I am absolutely devastated by the developments in this case. I grieve for the children and their families, and I pray for their comfort and relief.I have come to work every day for the last 61 years with one clear goal in mind: To serve the best interests of this university and the young men who have been entrusted to my care. I have the same goal today.
That's why I have decided to announce my retirement effective at the end of this season. At this moment the Board of Trustees should not spend a single minute discussing my status. They have far more important matters to address. I want to make this as easy for them as I possibly can. This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.
My goals now are to keep my commitments to my players and staff and finish the season with dignity and determination. And then I will spend the rest of my life doing everything I can to help this University.
The most recent info I've read says that a grad student reported the anal rape of a 10 year old boy (on campus) to the coaching staff (one of the many alleged assaults pinned on Sandusky), and that Paterno passed along the info to higher-ups.
ReplyDeleteShould he have done more? No shit.
Reminds me of Homer Simpson:
ReplyDeleteMarge: You lied to me Homer. You told me you got rid of the gun.
Homer: But Marge, I swear, I never thought you'd find out.
How anyone can think that passing on that information to a "higher-up" (and that includes the grad student who reported the incident to the coaching staff and not the police) would suffice is beyond me. Paterno's devasted by the DEVELOPMENTS in this CASE? Not by the rape of a 10-year-old child? Not by the serious danger Sandusky posed to children for years, children whom Paterno's actions might have saved from terrible pain and trauma?
ReplyDeleteUgh. I can't imagine how he's slept at night all this time.
"Ugh. I can't imagine how he's slept at night all this time."
ReplyDeleteWinningest coach in Div I football history, that's how. Think he's going to give that up just because some little kid(s) got groped/raped in the locker room? Hell no.
We can't understand why no one reported this to the police; I give you Exhibit A: The Catholic Church.
If someone had done something like this to one of my children, rest assured that I would be in prison, because the person who did it would be dead by my hand.
I come from a polite, restrained, gun-free land with still plenty of faith in the rule of law and the administration of justice, but I hear ya, BurntChrome, I hear ya and I'm right there with ya.
ReplyDeleteI think the "developments in this case" line means that Paderno passed on the information, thought that it must have been investigated and nothing had been found and so it was all okay, and now discovers that he was wrong about that and is horrified.
ReplyDeleteThis faith in hierarchy, in the right things being done by those in a position of authority,isn't only found in the Catholic church.
If Sandusky is convicted I do trust that bad things will happen to him.
If I reported to the police every crime my (adult) students told me about, then I wouldn't have time to do anything else. For one thing, students lie to me--how can I know that the crimes actually occurred? And if the crimes didn't actually occur, then I might be charged with filing a false report or sued for libel or something else. A decade ago, when the crimes allegedly occurred, it was not clear whether FERPA allowed for a private right of action against Paterno for violating the grad student's right to privacy, so Paterno might have legitimately felt that he couldn't report the crime to the police. And should Paterno have called the assistant coach into his office and said, "Tell me the truth. Have you been molesting kids?" Do you think he would have gotten an honest answer? If I'd been in Paterno's shoes, I would have walked the grad student over to the police station and told him to tell them what he told me. But what if the grad student refused to do that? So Paterno did what he was supposed to do. Really, what more should he have done? This is not such a simple case. Sad, yes. But not simple.
ReplyDeleteUm, excuse me? In the state where I work any third-party description of sexual abuse/harrassment makes me liable, unless I contact the campus office specifically charged with investigating those violations (not some vague "higher up"). That can be awkward -- sometimes I have to stop students midsentence and explain that I am bound by law not to keep their confidence and so they may not want to name the identity of the person they are accusing -- but it's designed to prevent me from doing exactly what Paterno did, i.e., from protecting the one accused. Bubba, it is not your job to know whether the crimes actually occurred -- that's for the authorities. That's why you report crimes. And if the campus authorities are not doing anything, you go off campus to the police.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I have to go take a shower now.
