One of the first stories I ever followed on this blog was the University of Colorado rape and sexual abuse scandal. For those who’ve forgotten — there have been a lot of rape and sexual abuse scandals over the years — the University of Colorado football team was accused of using the promise of sexual favors as a recruiting tool. One former Colorado player who had the temerity to be female, Katie Hnida, came forward to admit that she had been raped while at the school.
Coach Gary Barnett responded by criticizing her skill as a kicker.
As these charges flew, Kate Fagan was inside the bubble. She played basketball for Colorado. She was put forward to answer the charges against the school, and to defend the institution.
Today, Fagan is a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. And she is regretful about the way she handled things as a 21-year-old, and she’s aware of its applicability to current events:
While NBC Nightly News dimmed the lights inside the arena, set up two chairs facing one another, and adjusted the cameras, I paced the baseline and wondered if my answers would make the University of Colorado proud.
My school was mired in a recruiting scandal. NBC wanted to know how a female student-athlete felt about the charge that our football program used sex as a recruiting tool. The national media were pouring into Boulder as if the coasts had been lifted, everyone tumbling to the middle.
We were closing ranks inside the athletic department. Buffaloes above all else. The University of Colorado was being attacked from all sides; we were in self-protection mode.
Those months in 2004 were a light sprinkle compared to the thunderstorm that has descended upon Penn State. Former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky is charged with sexually assaulting young boys. Important members of the hierarchy, such as head coach Joe Paterno and athletic director Tim Curley, are charged – some formally, some in the court of public opinion – with failing to report Sandusky’s actions to police, for failing to protect our children in favor of their program.
As a 21-year-old in Boulder, I couldn’t see the humanity – the women whose lives had been damaged – standing just outside our black-and-gold athletic gates. I pulled on my CU letter jacket and refused to understand why a few women wanted to destroy our athletic family.
Fagan’s conduct can be forgiven. She was 21. Like the students who inexplicably rioted in support of Joe Paterno, she was too young to have gained a sense of perspective, or an ability to step outside herself and place herself in someone else’s shoes. It takes time to develop empathy. Time living in the real world. And college students usually haven’t had any of that. She can be forgiven her lapse, especially as she’s done what we’re all called to do: grown up.
Big-time athletic programs are not entirely unlike nation-states. Everyone wears the colors, says the pledge, and sings the school anthem. Everyone worships the logo, recites the fight song, and reports up the chain of command.
Everyone’s committed to defeating a common enemy: Ohio State or Nebraska or Michigan.
This is what makes college athletics galvanizing and wonderful. And also, for anyone who has been inside it, it’s what can make college athletics frightening. When you’re inside, you’re often a rah-rah believer. Blind acceptance exists that coaches and administrators, those who have established the institution’s culture, possess absolute authority. They’re accountable only to one another or not at all. The bad stuff can be handled internally, must be handled internally, unless it’s so bad it seeps out the office door.
And this is why, of course, Joe Paterno had to be fired. Because Paterno handled this precisely like every other college program facing every other scandal has: by burying it. Allegations against Sandusky first surfaced in 1998. Sandusky quietly stepped down from the team in 1999. No less anauthority on rogue programs than Barry Switzer said, “Having been in this profession a long time and knowing how close coaching staffs are, I knew that this was a secret that was kept secret. Everyone on that staff had to have known, the ones that had been around a long time.”
And yes, of course they did. Sandusky was investigated in 1998, in Joe Paterno’s town. Are you telling me he didn’t know? Paterno himself was told, flat out, that abuse had happened in Paterno’s own locker room. Did Paterno respond by going to the cops, or at least telling Mike McQueary to go to the cops? No, he passed it up the line, to his “superior.”
JoePa was the King of State College. He didn’t have superiors.
