“Close to 10 additional suspected victims have come forward to the authorities since the arrest of the former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on Nov. 5 on 40 counts of sexually abusing young boys, according to people close to the investigation. The police are working to confirm the new allegations.
“The news of additional accusations came on a day when Sandusky made his first extended public comments since his arrest, and the resignation of the chief executive of the Second Mile foundation, the charity founded by Sandusky, was made public. They were the latest developments in a case that has led to the ouster of several top university officials, including the football coach, Joe Paterno, and the president, Graham B. Spanier.”
“Alleged victims of former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky are working with at least two legal teams to prepare civil lawsuits against the university—seeking damages from the university over administrators’ failure to take action.
“‘This may be the most high-profile sexual abuse case ever,’ says Benjamin Andreozzi, a Harrisburg, Pa., lawyer who is representing at least one of the victims listed in grand jury filings. Adreozzi noted that once other potential victims see that they’re ‘not alone,’ perhaps they’ll come forward, too…
“Attorneys close to the cases, meanwhile, believe the number of victims will grow dramatically in the coming days. ‘I think things are going to be fast and furious over the next weeks,’ says Manning J. O’Connor, an attorney in Pittsburgh who has been following the case.”
“Sam Stellatella, a three-position player in the 1950s for Penn State, is trying to raise funds for Jerry Sandusky’s legal defense.
“Stellatella has donated money and has urged other former players to do the same.
“‘I told him he’s going to need a million dollars to defend himself,’ the 73-year-old Stellatella told teh Associated Press. ‘He called me back and said, ‘What am I going to do with this money?’ I said, ‘Use it for your lawyer because you’re going to need it.'”
“Mrs Sandusky, 68, attempted to call one of the victims in the weeks leading up to his testimony, despite the fact the now 26-year-old had cut off all contact with Sandusky two years prior.
“She left a message on Victim 7’s phone saying the matter was ‘very important’ but the man, who told the Grand Jury that as a ten-year-old in 1994, Sandusky hugged and inappropriately touched him, did not return the call.
“Part of that alleged abuse took place in the Sandusky family’s State College, Pennsylvania, home, in which Dorothy and her husband raised their six adopted children. Sandusky claimed he and his wife could not have any of their own…
“Quite how much [the Sandusky family] knew about the sexual abuse, which occurred between 1994 and 2009 with a number of incidents at the family home, is now under scrutiny.”
“In the middle of Curtin Road, John Matko held one handwritten sign in his right hand and rested another against his jeans. Two inches of black tape obscured Penn State’s logo on the 34-year-old father’s hat, as he tried to ignore the jeers, slaps and beer hurled at him.
“‘Put abused kids first,’ one of Matko’s signs read. ‘Don’t be fooled, they all knew. Tom Bradley, everyone must go.’…
“A beer showered Matko. One man slapped his stomach. Another called him a ‘[expletive].’
“‘I understand the culture,’ said Matko, who graduated from Penn State in 2000 with a degree in nutrition. ‘I was part of it. It doesn’t surprise me what I’m getting from them.'”
“[G]ood people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It’s precisely in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away…
“I suspect a similar instinct prompted the higher-ups at Penn State to basically ignore what they described as Jerry Sandusky’s ‘inappropriate conduct,’ and persuaded Paterno that by punting the allegation to his superiors he had fulfilled his responsibility to the victimized child. He had so many important duties, after all, and so many people counting on him. And Sandusky had done so much good over the years …
“The best piece about Darío Castrillón Hoyos was written by the Catholic essayist John Zmirak, and his words apply to Joe Paterno as well. Sins committed in the name of a higher good, Zmirak wrote, can ‘smell and look like lilies. But they flank a coffin. Lying dead and stiff inside that box is natural Justice … what each of us owes the other in an unconditional debt.'”
“If Penn State officials want to make the point, to their community and the whole country, that what’s going on is a helluva lot more important than football, there is no better way to make it than to forfeit the final two games.
“How could I say this? Isn’t it time for the ‘healing’ to begin? What better way to heal than to cheer the old team on to victory, right? Wrong. We are not yet remotely at the healing stage. That makes the playing of a football game not purgative but grotesque in the current context. To engage in those rituals at this time—rituals I love, by the way, and have participated in since I was about 8 years old and hope to participate in until I draw my last breath—is not to heal. It’s to forget; to force the horror into the background, to bury it in pageantry and team colors and marching bands and tailgate parties and boozed-up alumni taking comfort in ritual. There will be a time for that comfort and those rituals. But the Penn State board should not be permitting them just yet.
“What the board should be doing right now is trying to send the message that what happened is utterly and wholly and universally intolerable. There might be various ways to do it. But there’s really only one that will hurt, that will fully and truly drive the point home. Does Penn State want to be one more ass-covering institution in a world of ass-covering institutions? Or does it want to say—as it has often said during the Paterno era—no; we are different. We are Penn State. That’s their chant, by the way. We are [clap, clap] PENN STATE! They should be the Penn State they have claimed to be. Cancel the season.”
“When you graft a multimillion-dollar entertainment industry anomalously onto higher education, you produce a bubble of entitlements and exemptions, and eventually, a simple moral derangement.”
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