Some useful websites countering the main MSM presentation of the issues,
particularly in their opinion pieces:
http://www.framingpaterno.com/
The backers of that website include:
Barry Bozeman
Barry Bozeman is the Founder Editor and co-author of The Second Mile Sandusky Scandal Website.
As a Resident of Knoxville TN and graduate of the University of Tennessee
he has no ties to Penn State or any particular feeling about Joe Paterno.
Attacked as a "pedophile enabler" for suggesting that the Grand Jury Presentment was not unassailable fact,
Bozeman decided to become as well informed as possible on the facts of the Sandusky Scandal.
That decision led to the creation of his weblog as an objective non-partisan view of the Scandal.
http://paterno.com/
The Paterno family website.
Now for some news articles that did appear in the MSM:
2011-11-16-NYT-Bearak-in-sanduskys-birthplace-questions-of-how-well-you-can-know-a-man
In Sandusky’s Birthplace, the Man They Knew
By BARRY BEARAK
New York Times, 2011-11-16
WASHINGTON, Pa. —
[1]
The Brownson House,
the old red-brick recreation center on Jefferson Avenue,
was like a hearth the whole community huddled around.
Every child played there, one generation after another,
bouncing a basketball on an undersize court
that had an inconvenient pillar in the middle.
[2]
From 1952 to 1985, Art and Evie Sandusky ran the place —
the sewing classes, boxing matches, table tennis and all the rest —
and it’s fair to say they were widely admired.
The couple lived in a small apartment at the top of the building,
and they had one child, whose name was Jerry.
[3]
Art Sandusky, a great athlete, was a local legend,
but Jerry Sandusky became well known across the country —
praised as a defensive mastermind for Penn State’s football team;
celebrated as a humanitarian who started a charity for troubled youth;
and, as of last week,
reviled as an accused child molester in a scandal that brought down Joe Paterno
and rendered chaos at this state’s flagship university.
[4]
“I grew up playing ball with Jerry, a nice guy, a really good guy,
and when I see this on the news it’s just unbelievable,”
said Bill Lindsay, 68.
“You know, he’s an absolute look-alike for his dad,
and it’s hard to imagine anyone from that family being a pervert.
But it’s also hard to doubt all we’ve been hearing.
Old Art is rolling over in the grave.”
[5]
If there are answers to the enigmatic puzzle that is Jerry Sandusky,
they lie well beneath the surface here in his birthplace,
far more difficult to get at than the mineral-rich sedimentary rock
that runs under the Western Pennsylvania soil.
[6]
People in Washington, a blue-collar town of 14,000 about 30 miles south [-west] of Pittsburgh,
are even more confused than others about the ugly allegations,
the reported abuse of at least eight boys across 15 years.
They have the added question to face:
how well does anyone really know anyone else?
[7]
“For us, his best friends,
this is pretty close to what everybody felt after J.F.K.’s assassination,
a big hole in your stomach,”
said Ben Lucas, who made Sandusky the best man at his wedding.
“People’s first thought must be that this man’s a monster.
But that’s not so.
He is such a good person.”
[8]
And yet even though Sandusky denies the charges,
Lucas has been convinced otherwise by
the 23-page grand jury report
that portrays Sandusky as a predator,
a cunning man adept at using his charity — the Second Mile —
to find boys to sexually assault.
He bought them clothing and sports equipment, the report said.
He took them to the Penn State campus, to a golf resort, to a bowl game.
[9]
“As we were growing up, Jerry was an icon,”
said Lucas, 68, who is now a retiree in Virginia.
“If there had been an election in Washington, Pa.,
Jerry would have been voted the outstanding guy in the neighborhood.
And it didn’t stop there.
Look at all he accomplished in his life.”
[10]
But figuring out who might become a sex offender is not easy.
“People tend to think that sex offenders
have a trench coat and three-day stubble and look kind of creepy,”
said Thomas G. Plante, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University
and an expert on sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests.