And as Fagan reminds us, the man Paterno notified would go on to fail less sickening, but no less serious tests of character:
Is it a coincidence that Penn State is responsible for two of the most inflammatory college scandals of the last quarter-century? Women’s basketball coach Rene Portland “resigned” amid charges of anti-gay discrimination. She had coached successfully at Penn State for 27 years. The Penn State administration – Curley was Penn State’s athletic director then, too – allowed Portland to run her program in whatever way suited her personal beliefs. She scared lesbians into the closet and revoked scholarships based on sexuality.
Just look the other way. Nothing to see here.
Sound familiar?
Sounds very familiar. Like every college scandal, from Miami to Oklahoma to Minnesota to Colorado to USC to Ohio State back to Miami and now to Penn State, and all the dozens of other stops in between. Preserving the reputation of The Program becomes more important than preserving integrity as humans. As Fagan says:
But Penn State is no more guilty than other powerhouse athletic departments and universities. Believe this: These things could have happened anywhere. It’s the protective cocoon of big-time athletics.
The longer you reside within that cocoon, the more entrenched you become in the culture. Administrators and coaches often morph from humans who react with humanity into vassals charged with protecting the institutional image. Preserving legacy and mystique are placed ahead of a child’s – or a woman’s – pain.
Joe Paterno was supposed to be different. He was supposed to be more ethically pure than the lords who oversaw more maculate realms. But he wasn’t. When he and his program were confronted with a scandal that literally crosses every possible bright line, one that was almost metaphysically wrong, Paterno covered it up. For the 13 years from the time Sandusky was investigated by police in 1998, for the 11 years from the time a janitor saw Sandusky abusing a child, for the nine years from the time a grad assistant told him what he saw in the locker room, for the two years that Sandusky was under investigation by a grand jury, all the way up through the week where he became the winningest coach in Division I FBS history, Paterno kept silent, to preserve the reputation of The Program.
Today, The Program lies shattered, and Paterno is compared to Woody Hayes. Yes, inside the bubble, I’m sure it made sense to hide, to cover up, to obfuscate. But the vast majority of us live outside the bubble, and out here, the pain of a child rape victim is far more important than Penn State football could ever be.
Paterno didn’t have superiors?
Who was it that fired him just now, then?
Fact is he reported it to two people: one a University higher up, one the person in charge of the University police. Second fact is we don’t know what he was told or what he understood the facts to be. Thirdly, we don’t know what kind of follow up he did with the story because, despite lots of outrage like yours, no one has asked Joe Paterno his side of things, and people are forgetting that Grand Jury investigations are basically one-sided legal affairs that don’t even involve defense counsel or any defendents.
We know Sandusky is almost certainly guilty of sexually abusing multiple pre-teen boys. We know that McQuery told Paterno something about a scene he witnessed in a shower involving Sandusky and a young boy. We know that Paterno told the people he was legally obligated to tell.
Beyond that, we know next to nothing. There’s plenty of speculation that probably will turn out to be true that Paterno “had to” know more than this, but you know what? Joe Paterno deserves the chance to give his side of the story. Because the abuse of multiple pre-teens at the hands of a predatory molestor does not excuse the rush to accuse someone two places removed from the act.
Who has been telling JoePa he’s not allowed to give his side of the story? Oh, right; nobody. In fact, he already has.
It is very telling that you are willing to immediately assume Sandusky’s guilt – despite his denial and the fact that he has been charged with, but not convicted of, any crime – yet despite Paterno’s own admissions, and a grand jury investigation, when it comes to Paterno’s actions, all of a sudden we “don’t know the facts” and we should leave the poor old fellow alone.
mythago:
Everyone on the internet seems to be assuming Sandusky’s guilt and if I had made the slightest peep about the fact that Sandusky has yet to be convicted of anything , I’d probably be accused of being a rapist or molestor myself. In fact, I believe the odds and probabilities are so far in favor of him being guilty that I’m perfectly willing to take that as a fact. If, in fact, it turns out this was some weird strange amazing misunderstanding or smear campaign on Sandusky, I’m perfectly willing to step up and apologize unlike some feminists at other blogs who did not do so after the Duke case and etc.
