Large organizations – especially humongous universities – have policies in place to investigate these sort of things. These policies are presumably designed to insure both a thorough investigation of the accused, while at the same time protect the accused from a witch hunt. Everyone seems to concede that Paterno DID report what he was supposed to report.
So here’s the part I don’t understand: Why are they all going after Paterno and Spanier, instead of whoever it was that Paterno reported this to?
In other words: Somewhere in Penn State’s policies for dealing with this, the allegations reached a person whose job was to decide whether or not to report it to the police. That person let the matter drop, and seems to have made a conscious decision not to report it to the police. THAT’S the person whose head we should be after. Who was that, and why haven’t we heard about him?
That would be: Tim Curley, Penn State Athletic Director and Gary Schultz, Senior Vice President for Finance and Business. Curley was forced to resign and Schultz had already retired. But both have already been charged with obstruction of justice and failure to report a crime. The reason we haven’t heard more about them is that justice seems to be well on its way to investigate and prosecute them.
Well, that and the fact that prior to this week nobody had ever heard of them, whereas Paterno is famous. Paterno will get most of the ink on this even though in the heirarchy of responsibility for this outrage, he’s not at the top or even close to it. Curley, Shultz and Sandusky are interesting to the general public only for what’s happened over the last few days.
Sandusky retired in '99? Still had keys /access to the locker/shower room and was still bringing young kids in for his own perversion under the guise of mentoring, friendship and discipline up until last year maybe?
The disappearance of the county prosecutor who tried to proesecute Sandusky adds a new dimension
Yes, he did in fact manage to offer the legally required minimum effort. However, as a person of high esteem, a leader, the “face” of the school itself, you sometimes need to do more than the legal minimum.
Someone you have a 30 year working relationship with was seen raping a 10 year old boy on campus, you report it to a higher ranking executive and then go on as though it never happened? I was going to say that’s the attitude I might expect from a temp janitor, who was finishing up a 5 day work assignment when he saw the incident, but that would be insulting to the janitorial profession.
This post is exactly why I wrote about organizations having policies on how to handle these investigations!
Remember: Paterno did not see the rape himself. He only heard about it from McQueary. So he told Curley, who did some sort of investigation, and then, according to Wikipedia, “Ultimately, the only action Curley and Schultz took was to order Sandusky not to bring any children from Second Mile to the football building—an action that was approved by school president Graham Spanier.”
With the information that Curley and Schultz had, this might have been an appropriate reaction! Maybe they judged McQueary to be not so credible. One could argue that Paterno was acting quite responsibly, by making sure that Sandusky didn’t get railroaded.
Sometimes a person does need to do more than the legal minimum, and that’s a charge that I’d like McQueary to respond to. But Paterno? What did he do wrong? (If he did believe McQueary, then he was part of a coverup; but we don’t know whether, at the time, he believed McQueary or not.)
I could go on at length on what I think about Curley and Schultz, not to mention Sandusky, but that’s for GD, not GQ.
I wouldn’t plan on McQueary being around for much longer.
If he didn’t believe McQueary, then he’s guilty of hiring a liar to be his receivers coach. A man who apparently makes up stories about little kids getting raped in the locker room, let’s give him a job.
If he did believe McQueary, then at some point after kicking it up the chain, wouldn’t you have a certain amount of curiosity as to why the charge didn’t go anywhere? We’re not talking about Sandusky stealing office supplies, or banging a cheerleader in a back room, we’re talking about raping a little kid. A guy who runs a children’s charity was accused of raping a little kid, and you are satisfied with reporting it and calling it a day?
It’s not good enough. It doesn’t matter if your the Head Coach or an anonymous nobody, not following through isn’t good enough. The difference is that you don’t get to be Head Coach by doing the bare minimum, you get to be Head Coach by being excellent, by being more than the minimum, by setting an example for others to follow.
Worth pointing out that McQueary was really just a kid too. He was a grad student. Maybe 22 years old?
It took a lot of guts to bring this to Paterno. 22 years old and not even out of school yet. This was handled directly by the chancellor of the university. You can’t go any higher.
Whistle blowers are typically punished here. Heck just this week a woman got fired for whistle blowing about child porn on a computer. That’s the reality of whistle blowing. They kill the messenger.
For a kid around 22 McQueary did what he could. It was his word against the ex coach.
This thread is in GQ, so maybe you could get your facts straight and hold the RO. McQueary’s age when he witnessed the rape of a boy was 28. He’d been a star player for Penn State in the 90s and involved with coaching the football program for 2 years by then.
How was I supposed to know McQueary’s age? Most undergrads finish their degree at 22 and start grad school the next semester. I was basing my *estimate *on 25 years of working at a university. Our office hires grad students for positions every year.
I tried to give a factual answer. Whistle blowers careers are typically destroyed. That’s a fact. You can find hundreds of examples in the news. I even gave a cite from a case this week.
If you don’t know, don’t post it in GQ. You’re not talking about any random grad student - McQueary is a specific person involved in a specific event, and there’s a shitload of information available about it. There’s no reason to estimate his age at all, especially when you use your estimate to excuse his inaction.
In real life, McQueary is a former Penn State quarterback. By 2002, he’d been playing or coaching under Paterno for 8 years, and the relationship between the two of them was close enough for McQueary to go to Paterno’s home to discuss the allegations in person.
I really do not understand the policy of reporting a raping to your boss, and nothing more. You call the damn cops. That’s what you do. If you walk into the bathroom at work and see a coworker raping a kid, do you walk out and call the foreman and say,“Hey Ed, Bob is raping a kid in the men’s room. See you in the morning.”? Hell no.
Except this was the second complaint against Sandusky. The first one was credible enough that he was asked to resign as coach (though they still let him use Penn State facilities for his childrens’ camps!). If Curley and Schultz had any question at all about the second complaint’s credibility, they should have followed up and investigated it, or let the police figure it out.
Maybe you can say Paterno did the bare minimum – it’s not his job to play detective, and he reported it to someone who could call on the right resources to investigate something like this; since I assume it’s not directly his job to decide who gets access to facilities so he has no overt responsibility to follow up. But the ones he reported it to have no excuse, as far as I can tell.
And if you’re althetic enough to have been a former star QB for a Big Ten school, how do you not barge in there and beat the shit out of him? Or at least, I don’t know, yell “HEY!”