“Sex offenders come in all shapes and sizes and colors and I.Q.’s.”
[11]
He added:
“Some offenders are in remarkable denial.
They say they were doing the child a favor
because he was being neglected at home.
Others will say that what they did is not so bad.
They’ll minimize it, and when you break through the denial,
they’re often devastated and suicidal.”
[12]
In fact, according to the grand jury report,
detectives say they overheard Sandusky tell the mother of Victim No. 6,
“I wish I were dead,”
after she confronted him about improperly hugging her son in the showers.
[13]
Dr. David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire,
said no one knew where any type of sexual predilection comes from;
some people contain their sexual fantasies,
others act them out.
[14]
The indictment against Sandusky lays out
a familiar pattern of “grooming” victims, Finkelhor said.
“These were vulnerable kids,
and you can see the kind of guile and opportunism used,” he said.
“A big factor can be incentives offered, special attention and privileges,
taking the kids to certain activities and places
they wouldn’t ordinarily have access.
These kids may have complied with him
because of a need to keep the relationship.”
[15]
Jerry Sandusky, 67, is the author of an autobiography called
Touched,
published in 2000,
or about six years after the first crime outlined in the indictment.
The title is intended as a thank-you
to the great people who had touched his life.
It is tempting to search the book for clues.
[16]
In one reflective passage, he wrote:
“There were perils I faced as a youngster.
I did so because I thrived on testing the limits of others,
and I enjoyed taking chances in danger.”
[17]
But these intriguing sentences are the introduction to
a chapter about water balloon fights.
Sandusky and several pals, including Lucas,
were twice arrested for their overenthusiasm.
Art Sandusky interceded, and the young men — already college students —
were given a reprimand and a fine.
“It made me glad,” Jerry wrote,
that the community “thought of me as Art’s boy.”
[18]
Most people in Washington labored in steel mills, coal mines and glass factories.
Evie Sandusky worked with glass;
Art was a conductor for a trolley company.
In the afternoons, home from work, they operated their own ice cream stand,
which stayed open until 10 or 11 p.m.
[19]
They lived in a neighborhood called Tylerdale,
named after the Tyler Tube and Pipe Co.
When that business folded,
its offices were bought by Judge James I. Brownson,
who donated the building to a community group.
[20]
This became the Brownson House,
which, though still open as a community center,
nevertheless seems an artifact to a much earlier America.
It was home to kindergarten classes, pool tournaments and dance classes.
Boxers worked out in a makeshift ring in the stuffy basement.
News clippings were pinned on a corkboard.
A photograph from 1954
showed 10-year-old Jerry Sandusky kneeling like a mascot
with the Brownson Golden Gloves team lined up behind him.
[21]
Art Sandusky was recruited to run the Brownson House
because of his stature in the neighborhood.
In his book, Jerry calls his father a “T-shirt executive,”
a man who was the recreation center’s
director, accountant, plumber, electrician and janitor.
A sign in Art’s office read,
“Don’t give up on a bad boy because he might turn out to be a great man.”
[22]
Youth football was played on what is now called Art Sandusky Field,
boys as young as 8 learning what it means to block and tackle
in a part of the country particularly obsessed with the game.
Adults packed the bleachers most every night.
Evie Sandusky sold them refreshments.
[23]
These days, most of the factories in Tylerdale are gone,
though the neighborhood looks much the same.
Narrow two-story houses,
with porches out front and aluminum siding on the exteriors,
sit on small patches of land.
Osso’s Pizzeria, the great hangout, still sells 140 pies a day.
Men wearing Pittsburgh Steelers hats watch games
at the members-only Slovak Club, the Pulaski Club or the Polish Club.
[24]
“Art Sandusky was a standup guy, and he idolized his son,
taught him everything, even how to kick extra points,”
said Dick Cain, a 79-year-old bartender at the Pulaski Club.
“Jerry was a bashful kid.
He stayed away from the girls.