Here’s a column that explains things better than I can about Paterno:
http://joeposnanski.si.com/2011/11/10/the-end-of-paterno/?sct=hp_wr_a5&eref=sihp
I’m not one of those who rush convict people OR to call accusers liars and etc, but there seems to be a lot of people who immediately jump onto one “team” or another and hence bring disgrace upon themselves and any concept of justice.
Jerry Sandusky has been under investigation by a grand jury since 2009. Joe Paterno testified to the grand jury. Even if one wishes to pretend that Joe Paterno didn’t have any idea of anything negative before 2002, and that he did everything he could in 2002, by 2009, Joe Paterno knew full well that Sandusky was under investigation for child molestation.
Jerry Sandusky was working out in Penn State facilities in the week leading up to his arrest.
Think about that. A man who Joe Paterno knew, for a fact, was under investigation for raping children was still welcomed into Penn State’s football facilities — Joe Paterno’s football facilities.
Don’t tell me Joe was blameless. Don’t tell me he didn’t know. At a time when we know he knew, he did things the same way he did all along. He ignored it. He kept Sandusky close, even knowing that he’d raped children.
That’s not leadership. That’s the opposite.
As for him “not having superiors” — yes, he could be fired. But only by an emergency meeting of the Board of Trustees, and only after the worst scandal in NCAA history had broken and — tellingly — at the same time they fired the school’s president. Neither Curley nor Spanier fired Paterno. Neither would. Neither could. Paterno answered to the Board of Trustees collectively, just like the president of the school. He was at the apex of the school’s hierarchy, in practice if not in fact. Saying that he notified Curley and that he had then done enough is simply ludicrous.
Everyone on the internet seems to be assuming Sandusky’s guilt and if I had made the slightest peep about the fact that Sandusky has yet to be convicted of anything , I’d probably be accused of being a rapist or molestor myself.
Oh, please. Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you, against your sound judgment, to say “We know Sandusky is almost certainly guilty of sexually abusing multiple pre-teen boys” in the same breath as insisting (incorrectly) that we must withhold judgment against Paterno because we don’t know all the facts.
Yes, there are lots of people who jump to one ‘team’. The ones who are rushing to excuse Paterno in the face of his own admission. The ones who love JoePa and don’t want to believe anything wrong. As for the execrable column you linked, Posnanski has a glowing biopic of JoePa coming out – which he is, by his own admission, being paid a ‘sizeable amount of money’ to write. He has every interest in playing ‘pay no attention to that coach behind the curtain’. Hell, The Onion once again shows us that parody is dead.
But I’m not surprised you brought up the Duke case, because that’s pretty much the dogwhistle for people who want to excuse JoePa: never mind credible accusations over many years, never mind that JoePa admitted he fucked up, never mind that there is no hint whatsoever of prosecutorial misconduct here (as there was with Nifong), never mind that the grand jury spend years investigating these accusations (not merely rubber-stamping an indictment): OMG SPORTS + RAPE SO UR FAKE.
mythago:
You should stop arguing with the Clarence who exists only in your head and argue with the real one. I don’t follow college football and I didn’t even know about Joe Paterno until this week when it exploded all over the news and blogosphere. I hardly have a dog in this fight, all I’ve said is give the man a benefit of the doubt until all the facts are out. As for the column I linked to I dare say you didn’t read it for if you did you wouldn’t have tried to smear the writer by claiming he was going to write a “glowing” biopic when he specifically says he will include any information that comes out. And I dare say you know perfectly well that I brought up Duke as an example of a rush to judgment. Heck, you think I’m not aware of this blogs records on Duke? There’s such a thing as the Way Back machine ya know. Quite a few of the posters here disgraced themselves. I wonder if I was go back and look for your posts specifically what I’d find?
Mr Fecke:
Your opinion is your own. That I happen to share it doesn’t mean I approve of your arguments in support of it. What you really have to prove is that Paterno was in contact with Sandusky while he was on the campus.