@F&T: Are you saying that your state law requires you to do something if one of your students says, "I inadvertently saw my next-door neighbor rape hir spouse yesterday"? That's what it sounds like you're saying.
ReplyDelete@F&T: I've always generally liked what you write, and IANAL, and perhaps we're in different states, etc.... Unfortunately, my experience in these matters has been unpleasant. And the law and the reality are two very different things. Would one of us really have walked into a police station in 2000 and accused a trustworthy and immensely successful person we hired, of raping a little boy?
ReplyDelete[Scene: police station.]
Proffie: "I want to report that my assistant proffie Jane Smith raped a little boy yesterday."
Police: "Do you have any evidence of this?"
Proffie: "No." (Surveillance cameras were clunky and expensive at the turn of the century.)
Police: "How do you know this?"
Proffie: "One of my students told me."
Police: "You trust your student more than your assistant proffie?"
Proffie: "No, but I'm reporting it anyway." (Even if this is a career-ending accusation for her.)
Police: "What's the student's name?"
Proffie: "I can't tell you because of FERPA." (FERPA hadn't yet been so watered-down yet.)
Police: "But you must."
Proffie: "No, I can't because the student is having some issues because he's had concussions because he's a football player and he has some emotional issues and memory problems… and I can't even tell you that because of HIPAA and…."
Police: "So you don't really know that the alleged little boy was raped?"
Proffie: "How could I possibly know for sure? I wasn't there. It might not have even happened. I don't even know if the little boy exists…."
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
This shit makes me sick, but I've seen it drag out for a VERY long time and still come to no satisfying conclusion at all. It's frustrating as shit. It's especially awful when I believe the asshole perpetrated the crime, betrayed the trust of the entire department, and stole a young person's dignity and ability to trust. I fucking hate having to choose the lesser of two evils and then not be able to explain why to anybody. I hate it.
I'm sorry, but whether or not to give extra credit is an easy one. It's these life-destroying, clusterfucking issues that I'm supposed to be able to handle that ruin it for me. IANAL! I actually goddamn like hamster basket weaving! I fucking love it. It's my life. It's why I'm here. And I get to do too little of it. So I get drunk and vent a bit at CM.
Sorry, but I've just found that many of the most basic implied assumptions are often not true: that none of the campus police are corrupt, that none of the local police are corrupt, that the district attorney will be on my side, that the state children's protection service agents are competent, and so on. I don't assume any of those things anymore.
ReplyDeleteOr that everything I read in the newspaper is true.
ReplyDeleteBubba, are you fucking kidding me?
ReplyDeleteI wrote more in the other comment thread, so here's the abbreviated version.
ReplyDeleteThere are separate channels for reporting child abuse in most states. A link is at the end. Reporters are protected by law from civil or criminal liability.
Depending on interpretation of state law, you may be legally liable for not reporting child abuse you had "reasonable suspicion" of. Pennsylvania lists School Administrators and Teachers as mandatory reporters. Though the list seems to imply those would be ones dealing with minors, it does not explicitly say that, and it would be up to the courts to determine if it applied to a college professor/administrator.
Non-mandatory reporters are still protected from liability from reporting a suspicion of abuse. The only difference is that the punishment for not reporting will be meted out in the afterlife rather than in our court system.
I need to stop now. This is not improving my mood.
Link to reporting hotlines: http://www.childwelfare.gov/responding/reporting.cfm
Thanks, Alan. I had written out something similar about my own state's laws and Blogspot ate it. In my state, if you are in a supervisory role and someone describes an incident to you, you are protected if you report, but liable if you do not. So if the grad student had described this to me, I would be legally obligated to contact the office of sexual harassment as a bare minimum.
ReplyDeleteBut what I also wrote was more important to me:
"Would one of us really have walked into a police station in 2000 and accused a trustworthy and immensely successful person we hired, of raping a little boy?" Christ Jesus yes, of course, if I had seen it myself. If not, I would have walked the grad student over to do it. No way could I ever protect my imaginary ass or someone else's immense success at the expense of a 10-year-old child.