He was more about sports, every sport.”
[25]
Sandusky was not only a star high school football player;
he was a high-scoring guard at basketball
and a catcher on the baseball team.
However successful at sports, he was not a big talker.
Art taught him never to boast.
[26]
Jerry was indeed “shy and backward,” as he put it, around girls.
But he was smitten when he met Dottie Gross, his future wife,
at a picnic in Washington.
He was a senior at Penn State but still too timid to ask her out.
So Evie invited the young woman to one of her son’s softball games.
“Maybe I just needed that one little push because one thing led to another,
and before long, we had become closer,” Sandusky wrote.
[27]
Kip Richeal used to be an equipment manager for Penn State’s football team.
He and Sandusky have been friends for three decades.
Richeal ate meals at the Sandusky home in State College,
sitting in the dining room at a big picnic table with pews for seats.
The Sanduskys were unable to conceive on their own
but they adopted six children, who are now adults.
[28]
“Jerry was fun to be around,” said Richeal, 51,
who lives in a suburb of Beaver Falls, about an hour north of here.
“He was a big kid inside all the time,
though he could be serious and tough when it came to coaching.”
[29]
In 1991, Sandusky approached him about co-writing the autobiography.
The coach had put some thoughts on paper
and gave his friend the name of a possible publisher
who turned out to be uninterested.
[30]
The project was resurrected in 1999,
the year Sandusky retired from Penn State,
ostensibly because he realized he would never become the head coach
and wanted to spend more time with the Second Mile.
He talked about his life into a microcassette recorder,
mailing the tapes to Richeal,
who molded the meandering thoughts into a 238-page book.
[31]
“I felt I knew Jerry, but this thing now is so off-the-wall abnormal,
all I can say is, wow, unbelievable,”
said Richeal, who now sells tombstones.
“When I read the indictment, my stomach just kept churning,
saying to myself, ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.’ ”
[32]
He added:
“I loved him as a friend but he never tried any of that stuff with me,
never, never.
And I never saw him do anything like that with any kids.
No red flags.”
[33]
The book is not particularly introspective.
But in the chapters about his childhood, Sandusky describes an epiphany.
He mistakenly broke a headlight on the family car with a baseball bat,
then fretted over whether to lie about it to his parents.
He decided to confess, and instead of punishing him,
Art praised his honesty and gave him a hug.
[34]
This incident, according to Jerry Sandusky,
taught him to be courageous when confronted with adversity
and always tell the truth.
[35]
Challenged to do just that in a telephone interview Monday on NBC,
Sandusky responded to the charges this way:
“Well, I could say that, you know,
I have done some of those things.
I have horsed around with kids.
I have showered after workouts.
I have hugged them and I have touched their leg.
Without intent of sexual contact.
But, so if you look at it that way,
there are things that wouldn’t, you know, would be accurate.”
[36]
Richeal said the voice giving the rambling answers
hardly sounded like Sandusky at all.
He seemed “a beaten man,” Richeal said.
He added that he had not heard Sandusky that downbeat in 25 years,
since a loss to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl.
2012-06-20-NYT-Sandusky-wife-testifies
At Trial, Sandusky’s Wife Comes to His Defense
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
New York Times, 2012-06-20
BELLEFONTE, Pa. —
For more than a week, prosecutors and the witnesses they called depicted life inside the Sanduskys’ house at 130 Grandview Road in State College, Pa., not as the warm refuge for a stream of children that the outside world saw, but as a place of horrors where Jerry Sandusky sexually abused one young boy after another.
The abuse, the accusers have testified, often took place in the household basement. It happened on weekends and during the week, they said, and went on for years.
On Tuesday, Dorothy Sandusky — loyal wife, partner in charitable work, mother to six adopted children and an ever present adult in the house prosecutors have portrayed so darkly — took the witness stand.
