“The most saddening finding by the Special Investigative Counsel is the total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.” This is the opening sentence in the section on the “Findings” of an inquiry led by Louis Freeh, the former F.B.I. director, into the university’s role in the case of Jerry Sandusky, the former football coach convicted of raping or sexually abusing ten children. The report was commissioned by Penn State’s board of trustees; Freeh’s team interviewed more than four hundred and thirty people and looked at three and a half million pieces of “electronic data and documents.” The report makes it clear that Penn State was a facilitator of Sandusky’s crimes.
Senior administrators—notably Graham Spanier, the university president; Joe Paterno, the football coach; Timothy Curley, the athletic director; and Gary Schultz, the vice-president for finance and business—exhibited a “striking lack of empathy” for the children. In a half dozen or more places, the report returns to some iteration of this sentence:
The repetition beats out a note of disgust—as well it should. The report also makes a point of stopping at various places in its chronological narrative to make note of the children who were raped or abused after the administrators decided that allegations about Sandusky were, as Schultz said in one e-mail, “now behind us.”
That e-mail was addressed to Spanier and Curley and sent in 1998; it referred to an incident in which a mother looked for help after her son told her he had showered with Sandusky. When news about a grand-jury investigation into Sandusky came out in 2011, Schultz denied ever having heard about it. So did Spanier, and so did Paterno, although both, as the report makes clear, were involved then and revisited the matter after another incident in 2001. These men were either lying or have suffered from an incomprehensible bout of group amnesia—or else child-sexual-abuse allegations are not the sort of thing that they consider memorable. Arguing against that last point is the way that, as the report notes, their e-mails about Sandusky slip into code at key points—with references to “the person” or “the other organization” rather than proper names.
And they all are capable of emotion; for example—and this is as enraging as it is saddening—in e-mails in which they decide they are not, as originally planned, going to tell child-protective authorities about how an assistant coach saw Sandusky sexually abusing a child in a university locker-room shower, they manage to form a pleased circle of self-congratulation.
Curley:
In addition, Curley said, if Sandusky was coöperative, they would help him tell Second Mile, “his organization.” They’d also tell him not to bring “guests” to the locker room. Spanier replied:
Schultz, too, was impressed:
“I am having trouble with going to everyone, but the person involved”; “your conversation will be all the more difficult, but I admire your willingness to do that”; “more humane and upfront”—what are they talking about, and who do they think they are? Did they suppose it was brave to tell Sandusky to his face that they wouldn’t tell on him? They decided to hide; they did so for many reasons, Freeh found, but one of them was because of how much football meant to the university. The report makes it clear that Penn State football was Sandusky’s bait. The administrators repeatedly approved Sandusky’s requests to make his connection to the university real and visible, both as part of his retirement package—negotiated just months after the 1998 incident—and long afterward. He was able to offer children sideline access and tickets, camps and clinics on university property, and Second Mile-Penn State playing cards. Football players regularly volunteered for Second Mile.
These four are not the only ones who should be ashamed; the report finds that the board of trustees fell short, as well. (Spanier’s interactions with the board have a sort of startling diffidence to them.) So did the Second Mile trustees who thought that what they heard about the 2001 allegations was a “non-incident.” They were in the category that Curley called “everyone but the person involved”—a phrase that doesn’t seem to have struck any of the administrators as absurd, despite its omission of the person truly involved: the child in the shower. The report makes an important point:
What happened to that child? We don’t know; neither the university nor the prosecutors got his name. We do know that a jury agreed that something terrible had happened to him in that shower. And we know that Sandusky would have realized that the boy could be a witness against him. How did he treat the boy afterward? Based on the pattern of victims, he was likely someone Sandusky got to know through Second Mile, which was meant to help vulnerable children who came from difficult homes. Apart from possibly threatening or intimidating the boy (something he did to other victims), did Sandusky, over the next years, do anything to shape the boy’s life, to make him less credible—to direct him to grow into the kind of man whom others might not believe? A push, a word, a bad choice at a key juncture: whoever that boy became, or never had a chance to become, Sandusky helped make him. So did Penn State.
Photograph by Matt Rourke/AP Photo.