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
Bubba, you are right to raise the issue that reporting it to the police may not have solved the problem. However, I think there's a flaw in your schenario. If I had a staff member who I felt falsely accused my assistant of raping a child, I would fire that staff member.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the child rapist and the person who reported the rape remained on the football staff tells me everything I need to know. Yes, this would be incredibly difficult for Paterno to destroy the football program and the school which he helped to build and which he loved. However, at the end of the day, he must have thought, "It's for the good of everybody that I not make a big deal about this kid getting molested," assuming he thought about it at all.
Bottom line: the allegations involve the abuse of children. In my state, as a public employee, my ass would be fired if it was discovered that I had knowledge of such abuse and didn't follow through on it--and morally, I would have an obligation to follow up with my supervisor to ensure it was reported to authorities. A football legacy doesn't give you an out.
ReplyDeleteThe Penn State Trustees were right to fire Paterno and the president.
I am not a lawyer either. But passing the bad the A/D, and then ZERO apparent follow up FOR TEN FUCKING YEARS is despicable.
ReplyDeleteI love football, I love college football, and in my lifetime, Paterno emerged as THE embodiment of the best it had to offer. His inexcusable lack of action over many years this turns that legacy into big steaming pile of dogshit.
The centerpiece here wasn't some picayune NCAA rules violation involving tattoos and second hand football pants, or a "used" car or an eligibility issue.
This was a felony of the most repulsive type...apparently perpetrated in the heart of of the PSU football empire.
Here's how it played out:
"No feebback from the AD...guess old Gerry isn't a kid-toucher after all. Let me go back to building my legacy."
Here's what should have happened:
"Hey A/D: have you contacted the cops yet? If you're too busy, I'll do it, since it happened in my damned locker room".
The best Paterno can hope for now is that the "rest of my life" is numbered in a very small number of years, because it's a sure thing that the flood of details to follow will not do anything to improve his image.
Seriously: if a creative writing student handed this shit in a short story draft, the feedback session would ask him to scale back the grandiosity...because we can only suspend so much disbelief.
Sorry, not enough coffee: reposting with important missing words included:
ReplyDeleteI am not a lawyer either. But passing the bad news to the A/D, and then ZERO apparent follow up FOR TEN FUCKING YEARS is despicable.
I love football, I love college football, and in my lifetime, Paterno emerged as THE embodiment of the best it had to offer. His inexcusable lack of action over many years turns that legacy into big steaming pile of dogshit.
The centerpiece here wasn't some picayune NCAA rules violation involving tattoos and second hand football pants, or a "used" car or an eligibility issue.
This was a felony of the most repulsive type...apparently perpetrated in the heart of of the PSU football empire.
Here's how it played out:
"No feedback from the AD...guess old Gerry isn't a kid-toucher after all. Let me go back to building my legacy."
Here's what should have happened:
"Hey A/D: have you contacted the cops yet? If you're too busy, I'll do it, since it happened in my damned locker room".
The best Paterno can hope for now is that the "rest of my life" is numbered in a very small number of years, because it's a sure thing that the flood of details to follow will not do anything to improve his image.
Seriously: if a creative writing student handed this shit in a short story draft, the feedback session would ask him to scale back the grandiosity...because we can only suspend so much disbelief.
One more thing: Southern Bubba implied that 10 years ago, the law wasn't as strict about reporting molestation.
ReplyDeleteSure it was. In my state we had mandatory reporting by 1996; I know because I did it about someone in my extended family. Is it easy to believe? No. Is it easy to report? Yes, the phone call is easy; no, the repercussions and backlash are very hard. Would it be easier to hope it will just go away on its own? Yes.
Did Paterno claim to be about honor?
@Eskarina: I don't think I implied anything about changes in laws with regard to molestation. I said FERPA is more watered down than it was in 2000. I think that's true.
ReplyDelete