Nervous, often wide-eyed, she spoke of her marriage and her husband, a former Penn State assistant football coach, and her belief that his aim had always been to help not hurt children, inside her home or anywhere else. For 40 minutes, she hunched forward in a pale green blouse and matching sweater, and the 12 jurors leaned forward to hear her.
At one point, Mrs. Sandusky, 69, was asked
if she had ever seen inappropriate contact between her husband
and the many young boys he met through the charity
for disadvantaged children that he ran.
She paused. The courtroom was silent.
She then said the only time she could recall,
it was a boy being overly affectionate with her husband.
Jurors, of course, had heard differently from eight men
who claim they were assaulted by Mr. Sandusky in their youth.
One testified that Dorothy Sandusky nearly walked in on
an assault in a hotel bathroom.
Another said he had cried out from the Sanduskys’ basement
as he was being raped,
hoping she might hear him and act.
Joseph Amendola, a lawyer for Mr. Sandusky,
zeroed in on that testimony with Mrs. Sandusky.
“Is your basement soundproof?” Mr. Amendola asked.
“No,” she said, with a chuckle.
“How’s your hearing?”
She said her hearing was fine, and went on to testify that
she never heard any such cry for help —
and that if it had happened, she surely would have heard.
She said more than once that
her husband, who worked long days,
always went to sleep earlier than she did
— and yes, she said, they sleep in the same bed.
When one of the prosecutors, Joseph McGettigan, asked Mrs. Sandusky
why the men who had testified about being abused as boys
would have invented the awful tales,
she stammered a little, shrugged, smiled and shook her head.
Finally, she said, “I can’t think of any reason.”
Since the charges against Mr. Sandusky, 68, were announced last fall,
Mrs. Sandusky has been something of a mystery figure —
pitied by some and scorned by others who asked how,
if the allegations were true,
she could not have known what was happening.
Jurors whose gazes had wandered through the testimony of other witnesses kept their eyes locked on Mrs. Sandusky.
At the defense table, Mr. Sandusky smiled occasionally,
but otherwise remained stoic.
If Mr. Sandusky does not testify, calling his wife to the witness stand may have represented the defense’s best hope of not only trying to poke holes in a few of the accusations, but also of softening the image of her husband.
She testified that many of the accusers
continued to visit him years after the alleged abuse, well into adulthood —
a point Mr. Amendola brought her back to again and again.
One man brought his girlfriend and infant child to meet the Sanduskys
just two or three years ago, she said.
Asked what she knew at the time of a 1998 police and child welfare investigation into her husband’s conduct with a minor,
Mrs. Sandusky said she understood that he had showered with a boy,
that it had been looked into and that the matter had been dropped.
That boy, now in his late 20s,
testified last week that Mr. Sandusky had abused him.
But Mrs. Sandusky said the young man visited them last summer,
and “he went out to dinner with us,” she said.
“We went to the Cracker Barrel.”
In fact, she said, it was one of many pleasant visits they have had over the years with the man, and “every time he came in the door he would give us a hug and say how good it was to see us.”
Mrs. Sandusky talked about meeting her husband when he was in college, getting married, adopting children after trying unsuccessfully to conceive, taking in foster children and later playing hosts to a steady flow of visiting boys from the Second Mile, the charity for troubled youths that Mr. Sandusky founded in 1977. But she also said that Mr. Sandusky was often absent, traveling frequently for work and working long hours.
Prosecutors contend that he used the Second Mile to supply himself with victims.
Mrs. Sandusky said some of the Second Mile boys, including those who testified against him, slept at the Sandusky house — an average of once or twice a month, she estimated, and more during football season, when her husband would take them to games.
On cross-examination, prosecutors treated her gently,
not pointedly challenging her testimony or questioning her actions.
The only sharp exchange occurred when Mr. McGettigan,
senior deputy state attorney general,
twice paraphrased her testimony as saying that
Mr. Sandusky would descend to the basement to put the visiting boys to bed,
and both times she objected.
