Ooh, will there be towel-snapping?
“Nittany Lion Tips are sets of sports trading cards featuring Penn State athletes… The Second Mile produces two editions of 25 cards each - the Fall Edition, featuring Penn State football team members… These cards are provided to counselors and caseworkers to use in their work with elementary and middle school students.”
http://espn.go.com/espnradio/play?id=7215524
“He (Sandusky) was definitely around… and the fact that the Second Mile organization, the organization he founded, was, any time guys wanted to help out, do charity work, that was always an opportunity for us to go out into the community and help out, and he was always present at those types of events.”
“Events” is his word, not mine. I have already conceded I can’t find a cite of Paterno encouraging them to participate, but that is not an essential point. Paterno still knew that Second Mile had the implicit support of Penn State, and not only through the cards and participation in events. There are many other examples of Sandusky taking advantage of Penn State support: for example, he held football camps for kids on a Penn State campus AFTER being caught abusing a child.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11310/1187908-454-0.stm?cmpid=psu.xml
“Mr. Sandusky usually met his victims, the grand jury report said, in their second year at Second Mile camps at the Penn State campus, when they were 7 to 12 years old.”
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-11-07/news/30371483_1_face-perjury-charges-abuse-grand-jury
“Sandusky was told by Curley not to bring children onto the campus, yet the coach was seen at a Penn State practice with a 12- or-13-year-old boy as recently as 2007”
“I am just overwhelmed at how hands-on Jerry is (in 2003), and I think he is more involved now than I think he ever was… He has his hands in every event… It’s like he was put on this earth to work with kids.”
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/football/ncaa/11/07/penn.st.sandusky.ran.camps.ap/index.html
“Sandusky held summer football camps through his Sandusky Associates company at the satellite campus just outside Erie from 2000 to 2008, Penn State Behrend spokesman Bill Gonda said.”
You are completely missing the point.
The point is that the people in Penn State and Second Mile who knew that Sandusky was a child abuser had a responsibility not to give him access to Penn State and Second Mile in his quest to abuse children.
Would Sandusky have been able to abuse as many children if he wasn’t allowed to hold football camps on a Penn State campus? If Second Mile didn’t distribute Penn State football cards to kids? If Sandusky was unable to take the kids to Penn State practices and games? In short, if he did not operate under the blanket of trust afforded him by association with Penn State and Joe Paterno?
I think the answer is clearly “no”, but even if the answer was somehow inexplicably “yes”, it would not in any way let anyone off the hook for allowing a known child abuser to continue using that access.
There are two reasons why what you just said is absolutely insane.
The first is that there are few parallels to the position Penn State football has in that area, and there is no guarantee he could have gotten in anywhere similar. It is very likely that he would not have been able to obtain as many victims, or would have been found out sooner, had he not been in the position he was.
The second is that he DID use Penn State and Second Mile. Whether he could have done the same elsewhere is irrelevant to the fact that the people at Penn State and Second Mile who knew he was a child abuser had a responsibility to stop him from using them to abuse kids. If he had gone somewhere else and been found out, then someone else would have had a responsibility to stop him, and hopefully would have. But that isn’t what happened.
His lawyer was in the studio with Costas when Sandusky called. I’d like to see what his face looked like while Sandusky was fumbling with that question.
First, stop putting your sentences into separate paragraphs. It unnecessarily adds to the length of already lengthy posts (myself included). Second, please embed your links into the text.
Of course it is. It was the the whole entire point of what you were saying. Trying to soften your stance now is just ridiculous. You were wrong, let it go.
Again, Second Mile is not Sandusky. The relationship between the charity and the university itself is not problematic. It’s the presence of Sandusky. Second Mile had/has the implicit support of Penn State because they likely deserved it.
I don’t think anyone has argued that he should have been allowed on campus. Obviously that was a bad thing. The problem with your argument is that it all stems from your false claim that Paterno and Penn State were knowingly and actively facilitating abuse, and that that supposed support is what allowed this situation to happen.
Again, nobody here disagrees with your general premise that PS and SM should have done more to remove his access to kids given that there was a good amount of evidence of impropriety. Where I disagree with you is making this the focus of the debate. Jerry Sandusky would have molested kids regardless.
This is all speculation. I think we can all recognize that absence some position giving him access to children, the number of victims would have been lower, but your supposition that the charity thrived on Penn State idolatry, and giving folks access to Penn State football is not really bourne out by the facts. Go to their website. Do you see a lot of mentions of Penn State, or football? Look at the events they have organized. Few of them are on PS campus. Also note they have offices in PA roughly 2 and 4 hours away from the main office. I don’t think they are wholly dependent on PS for anything.
Even your own cite says Sandusky usually met his victims in their SECOND year at Second Mile camps at the Penn State campus. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was recruiting these people, or that he did much beyond cruise for vulnerable young people.
