The grand jury report is as difficult to believe as it is sickening to read.
The report paints Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State University, as a depraved sexual predator. He is accused of violating young boys from troubled backgrounds, abusing his position with a charity and committing some of his crimes at school facilities.
According to the report, the university kept it all quiet. Officials failed to contact police — even in 2002, when a young assistant coach said he witnessed one attack.
When they should have tried to protect Sandusky’s purported victims, university officials closed ranks to protect their institution and its reputation.
Sandusky is accused of sexual perversion, of a sickness, that violates all standards of decency. If guilty, he did not act alone. The university’s top officials stand accused of acting as accomplices — if not in a legal sense, then at least in a practical one. By failing to act on Sandusky’s reported crimes, they nurtured a climate that may have put more boys at risk.
The shocking scope of this coverup is almost impossible to put into perspective. Yet it is important to try.
Days before the release of the Penn State grand jury report, we criticized the way the University of Idaho handled the case of Ernesto Bustamante, the former assistant professor who killed graduate student Katy Benoit before killing himself. We said, and maintain, that the university should have contacted police immediately, when Benoit said Bustamante had threatened her with a loaded gun on three occasions.
But there are so many differences, and they serve to underscore Penn State’s abject failures:
• Benoit asked the university to keep her complaints quiet, putting U of I in an awkward position. But Penn State’s was a self-imposed silence.
• Benoit, a graduate student, was in a position to go to police, as the U of I urged. Young victims of sexual abuse are far less able, and far less likely, to go to police.
• Benoit reported crimes that evidently were not witnessed by anyone at the U of I. At Penn State, an in-house witness came forward. And nothing happened.
• Benoit went to the U of I in June. By July, the U of I and Moscow police met to discuss her complaints — although the two parties disagree about whether police were told of the gun threats. The Sandusky case stretches across 15 years.
The long coverup has unraveled, and rapidly. Athletic director Tim Curley and university vice president Gary Schultz, accused of lying to the grand jury, have since stepped down. On Wednesday, school trustees fired university president Graham Spanier and football coach Joe Paterno.
Paterno’s record — a 46-year career that leaves him the winningest coach in college football history — seems a mere footnote in the face of the scandal. In 2002, the assistant coach who claimed to witness sexual abuse went not to police, unfathomably, but instead to Paterno. Paterno also kept the matter in-house, talking only to his superiors.
The de facto face of his university, Paterno exerted none of his considerable power to press the case, internally or externally.
This is a shocking story of systemic secrecy. Football is a subplot.
Except as it relates to celebrity. In sports, perhaps more than anywhere else, we celebrate celebrities. We want to believe that famous people, while still people, embody greatness.
Greatness comes from simply doing the right thing when the pivotal moment arrives, as it did for Paterno in 2002. In that moment, Paterno failed to live up to his elevated status — or his most basic human obligations.
“Our View” is the editorial position of the Idaho Statesman. It is an unsigned opinion expressing the consensus of the Statesman’s editorial board. To comment on an editorial or suggest a topic, email editorial@idahostatesman.com.