“I didn’t say he would put them to bed,”
Mrs. Sandusky said firmly.
He would go down and tell them good night.”
In addition to Mrs. Sandusky, the defense called a psychologist, Elliot Atkins,
who testified that Mr. Sandusky suffered from a condition called
histrionic personality disorder,
which often includes excessively sexual or flirtatious behavior
as a way of getting attention.
That, Mr. Atkins said, would explain letters Mr. Sandusky wrote to some of the boys,
disputing the prosecution’s depiction of them
as being like the complaints of a spurned lover.
A psychiatrist then called by the prosecution, John S. O’Brien,
said that Mr. Atkins’s diagnosis was a stretch and that
the letters could as easily be explained as resulting from a “psychosexual disorder,”
attraction to boys.
Both competing experts agreed that psychological evaluations of Mr. Sandusky
showed a man trying hard to make himself appear healthier and more virtuous
than he really was.
Mr. Sandusky’s lawyers also tried to cast doubt on the accusers in questioning two state police investigators, suggesting that the young men made their allegations only after being told that others had related similar tales.
The investigators acknowledged that some of the witnesses at first insisted that nothing untoward occurred and told of abuse only on a second or third police interview, but that such reluctance was not unusual.
2012-06-24-WP-juror-Joshua-Harper-on-verdict
Sandusky juror on guilty verdict:
‘It’s the beginning of our time to heal’
By T. Rees Shapiro
Washington Post, 2012-06-24
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. —
On Sunday, Joshua Harper attended services at the Keystone Church and Ministries to pray, he said, for healing to begin in this tightknit community .
As Juror No. 5 in the trial of Jerry Sandusky,
Harper had seen how the case had unraveled this rural town.
Harper and 11 other jurors ruled Friday that
Sandusky was guilty of 45 counts related to sexually abusing boys.
“It feels good to expose something that was covered up,” said Harper, 31.
“It’s a statement that there needs to be accountability and change.
It’s the beginning of our time to heal.”
Harper, a physics and chemistry teacher at Bellefonte Area High School,
said that before the trial he had admired Sandusky.
As a Penn State University alumnus,
he knew that Sandusky had been a longtime assistant football coach under Joe Paterno
and that he had founded a respected charity for underprivileged children.
During the trial, however, he said, his impression of Sandusky changed.
“The testimony after testimony of the victims was very convincing,”
Harper said, noting that he and the other jurors observed
a common thread concerning how Sandusky “groomed” each victim with gifts and attention.
“That was pivotal.”
When the victims took the stand, Harper said,
he observed Sandusky lean forward in his seat with a “wistful expression on his face.”
“There was definitely a creepy factor,” he added.
Had Sandusky taken the stand, Harper said,
his testimony would have had little effect on the jury’s outcome.
“I don’t think he could have said anything with any credibility,” Harper said.
“He has every reason to lie, and these kids — these victims —
why would they lie?
Why would they say these horrible things happened to them?”
By 8 p.m. Friday, Harper and his fellow jurors alerted Judge John Cleland that they were close to reaching a verdict.
He said some of the jurors became emotional and that tears welled in their eyes.
Harper said he watched Sandusky’s face as the foreman read the verdict.
“It seemed to me that he accepted it, that he knew it was true,” Harper said.
“He looked guilty.
There was no shock, no surprise.”
...
2012-08-23-NYT-Spanier-and-lawyers-challenge-Freeh-report
Spanier’s Lawyers Attack Freeh Findings
By ADAM HIMMELSBACH
New York Times, 2012-08-23
Lawyers for the former Penn State president Graham B. Spanier
issued a searing rebuttal Wednesday
to findings by the former F.B.I. director Louis J. Freeh
that Spanier and other top university officials
had helped conceal allegations of child abuse
involving the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
At a news conference in Philadelphia,
the lawyers called the Freeh report, released in July
after an independent investigation commissioned by Penn State,
“a myth” as it pertained to Spanier.
