Documents: Paterno ignored boy’s Sandusky complaint in 1976

He said he told several adults at the camp, held on Penn State’s main campus, about it before seeking out Paterno. As most know, Sandusky was charged and convicted of multiple counts (45) of sexual abuse of children in 2012.

Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, told by a teenage boy in 1976 that assistant coach Jerry Sandusky molested him in a shower, responded that he didn’t want to hear about it and had “a football season to worry about”, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday. Paterno died in 2012, and the school’s top administrators who dealt with complaints about Sandusky are awaiting criminal trials and generally have not been willing to speak in detail in public about what they know. “I said, is that all you’re going to do?”

“The materials released today relating to Joe Paterno allege a conversation that occurred decades ago where all parties except the accuser are now dead”, the statement said.

The lawyer, Wick Sollers, said, “There are numerous specific elements of the accusations that defy all logic and have never been subjected to even the most basic objective examination”.

On Nov. 9, 2011 – the day Paterno announced he would retire at the end of the 2011 season, but was instead fired that same night – Schiano was quoted by the Asbury Park Press and other media outlets in response to whether he had any inkling that something inappropriate was going on with Sandusky during his time at Penn State.

McQueary said Bradley identified the other assistant coach as Greg Schiano, now defensive coordinator at Ohio State.

Senior, while denying that Bradley had any prior knowledge of inappropriate activity by Sandusky, said by the time Bradley became aware of the 2001 rape allegation, “it had already been reported to the university administration years earlier”.

Bradley, who briefly took over as head coach after Paterno’s firing, “said he knew of some things” about Sandusky dating to the 1980s, McQueary testified.

“Greg had come into his office white as a ghost and said he just saw Jerry doing something to a boy in the shower”, McQueary testified.

The attention will center, as it invariably does, on Paterno, and an alleged victim’s statement that the head coach “didn’t want to hear that stuff” when he tried to report Sandusky molesting him in 1976. According to McQueary in his newly released deposition, he also discussed what he had seen with Bradley, a Penn State assistant from 1979 to 2011. Schiano was hired by Ohio State in December to be its associate head coach and defensive coordinator. “And that’s it. That’s all he ever told me”.

After leaving Penn State in 1993, O’Dea spent most of the next two decades as an National Football League assistant coach with seven different teams, most recently as special teams coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2014.

A man called John Doe 75 said in a 2014 deposition that in 1987, assistant football coach Joe Sarra walked into a coaches’ meeting room to see Sandusky with his hands down the then-13-year-old boy’s shorts. This incident was witnessed by another Penn State assistant football coach, Joe Sarra, according to John Doe 75’s version of events. “I think all those questions have been answered years ago”, he said.

Penn State President Eric J. Barron additionally issued a statement regarding the documents’ release, emphasizing that “alleged knowledge of former Penn State employees is not proven, and should not be treated as such”.

The records also include an insurance company lawyer’s analysis that Penn State overpaid to settle with Sandusky’s accusers, possibly as a result of the university’s concern about publicity and a desire to resolve the matter quickly. The university has paid $92 million to settle claims from 32 Sandusky accusers.

“Nor did he have any knowledge of alleged incidents in the ’80s and ’90s”. But it should also be noted the settlement process was protracted and included several layers of vetting, with some claims rejected, and Penn State knew it would have to justify settlements, which total nearly $93 million, to its insurer.

Information from The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was included in this story.