Archive For The “Graham Spanier” Category
This weekend, HBO premiered the movie Paterno, a fictional representation of the two weeks covering the span of time between Joe Paterno’s 409th career game and his lung cancer diagnosis.
I watched the movie, curious to see how Barry Levinson would portray the events, and how Al Pacino and a litany of really great actors would put the whole thing together.
The movie had a Shakespearean quality to it, trying to make an interesting case study of Joe Paterno and an examination of two fateful weeks. Like many movies, it took actual events, and the writers formed a narrative around it – much like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar wasn’t based on the actual conversations between Marcus Brutus and Cassius.
Predictably, in their response to the movie, the Paterno family chose to attack the movie’s credibility.
“The HBO movie regarding Joe Paterno is a fictionalized portrayal of the tragic events surrounding Jerry Sandusky’s crimes. Numerous scenes, events and dialogue bear no resemblance to what actually transpired,” Scott Paterno thundered in a public statement just prior to the movie’s release on Saturday.
For good measure, the family also pushed their own commissioned report on the scandal – a weak, broad characterization of the profile of child molesters. The report, which has been floated before, is another attempt to try to convince people to believe that Jerry Sandusky simply fooled everybody, which conveniently absolves everyone from blame – especially Joe Paterno.
Their attacks on the credibility of the movie are reprehensible and are yet another attempt by Paterno apologists to try to deny that anything was wrong with their father or the institutional structure at Penn State when their father was head coach there.
In effect, they are trying to replace the fictional portrayal of Paterno in the movie with their own fictional representation of Joe.
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This weekend, HBO premiered the movie Paterno, a fictional representation of the two weeks covering the span of time between Joe Paterno’s 409th career game and his lung cancer diagnosis.
I watched the movie, curious to see how Barry Levinson would portray the events, and how Al Pacino and a litany of really great actors would put the whole thing together.
The movie had a Shakespearean quality to it, trying to make an interesting case study of Joe Paterno and an examination of two fateful weeks. Like many movies, it took actual events, and the writers formed a narrative around it – much like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar wasn’t based on the actual conversations between Marcus Brutus and Cassius.
Predictably, in their response to the movie, the Paterno family chose to attack the movie’s credibility.
“The HBO movie regarding Joe Paterno is a fictionalized portrayal of the tragic events surrounding Jerry Sandusky’s crimes. Numerous scenes, events and dialogue bear no resemblance to what actually transpired,” Scott Paterno thundered in a public statement just prior to the movie’s release on Saturday.
For good measure, the family also pushed their own commissioned report on the scandal – a weak, broad characterization of the profile of child molesters. The report, which has been floated before, is another attempt to try to convince people to believe that Jerry Sandusky simply fooled everybody, which conveniently absolves everyone from blame – especially Joe Paterno.
Their attacks on the credibility of the movie are reprehensible and are yet another attempt by Paterno apologists to try to deny that anything was wrong with their father or the institutional structure at Penn State when their father was head coach there.
In effect, they are trying to replace the fictional portrayal of Paterno in the movie with their own fictional representation of Joe.
Read more »
Finally, I hoped, some justice would prevail.
It had been 19 years since the then-President of Penn State, Graham Spanier, had emails hit his inbox that Gerald Sandusky was being investigated about an incident involving Sandusky and a child in the showers in Penn State’s Lasch building.
Recently, Spanier had opted for a public trial in an effort to prove his innocence, but a former Penn State athletic director, Tim Curley, and former Penn State legal counsel, Gary Schultz, had pleaded guilty for the lesser charge against them – endangering the welfare of children – to avoid that spectacle.
Spanier chose instead to fight his way in court that he was innocent – that the reams of information unearthed by Louis Freeh‘s report were wrong about his involvement with Sandusky’s crimes.
Late on Friday afternoon, on a day of many other news events and distractions, the verdict was in: Spanier was found guilty of the same crimes for which Curley and Schultz pleaded guilt last week – endangering the welfare of children, the cold, sanitized description of the act of allowing Sandusky to go free without much consequence and continue to go throughout Centre County, and even all of Pennsylvania, to molest more children.
It’s a verdict that seems to make nobody happy, and also appears to be a compromise that doesn’t seem to fit the facts, whether you find Spanier guilty of a cover-up or innocently trying to do the right thing for Sandusky and the Penn State football program.
Curley, Schultz and Spanier may serve some time in jail. But even if they do, it doesn’t feel like enough.
In the news last week came, essentially, four new claims of abuse that happened at the hands of Gerald Sandusky while he employed as a linebackers coach at Penn State.
All are, at a bare minimum, troubling, and they invite the question “who knew what, and when” in terms of these allegations.
Three of the allegations, however, are worthy of further examination because they could demonstrate that the administrators at the time, which would include former athletic directors Ed Czekaj and Jim Tarman, violated the law.
It also could eventually – though nothing has surfaced yet – implicate Joe Paterno.
With the very important caveat being we don’t know everything, we do seem to have enough to bring some context to the goings-on inside Penn State’s athletic department during the last 40 years. The only clear fact was that child sex allegations weren’t handled with the respect they deserved.
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The crimes committed by Gerald Sandusky continue to be a band-aid that is re-applied, and continuously ripped off, the arms of those of love Penn State.
Already convicted by a court of law, Sandusky has what is effectively a life sentence, while others who were in power at Penn State during the 1998 period where sex crimes were reported internally, Graham Spanier, Gary Schulz and Tim Curley, have still not faced any sort of trial and are still at-large today.
Last week, with an interesting sentence appearing deep in an insurance lawsuit involving a Sandusky victim settlement, the band-aid was once again ripped off.
The details of the lawsuit claim that Joe Paterno chose not to act in 1976 when one victim reported abuse by Sandusky, while Sarah Ganim, the hero reporter who broke the Sandusky story wide-open five years ago, added a second story of abuse in the 1970s where Paterno pressured one of Sandusky’s victims over the phone in the 1971 to not press charges against him.
Penn State folks doggedly and consistently appear to deny that Paterno had anything to do with Sandusky, with the Paterno family themselves on the leading edge of of the denials.
As you’ll discover below, these denials are becoming less and less plausible by the second.
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| New Penn State President Eric Barron (Nabil K. Mark, AP)/Morning Call |
Penn State president Eric Barron certainly made an impression yesterday.
A few months ago, Barron said he would review the Freeh report, the one requested by Penn State’s board of Trustees in the wake of the revelations against Gerald Sandusky and was used by the NCAA as a justification for unprecedented sanctions against the university.
Evidently, his report is in.
Today, he said that the Freeh report “very clearly paints a picture about every student, every faculty member, every staff member and every alum. And it’s absurd. It’s unwarranted. So from my viewpoint, the Freeh Report is not useful to make decisions.”
His tone deaf comments continued.
“Unfortunately, there are a lot of shoes that have to drop. You could argue that public opinion has found us guilty before the criminal trials,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind what was completely and totally wrong was the notion that this entire alumni base, our students, our faculty, our staff, got the blame for what occurred.”