“It is now apparent that Judge Freeh was not an independent investigator,
but a self-anointed accuser who,
in his zeal to protect victims of wrongdoing from a monster,
recklessly and without justification created victims of his own,”
said one of Spanier’s lawyers, Timothy Lewis,
a former United States district court judge.
Spanier has not been charged with a crime.
His lawyers were asked Wednesday if they thought an indictment was imminent.
“We have no information that would lead us to believe that,”
the lawyer John E. Riley said.
In June, Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts of child sexual abuse.
He is awaiting sentencing.
Tim Curley, Penn State’s former athletic director, and
Gary Schultz, a former university vice president,
are facing charges related to the extent of their knowledge
of a 2001 allegation of abuse against Sandusky.
Spanier, who was fired as president in November after Sandusky’s arrest,
did not attend Wednesday’s news conference.
But portions of interviews he gave to ABC News and
The New Yorker were released.
“The Freeh report is wrong, it’s unfair, it’s deeply flawed,”
Spanier told
The New Yorker.
“It has many errors and omissions.”
Spanier said he had spoken to many people who were interviewed for the report,
and he said he felt
some of their claims that did not fit Freeh’s narrative were left out.
“Many of them described the interviews to me as a witch hunt,”
Spanier said.
“They felt like it was back in the era of McCarthyism.”
Spanier’s lawyers issued an 18-page response to the Freeh report,
challenging its content.
Lewis cited a 1998 episode involving Sandusky and a child
that was investigated by the police and child protective services.
No charges were filed against Sandusky at the time.
Freeh said Spanier had failed to protect children on campus
and concealed the facts of that episode
to avoid bad publicity after the investigation.
But Lewis said Spanier had received copies of e-mails saying that
the investigation was complete and
that there was no evidence of criminal behavior,
so he had no reason to take action.
Spanier told
The New Yorker
he had no recollection of those 1998 e-mails
until they were brought to his attention during the recent investigation.
Spanier’s lawyers also disputed Freeh’s claims
that Spanier knew details of
the former graduate assistant Mike McQueary’s account
of a 2001 encounter between Sandusky and a child
in a Penn State locker room shower.
McQueary reported the encounter to Coach Joe Paterno,
who relayed the account to Curley and Schultz.
But Lewis said there was no evidence
that Spanier knew that it was sexual in nature.
“I remember asking two questions,” Spanier told
The New Yorker.
“Are you sure that’s how it was described to you, as ‘horsing around’?
And the answer was yes from both Gary and Tim.
And are you sure that’s all that was said to you?
And the answer was yes.”
Spanier added:
“I remember, for a moment, sort of figuratively scratching our heads
and thinking about
what’s an appropriate way to follow up on ‘horsing around.’
I had never gotten a report like that before.”
Spanier has been criticized
for a February 2001 e-mail to Curley and Schultz
in which he alluded to a “humane” way of dealing with Sandusky.
He told
The New Yorker
he was referring to Curley’s decision to tell Sandusky
he was reporting him to the Second Mile,
the charity for at-risk youth that Sandusky founded.
“I think what many people wanted to read into it was that
it was humane for us not to turn him in for being a child predator,”
Spanier said.
“But I never, ever heard anything about child abuse or sexual abuse
or my antennae raised up enough to even suspect that.”
Spanier was asked what he would have done differently.
“Based upon what I was told and what I knew
and the reliance that you have on others to follow up on things,
there wouldn’t have been a basis for handling that any differently,”
he said.
But hindsight, Spanier added, offers a different view.
“I wish I could have known what I know now,” he said,
“or even that I would have had
just a little more information, suspicion, awareness,
because that could have provided a basis for motivation
for a higher level of intervention.”
2013
2013-02-11-NYT-paterno-family-challenges-accusation-of-cover-up
Paterno Family Challenges Accusation of Cover-Up
By KEN BELSON
New York Times, 2013-02-11
A report commissioned by the family of Joe Paterno, the former Penn State football coach,
said he was unfairly tarnished and implicated
in the sexual abuse scandal involving Jerry Sandusky,
a longtime assistant who was convicted last year of sexually assaulting 10 boys.