In any case, Joe Paterno is neither guilty of abusing children nor is he guilty of not properly reporting this based on the laws he was operating under. He wasn’t the man who had the legal duty to contact outside police and while I might agree that he should have done that in a moral sense if he had any reason to suspect that this wouldn’t be properly investigated, the fact is he did what he was legally required to do and I think that needs to be stated and taken into account.
If he did all that he was legally obliged to do, then he shouldn’t go to prison. As far as I am aware, he’s not at much risk of doing so.
That does not mean he should keep his job, though. A man in his position of authority – and it doesn’t matter if it was the top position or not, he clearly had a lot of influence – shouldn’t have done the minimum necessary. He may not be a criminal, but he’s certainly not fit to continue as he had before.
@Clarence, one of us is arguing with an imaginary person, and it’s not me.
I know why you brought up the Duke scandal. It’s still stupid, because Paterno has admitted wrongdoing. This is not about “I don’t care if Paterno denies it, I think he’s guilty.” This is not about Paterno being charged with a crime and people calling for his head before the allegations have been proven in a court of law. And gee, for somebody who claims not to have a dog in this fight, you’re spending an awful lot of energy jumping into the ring. (And no, I don’t think you’re aware of this blog’s record on the Duke accusations.)
As Eytan points out, you and JoePa’s other defenders are pretending that as long as he did not break any laws, he should be free of condemnation. Legal duty and moral duty are different things, as we know from this guy’s example.
Clarence, I’ve responded to you on an open thread.
Mythago:
Paterno has admitted misjudgement. That’s a far cry from admitting to covering anything up , let alone the tons of alleged scandals involving Sandusky that Mr. Fecke seems to think he must have known about and, probably for reasons of prestige (which is the common guess about his motives) covered up in some way, probably by not reporting or deliberately not looking. Now in my opinion a small amount of that (mostly of the “not looking” variety) is probable, however the fact is that none of this has been proved at this point. Need I also point out that the Duke scandal was about an alleged rape that never happened and the enabling of the false accusation by some political groups and some corrupt police, prosecutors, and judges? The only similarity between the Duke case and this is that so many people think they know everything relevant before all the facts are in.
Right now he may be a foolish man or a slightly corrupt one. As more facts come in we might find him an active and sustained participant in covering up incidents of abuse against children – or we might not.
The only similarity between the Duke case and this is that so many people think they know everything relevant before all the facts are in.
Indeed, but perhaps not in the direction you meant.
The “misjudgment” to which Paterno has admitted is not doing anything about the allegations against Sandusky in 2002 other than reporting to his immediate boss. But it is notdisputed that Paterno took absolutely no other action whatsoever other than relating the ‘inappropriate behavior’ to Curley. It is not disputed that Paterno remained an honorary board member of Second Mile, the organization Sandusky founded to work with at-risk youths.
Even if we ignore everything else in the grand jury investigation – treating McQuery as a liar – how, precisely, is this unfair to Paterno? The very best case scenario is that he was told, in 2002, that Sandusky was engaging in sexual contact with a child on campus, and that he did absolutely nothing other than to tell the athletic director. He did not tell the police. He did not distance himself from Sandusky, or Sandusky’s youth organization. He did not confront Sandusky.
The evidence points to the Penn State football program and administration being aware of Sandusky’s crimes since 1998. Sandusky was an extremely well respected top assistant coach at one of the top football programs in the country at that time. He was expected to be named Paterno’s successor. Suddenly, in 1998, Sandusky was told he wouldn’t be Paterno’s successor. Suddenly, in 1998, he wasn’t considered a candidate for any of the open coaching jobs at other universities. He retired in 1999. This is a very unusual sequence of events and, although not proof of anything, strongly suggestive that Penn State’s administration knew and rumor got around to other top NCAA programs that Sandusky was not a desirable hire.
