s. One assistant was so shaken by what he witnessed that when he arrived at a football staff meeting, he blurted out, “You won’t believe what I just saw.” According to the order from state court judge Gary Glazer that contained the 1976 allegation, two assistants witnessed “inappropriate” contact between Sandusky and children in 1987 and 1988. Another incident that took place in 1988 was reported to then-athletic director Jim Tarman.

Glazer could not find any evidence that anyone “further up the chain of command” at Penn State knew about the 1987 and 1988 incidents. Specifically, he found no evidence that then-president Bryce Jordan or anyone on the board of trustees knew about them. Partly for that reason, he ruled that any incidents prior to 1992 would be covered by insurance, while Penn State would be on the hook for any incidents between 1992 and 1999–when the bulk of the abuse occurred. Responsibility for any claims after 1999 will be decided at trial.

It can safely be assumed that the other four incidents were not reported up either. Unless I’m very wrong, one of three things happened. Either the assistants passed the allegations on to Paterno and Paterno didn’t report them up, the assistants didn’t bother to report them further, or the athletic director knew about them and didn’t act.

You may recall that in 2012, the NCAA slapped Penn State with some of the harshest sanctions ever imposed on a major collegiate athletic program–including a four-year bowl ban and erasure of all of Paterno’s wins after 1997. The postseason ban and the wins were restored in 2015 to stave off legal action by several state lawmakers. You can question whether the NCAA went too far in imposing the sanctions that were ultimately imposed, since they had the effect of punishing Penn State for incidents that took place when most of the players at the time were still playing Pop Warner football.

After this, however, there should no longer be any dispute about whether the NCAA had any business getting involved. Maybe it could have been more deliberate in how it handled this affair. But these revelations prove why the NCAA took action in the first place–to eliminate a program culture that ran counter to some of the most basic principles of intercollegiate athletics. If covering up this monster’s crimes in order to protect the image of a football team isn’t evidence of wanting to win at all costs, nothing is.

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.