The 238-page report, which was compiled by a team led by Richard Thornburgh,
a former United States attorney general, and released Sunday,
said an even larger investigation into the scandal by Louis Freeh, the former F.B.I. director,
was “factually wrong, speculative and fundamentally flawed.”
According to the Thornburgh report, the Freeh inquiry,
which was ordered by the Penn State board of trustees and released in July,
falsely accused Mr. Paterno
of helping to cover up Sandusky’s repeated abuse to shield the school from adverse publicity,
and wrongly blamed the “football culture” at Penn State for helping foster Sandusky’s crimes.
Unlike a legal proceeding,
no one testified under oath
and witnesses were allowed to speak anonymously
in the Freeh report,
which also failed to conduct interviews with “most of the key witnesses,”
the Thornburgh report said,
including the university’s top executives and Police Department
as well as the district attorney’s office in Centre County,
where Penn State is.
“Having never talked with these individuals,
the Freeh report still claimed to know what they did and why they did it,”
the Thornburgh report said.
...
2013-10-29-NYT-penn-state-to-pay-59-7-million-to-26-sandusky-victims
Penn State to Pay $59.7 Million to 26 Sandusky Victims
by Joe Drape
New York Times, 2013-10-19
2014
2014-07-20-NYT-Sokolove-the-trials-of-graham-spanier-penn-states-ousted-president
The Trials of Graham Spanier, Penn State’s Ousted President
By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE
New York Times Magazine, 2014-07-20
On the day the police arrived at the home of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach, to arrest him on multiple counts of child sexual abuse, Graham Spanier was beginning his 17th year as Penn State’s president. It was an extraordinary tenure, and one that had seemed most likely to continue for many more years. A man of ceaseless energy and considerable ego, Spanier led the university as it grew from a remote outpost of American higher education into a top-tier public university.
His imprint was everywhere. Some of the world’s most-decorated architects designed the dozens of new buildings constructed on his watch, and Spanier had the last word on everything from the shape of the windows to the color of the brick. He performed magic tricks as the opening act at student events, played washboard in a Dixieland band and sometimes climbed into the costume of the school mascot, the Nittany Lion. At various times, he led the boards that governed the N.C.A.A., the Big Ten conference, the Bowl Championship Series, the Association of American Universities and the National Council on Family Relations. His TV show on the Big Ten Network was called “Expert Opinion With Graham Spanier.”
Four days after Sandusky’s arrest in November 2011, he was out. Penn State’s board of trustees either dismissed Spanier or, as he contends, he resigned first. A year later, after Sandusky was convicted, Spanier, a sociologist whose academic background is in family and marital studies, was charged with eight criminal counts, including child endangerment, perjury and conspiring to cover up Sandusky’s crimes. The charges were as shocking in their own way as those brought against Sandusky. Spanier had ruled over an empire: about 45,000 students on a stately, sprawling main campus in State College; another 40,000 at locations around the state; an annual budget exceeding $4 billion. In order to protect the reputation of the university and its vaunted football program, according to the charges against him, he let a pedophile roam free.
The case against Spanier is at best problematic, at worst fatally flawed. More than 20 months after the state branded him a criminal, he still awaits a trial. He continues to live in State College but in limbo. Where once he strode confidently along campus pathways, saying hello to everyone in sight, he now stays within a narrow band of comfort, mixing mostly with close friends and a few trusted former colleagues. “At first I was just so stunned by it all, I couldn’t do anything,” he told me in one of our conversations this spring. “I was depressed. I couldn’t sleep. I lost 25 pounds. When I got up the courage, one of the first things I did was go back out on the racquetball courts. I found that everybody was so supportive. I was still one of the guys.”
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Labels: scandals