As others have pointed out, Paterno had to have known for the last 2 years that Sandusky was being investigated for these charges as Paterno himself testified to that grand jury. Yet, Sandusky was still allowed on campus and in the football program’s buildings for the last 2 years. If Paterno wasn’t covering up because he didn’t know what was going on he didn’t have the wits to run a football program since at least 2009.
Take a look at this and see if you notice anything else that happened involving Sandusky in 1998.
Jake @13: But even if we ignore the testimony presented to the grand jury, ignore all the other reports (including from eyewitnesses) that Sandusky was raping children, and assume all the other officials implicated are lying, by his own admission the most charitable reading of Paterno’s behavior is that in 2002 he was told that Sandusky was engaging in sex with children, and the entirety of his response was to tell the Penn State athletic director.
I’m not sure why condemning Paterno, even under this most charitable interpretation, is supposed to be “rushing to judgment”.
Maybe Paterno has been suffering from dementia since at least 2002 and forgot what he’d been told. Perhaps his staff reminded him of what he’d been told in 2002 and wrote it down on an index card for him just before he testified.
As Clarence so astutely points out, we can’t know that that isn’t the case.
You’re right, though, mythago. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of days and I’m reaching the conclusion that both Paterno and McQueary have utterly failed at the task of being decent human beings.
Paterno failed, but I do wish people would be a little more accurate about how he failed.
You can’t fault him for not going to the cops right away. Pennsylvania law enforcement does not expect multiple reports of the same incident from the same organization. That would hinder them, not help them. The proper procedure is to refer the info to the university officials who are in charge of contacting law enforcement–not just proper on paper, fulfilling the requirements of the law, but actually the the most sensible thing to do. When you work for a university you really should let the people who are in charge of reporting be the ones to do it.
It’s only after that, when he realized that those officials did not contact law enforcement (I’m not sure when this happened), that he’d have any reason to contact them directly himself. So the fail here was not immediate, but delayed.
Beyond that, he says he didn’t know the details of what McQueary saw, but why not? Did he even ask? Perhaps he didn’t want to know. But it was his responsibility to do something about the situation, even if he maybe assumed at the time that law enforcement knew but didn’t have enough evidence to do anything. Law enforcement is bound by rules about evidence and other factors, but those rules don’t tie everyone else’s hands.
You can’t fault him for not going to the cops right away.
Sure you can. He could have gone to the athletic director and insisted that the police be called immediately. And I really don’t think the police would be running in circles with confusion if they got a 911 call on top of a formal report from the university.
I’m not calling for Paterno to be jailed. He and McQueary appear to have met the bare minimum legal threshold of responsibility in Pennsylvania. (Though it should be noted that in 45 states, Paterno and McQueary would have broken the law; educators are mandated reporters in all but five states.)
But the idea that Paterno is not morally culpable, and that we are just totally incapable of knowing whether he was, is ludicrous. There are far too many red flags, far too many times where anyone connected to the program had to know something was going on. We can’t know for sure exactly what happened, but we know enough to know that Paterno repeatedly failed the moral test, and failed spectacularly.
We can’t know for sure exactly what happened
I am a little tired of hearing this, as if we have to get every historical detail exactly right or throw up our hands in despair. At a bare minimum, we in fact know that in 2002, Paterno was informed that Sandusky was engaging in sexual acts with a child on Penn State property, and took no action ever other than telling the athletic director.
How exactly does one use the promise of sexual favors for recrution to a team?
Is it – join our team and we’ll give you fellatio/cunninlingus OR I’ll give you a fellatio/cunninlingus if you let me on your team?
I’m confused.
Well, at the university I attended for undergrad, it was through “football hostesses.” The athletic department would recruit current undergrad women to be football hostesses, which according to the description on the posters meant that you’d escort prospective high school players around campus and convince them to choose our school, but everybody knew that you were supposed to have sex with them if that was what they wanted.
Ruchama says:
November 14, 2011 at 3:14 am
How exactly does one use the promise of sexual favors for recrution to a team?
