I can’t say exactly why Penn state execs made the choices they did, but I have some experience with an employer that covered up crimes of an executive, thankfully of a financial nature rather than a sexual one. In tact there were two sets of crimes by two different people and handled entirely differently by management.
A department secretary embezzled about 20 grand out of a physicians entertainment fund over the course of a couple of years. I don’t know how she was discovered, but once she was, management called the police and she was led out of the building in handcuffs. I know this because it was in the news periodically for the next several months.
I couple of years later, one of our division directors (a step below a VP) was discovered to be embezzling money. I know a lot more details about this because I was interviewed and provided evidence to management about it. She was issuing bogus contracts to bogus ‘consultants’ and contractors who didn’t exist, depositing the checks into an account she controlled, and pocketing the money. I was one of the staff people who was actually performing the duties that she had claimed required outside contractors.
It was eventually explained to me and my boss (both if us were among those used by this person in her scam) that senior management decided that having a high-profile person life her arrested for fraud and embezzlement would be bad for the institution. She was well connected in the community, was a well known ‘face’ of the hospital to the public, and they were afraid that the hospital’s fundraising ability would be compromised.
Several months later I saw a story in the local paper about this same woman being hired to a very high position in a local women’s health organization. I didn’t call anyone with a heads up, and AFAIK no one else did either.
But I swear I wouldn’t have done nothing if she was sexually assaulting children – or adults either, for that matter.
I would love to know what your employer gave when asked for a reference that did not expose them to liability for not warning the next employer. It would be some interesting verbal gymnastics.
I’m thinking it might have been due to privacy issues. Let’s say you were Joe Paterno or a high level administrative official, and you wanted to address the issue of Sandusky’s sexual abuse. The media today is everywhere, and it’s going to blow the whole story open. It’s hard to maintain anonymity in such a situation, and the media reaction that is seen today is really negative. If the admins had turned Sandusky in earlier voluntarily, it would still have hurt Penn State’s reputation, although not as much, since it’s the cover up that made the crime worse. But the crime was bad enough that even without such a big cover up, it would have been negative for Penn State’s reputation had the situation reached the news media. (Does anyone think that if Penn State had turned him in voluntarily, the media would have given the institution a measure of privacy? Hell no. They would have screamed bloody murder.)
That’s why I think criminals deserve a certain measure of privacy and anonymity, especially if they are entrenched within an institutional power structure. For example, the Duke lacrosse team members who were indicted for rape were publicly shamed. Wouldn’t it be better to unleash the anger and emotions after the trial was conducted; and allow the accused to remain anonymous until the results of the trial?
I think what happened to Penn State was a lynching of sort. It is a form of public outrage that I find to be quite childish and immature, something that makes people scared to turn someone in from their own group because of the negative publicity that would fall on everyone in the institution. If you give these people and institutions privacy, then they might be motivated to do the right thing.
But again, it’s possible that these institutions would use the extra privacy and abuse it, so that nobody would ever find out. That’s why I’m against institutions in general…they become full of people who think they’re special and are above the law…
I’d suggest the Catholic Church was in a better position to maintain a cover than four guys at a state university. They may have treated Paterno like a god, but the Church actually had God on their side (or so thought their parishoners.) Their enablers went all the way up to the Vatican. Plus, sexual abuse was more likely to be swept under the rug by more than just Church officials 30 or 40 years ago. If the stigma associated with it today can keep people from coming forward, imagine what it was like 50 years ago. Either way, the Church had a lot more to lose than Penn State, so, in this perverse sense, it may have been better to take their chances. Given the enormous gulf between risk and reward in the Penn State case, the decision to cover-up was idiocy beyond belief.
Actually I don’t see it as that negative if they’d turned him in first time. I suppose the real embarrassment would be a news report that it happened on campus… Which also exposes the university to liability.
She was allowed to resign with a pension she’d already been vested in. As far as references, that I don’t know, though she was well enough known locally within the medical community that perhaps no one checked her references. Also, I don’t know how widespread the real reason for her departure was known. I’ve mentioned this to quite a few other people who worked there, and none had any idea.
I also have other unanswered questions, like how long was she doing this and how much money did she scam? I know that, before this came out, she wouldn’t even let my boss see her own annual department budget. We would submit a proposed budget, but what was actually approved never got down to us. She just told us to submit our requests for expenditures and POs to her, and she would get the funds. She ran half a dozen different departments the same way, and we think she just treated every individual budget like it was one big slush fund. And nobody but her knew what was really being spent. She could have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To the hospital’s credit, they did take some action after she left to prevent a recurrence. The finance department started sending all budget info directly to department managers as well as division heads, and there were quite a few new controls put on the budget process to make it more transparent to a lot more people.
Except the first accusation Paterno heard wasn’t some outsider or person with an axe to grind. It came from a trusted member of his staff who witnessed it in person. I don’t believe Paterno was worried about Sandusky’s reputation. He was worried about his own.
This is ridiculous. You think the police and prosecutors should have different standards of treatment for criminals based on their social positions within a community?
How is this supposed to work? An employer (or a school) should concoct a cover story to explain why this person isn’t at work anymore, and then what, swear everyone who knows better to secrecy? The police are supposed to keep the names of defendants off of arrest records? Court calendars shouldn’t have the names of the people involved with the cases?
It’s thinking like this which RESULTED in the Penn state scandal.
Blabber, welcome to the SDMB, but could you eliminate the blue color and weird font in the future? It’s actually easier to go with the default and we’ll get to know you by what you say rather than how you say it.
Thanx[/quote
Thank you for the welcome and will no longer use the blue colour and weird font. But why is it offered if we shouldn’t use it ?
l have no problem with that and thanks for correcting my error. Had l known in advance this was a no-no l never would have done so.
The fact it’s offered gave me the impression l could if l choose to use it.
But as l said no problem.
The dynamic you describe makes a lot of sense but doesn’t happen to fit the facts of this particular case (unless we assume a lot of facts which are not in evidence). The first incident that these guys knew about (in 1998) was reported (though not by them - the kid’s mother went to the police). The 2001 incident is the one they didn’t report. It does not appear - based on their notes and deliberations as disclosed in the Freeh report - that they were aware of the earlier incidents.
It is offered so people can use it to illustrate some particular emphasis or point, or to add something to a joke. It wasn’t intended to be used routinely in ordinary conversation.
What I don’t understand is why they at least didn’t quietly fire the pedo, and just let it be known, under the table that he wasn’t to be trusted around kids. Why did they keep him on the payroll?
Well, for one thing, it’s pretty much impossible to keep something like that under the table. Whoever is spreading the word is going to pressed pretty hard for an explanation. If they give one, they are going to be extremely vulnerable to a lawsuit by Sandusky.
Plus, their whole course of action was to designed to keep the abuse under wraps. Which is another thing pretty much impossible to so if they are also spreading the story around that Sandusky is dangerous to children.