Maybe, maybe not. I think that is likely, but certainly debatable. Given that Sandusky held his own summer football camps through his Sandusky Associates company, I don’t think the magnitude of his crimes would have been mitigated much if didn’t have access to PS or Second Mile. Ultimately, what allowed his abuse was his good reputation, and his freedom. Clearly he should have had neither, but the assumption that without PS or SM, the abuse would not have occurred is completely unfounded.
You are operating under the assumption that they KNEW and APPRECIATED he was a child molester and, therefore, a present danger to kids. Of course we know they were told, and that they should have taken greater steps to put Sandusky behind bars. But glossing over the above is to miss the entire point of the debate. Everyone agrees that in an ideal world, a guy like Sandusky would not be able to escape this long. The crux of the matter is why he was able to continue for so long, and who is to blame for that. I, and a few others, contend that few involved in the matter were knowingly complicit, fully aware of the magnitude of the allegations, or truly appreciative of who Sandusky seems to be. Given that we disagree of those basic premises, I cannot agree with your conclusion however valid the steps leading to it are.
You could see his face during a couple answers. He tried to show no emotion, but I seem to remember his Adam’s Apple bobbing as he gulped once or twice.
He actually did say a simple “no” to that question. The followup question was about whether he is sexually attracted to children, and at that he meandered a bit about being attracted to children but not sexually.
Beyond that, it’s a lot more difficult to anwer this type of question under enormous pressure on a live national broadcast than it is to imagine yourself answering it while typing on a MB.
There’s obviously quite a lot of evidence against Sandusky, but I don’t think this type of deconstruction adds much.
He was probably just horsing around with her and next thing you know …
The claim I saw was that he reported it to the police and the guy in charge of the police.
That’s what I saw, too. Schulz would presumably be the guy in charge of the police. He hasn’t asked about any of this under oath but he said he only stuck around the locker room for 30 to 45 seconds to “make sure” the assault stopped. Unless the boy got dressed and ran like hell, I’m not sure how hanging around for less than a minute after a rape is supposed to make sure of anything. I would think that catching a rapist in the act and leaving him alone with his victim (if that is what happened) sounds like a great way to get the victim killed as the attacker panics, but what do I know?
It was more than a “bit” of meandering.
I’d think that “Hell no!” would occur to most anyone pretty damn fast.
That is just speculation. Maybe if Sandusky had used some other organization as his cover, they would have turned him in when he got caught. Maybe he would have been unable to find another cover that gave him a sufficient position of trust to overcome his creepy demeanor. You are speculating just as much as I am.
So let’s both stop speculating: in a sense, it doesn’t really matter what would have happened if he had used some other organization. What matters is that he DID use Penn State and Second Mile. That gives a special responsibility to those in high positions at Penn State and Second Mile who were informed that he was a child abuser. They had a responsibility to stop him from using their own organizations, and their own trusted images, to abuse children.
According to the grand jury report, Sandusky met victim 1 at a Second Mile camp on the Penn State campus in 2005 or 2006. He held football camps at another Penn State campus until 2008. He brought kids to Penn State practices as late as 2007. All of that is totally unacceptable, and Joe Paterno happens to be one of the people who knew enough that he should have stopped it. Remember that Sandusky had no innate right to all that access.
It isn’t just not reporting the crime, though that would be bad enough. Joe Paterno and all the higher ups that were told had to make damn sure that Sandusky was not still using Penn State resources to gain access to and power over children. I don’t want to say it was the very least they needed to do, because it’s below the very least, but you get the point.
These objections are getting stupider and stupider. Whether you’re on TV or not, “Are you sexually attracted to young boys?” is not a question most of us need time to think about, and it took him 15 seconds to say “no.” Before that he repeated the question, which is what you do when you are thinking about your response and trying to buy time, and then meandered because he was trying to give a nuanced answer. And he never said he was non-sexually “attracted” to children; he offered the fact that he enjoys spending time with young people as an alterantive to sexual attraction. If you exclude people who are attracted to children, very few adults think there is any kind of natural progression from ‘I like spending time with young people’ to ‘I think it’s OK to shower naked with young children who are not related to me and are under my supervision.’
Well yeah, it’s not some clever formulation that you might not think of. But you might be uncertain as to whether it’s the best response in that situation.
Maybe it would come off as protesting too much. Maybe more detail and explanation would be more convincing. (And frankly, it’s quite possible - I think people would deduce guilt out of anything Sandusky said.)
And you would be making a split second judgment on that, while already under a tremendous amount of stress.
It’s very common for people to flub questions from interviewers, even when these seem simple to viewers in armchairs, and frequently for this reason.
