The report cited court documents that were uncovered during a case with an insurance company as Penn State is hoping to recoup losses the university incurred defending itself from civil cases involving Sandusky’s victims.
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“You won’t believe what I just saw”, one of them reportedly blurted out after bursting into a room filled with Penn State football staff, according to a source.
The line from that document in question reads, quote: “in 1976, a child allegedly reported to PSU’s head coach Joseph Paterno that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky”.
Insurers in litigation with the university claim that in 1976, a boy told Paterno that he had been molested by Sandusky, who’s now behind bars after being convicted of 45 counts of child sex abuse. The order also references instances in 1987 and 1988 in which Penn State assistants are alleged to have witnessed inappropriate contact between Sandusky and children, plus a 1988 case that allegedly was reported to the school’s athletic director.
The victim says that Sandusky, who was 27 at the time and a year into his coaching career at Penn State after playing there, picked him up as a hitchhiker, bought him beer and gave him pot. “Joe Paterno did not, at any time, cover up conduct by Jerry Sandusky”. Mr. Paterno said in a 2011 grand jury appearance that he first heard concerns about Sandusky and a child in 2001.
This date is 12 years before what had been thought was the earliest known allegation of abuse by Sandusky. Sandusky was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison, effectively a life sentence, in the child sexual abuse scandal that brought shame to Penn State and led to coach Joe Paterno’s downfall. Last year, he launched an effort to overturn the conviction on the grounds that his rights were violated in the original trial and that his lawyers were ineffective. She asked board members to seek the truth “in the spirit of our love for Penn State and our duty to the victims”.
Lawrence Lokman, a Penn State spokesman, said Thursday that university officials knew of the allegations, but he declined to discuss them.
“I think he was responsible and I don’t think he carried through like he should have”, said Dick Svhetler of Lime Ridge.
“There is no evidence that reports of these incidents ever went further up the chain of command at PSU”, Glazer wrote in the order.
The revelations that Paterno appeared to know about abuse decades earlier come the same day a different judge in Pennsylvania granted Sandusky a hearing later this month to press his case for a new trial.
Details of the testimony remain hidden inside a sealed deposition in Penn State’s court fight with the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association Insurance Co.
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Caldwell left Penn State following the 1992 season to become head coach of Wake Forest.