Well, at the university I attended for undergrad, it was through “football hostesses.” The athletic department would recruit current undergrad women to be football hostesses, which according to the description on the posters meant that you’d escort prospective high school players around campus and convince them to choose our school, but everybody knew that you were supposed to have sex with them if that was what they wanted.
When I read this, I thought you HAD to be joking.
Now I’m realizing that you were serious.
Holy shit.
http://www.fitsnews.com/2011/07/20/inside-college-footballs-hostess-programs/
What’s the author’s definition of “inflammatory”? How many people do you think had heard of this – or cared – compared to this more recent issue? I doubt very many people were inflamed over that.
Cross-Cultural Comparisons and gin-and-whiskey, I have got to say that if you’re surprised over the use of sexual favors in college sports recruitment then you are quite naive when it comes to college sports. “Football hostesses” – and the equivalent for basketball – have been around for decades.
Finally – as I’ve noted elsewhere, there’s a difference between authority and responsibility. Joe Pa fulfilled his obligations under the authority of the University. But he failed to fulfill his obligations under his responsibility as an educator and a human being. So did the graduate assistant, BTW. Joe Pa fittingly lost his job, I”m afraid – I take no pleasure in saying that, but if I did what he did I wouldn’t expect anyone to trust me with their kid again.
Do female atheletes get “soccer hosts” or “basketball hosts”?
Personally, I’d rather be naive and believe it’s a small problem, and not think even less of humanity than I do now. I’ll start treating cats better than people soon.
Yup, i was that naive. Neither my high school or my college had a football team, and I don’t really follow the pro/college sports thing. I really had no idea.
From the link it appears something the young women are more than happy to oblige.
I call sex discrimination on this situation!! I want dancing boys!
This will be a late update and I don’t know how many people will see it, but:
I was recently at a BSA meeting made up of about 200 Commissioners. These are Scouters whose job it is to advise Packs, Troops, Crews, Ships and Teams on how to solve their problems, what BSA policies are, etc. This meeting was also attended by some representatives from the Regional or Area office. The BSA is broken up into 4 regions and the Regional officials are supposed to be up on all the latest from National. Areas are subdivisions of Regions that cover a dozen Councils or so (there are ~ 300 local Councils in the U.S.). A couple of them were professional Scouters – people actually on the BSA’s payroll (there’s about 3600 of them nationwide).
These were training sessions on various topics, none of which are on point here. But one session was “Talk to the Pros”. The Regional and Area professionals were there to answer questions. During that session they announced that given recent events they wanted to make clear what the BSA’s policies are on regarding what to do if you find that a Scout has been abused. We were told that it is BSA policy that if you find such – either because the Scout reported it, you have reason to suspect it because of behaviorial changes, physical evidence, etc., or if you catch someone in the act, you are to report it directly to the authorities immediately, and then – and only then – report it to the Scout executive of your local Council. It was stressed that reporting the situation to the local Council does not relieve you of the responsibility of a) reporting it to the authorities and b) following up to ensure that they act. I have since seen this in writing sent out from National – including the stress about one’s personal responsibility.
Now, you may recall that I said above that I had been previously told that my first report went to the local Council. So I spoke up and pressed that point. I was told that what I had just been told has been the policy all along. I asked around to a few of my colleagues and they said that what their understanding was that what I said I had been previously told is also what they had previously been told. Now, I do mean “a few”. Maybe we few were misinformed, or misunderstood our training. Let’s just say for once that if I was wrong I’m glad I was. In any case, I’m a lot more comfortable with this policy.
I am rather skeptical that this was the policy “all along” and that you were wrong, rather than this being an we-were-always-at-war-with-Eastasia kind of thing, but then I know people who represent victims of sexual abuse in court. I’m very glad that the new policy is clear and being communicated, though.
If someone is sexually abused they should go directly to police. Forget these “councils” or school authorities. Sandusky’s case exemplifies exactly why this is so.
Anyway, this Scouting venture seems nothing more than a front for upscale prostitution.
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