IMO, there’s nothing at all in that (though again, there is obviously a lot of other evidence).
Actually, what Sandusky did when asked if he was sexually attracted to young boys was to immediately repeat the question … then he meandered.
When someone being interrogated repeats the question he’s just been asked … he’s thinking of his lie.
Just for folks who are now going “Huh? I thought he was doing this for 20 years or more!”, I’d like to point out that the victims in this investigation aren’t numbered chronologically, but by the order that the investigators uncovered the incidents. So Victim 1 met Sandusky in 2005, but Victim 4 might have met him in 1995 (as an example…I don’t know how the actual timeline relates to each victim offhand).
As you pointed out (thanks for the correction/clarification), he was able to immediately answer “No” when asked if he was a pedophile. So he clearly was able to answer a sensitive question with a straightforward answer, despite the high-pressure situation. Which leads us to conjecture other reasons besides pressure for why he stumbled on the (nearly identical) follow-up questions. You speculate it’s wanting to avoid a perception of protesting too much, or perhaps wanting to convey nuance. Most of us speculate dishonesty. Obviously neither camp’s rationale is proof, but I think “He was nervous” as a rationale can be dismissed out of hand.
Seriously, he had to know that he was going to be asked that question. Since it seems Bob Costas only knew a few minutes beforehand that the interview was taking place, I assume it was Sandusky and his lawyer that initiated it in the first place. You don’t think they talked about what to say, how to say it, what to deny and what to admit to? You have to be a blithering idiot to say “um…well…I enjoy being around children…” when asked “are you sexually attracted to young boys?” in an interview where you are trying to present yourself as not guilty of being a sexual predator who targets young boys. Especially when (if?) you initiated the interview yourself!
The whole thing was weird, and not an appropriate answer. His lawyer was an idiot for allowing it to happen, because IMHO it’s so much more damaging to his case. “Anything you say and do can be used against you” and now there’s a professional level recording of him saying “um…well…” instead of “no”, which is the right answer to give if you’re mounting a defence in a case like this.
I said it elsewhere and I’ll say it again: if this were a TV show, it would have jumped the shark. There’s just so many bizarre events and actions - from Sandusky’s behaviour and this interview, to the denial/coverup/whatever by people at PSU, to his lawyer and his teenage bride, to the judge who volunteered for the organization - we’d be complaining in CS that we’d be struggling to sustain disbelief. Real life is just so, so messed up sometimes.
You fucking kidding me?! Anyone asks me that, no matter when/where/why, you bet I’d respond in a nanosecond. Along with a mystified/disgusted/infuriated look in my face that I’d be asked such a question in the first place!
Moreso if I was wrongly accused of such a crime.
In fact, just for the hell of it I just asked an employee of mine – who knows nothing about this case, as it isn’t news here – the same question out of the blues. I think it is a testament to his good character that I am able to type this, for the look he gave me when asked could have melted steel. Had he followed with action…
You are welcomed to re-enact the experiment with anyone of your choice. Then get back to us.
He’s thinking of how best to phrase the answer. Whether that’s because of a lie or otherwise.
Even if Sandusky was lying, it wouldn’t be hard to think of “no” as the answer to that question. So that’s not the explanation.
What you’re saying is sometimes true, in cases where the question is not an obvious one and the answer is inherently complex. The guy saying the truth doesn’t need time to compose the answer, because he knows the complex story from having lived it, while the liar has to make it up on the spot. In this case, the question was an obvious and simple one, and it would be extremely easy for a liar to answer directly. So Sandusky was just struggling with how to answer in the most convincing manner, not with the fact that he was about to lie.
I disagree. A nervous person doesn’t necessarily mess up every response, and the fact that he didn’t do this doesn’t mean it wasn’t a factor.
This is probably all much ado about nothing, because there’s a whole lot of other evidence against Sandusky anyway. I commented on this because it’s a minor point of interest, but there’s a limit to how much energy I intend to devote to this specific point, and I think I’ve already reached that limit.
I have the feeling that McQueery’s friend was giving him a hard time about not doing enough so he sent an email stretching the truth and saying that he had contacted the police and done more than he actually had. It doesn’t make sense for him to lie to the GJ to make himself look worse but it does make sense to lie to a friend to make himself look a little better. He probably didn’t think that the email would hit the news.
More profiles in Joe P. courage:
That is really sketchy. There are reasons for transferring assets into a trust.
For instance, one spouse is mentally incapacitated but not dead. The other spouse will put assets in a trust, with outside trustees, in case something happens to the healty spouse. That way the estate can be managed by the trustees.
In this case it’s hard to imagine what the reason might be except to protect assets from someone making a claim against them. It’s looking like JoePa knew a lot of what was going on behind the scenes. He was sitting on a powder keg about to explode and it has.