Pennsylvania State University, home of the storied Nittany Lions football team and its legendary coach, Joe Paterno, was rocked by allegations that one of Paterno’s former assistants, Jerry Sandusky, was charged with sexually assaulting eight young, disadvantaged boys.
The point of the article I posted earlier today, about former Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent Fumo, was abuse of power. This sex abuse scandal is a variation of the same theme. Sandusky’s inappropriate behavior went on for years, probably because no one wanted to challenge a football dynasty.
According to the grand jury report:
• In 1998, Sandusky brought an 11-year-old boy into a Penn State locker room shower and behaved inappropriately. The boy’s mother reported it to Penn State University police. After a lengthy investigation, the Centre County District Attorney decided there would be no criminal charges.
• In 2000, a janitor saw Sandusky in the showers with an 11- to 13-year-old boy pinned against the wall, performing oral sex. He was distraught as he told his fellow janitors and his supervisor what he witnessed. But most of the janitors were new employees, and they were afraid that if they reported what had happened, they would lose their jobs.
• In 2002, a Penn State graduate assistant witnessed Sandusky having anal sex with a 10-year-old boy in the locker room showers. The graduate assistant told Joe Paterno. Paterno told his supervisor, Athletic Director Tim Curley. There were a few meetings, but no official investigation. In the end, all that happened was that Sandusky was told he could no longer bring boys to Penn State. Then, when the grand jury investigated, both Curley and the university’s Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, downplayed the incident.
For more, read reporting in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Ex-Penn State coach charged with sex crimes
Paterno says all at Penn State were fooled by Sandusky
Louise ~ I just read, although for the life of me I can’t remember where right now, that the statistics are 1 in 7 boys are molested and 1 in 3 girls are molested as children.
This is frightening, especially when you are raising a child in this day and age.
Sky, I know for a fact that my ex was attracted to little girls. I don’t know about boys. But I do remember him revealing to me toward the end of our friendship that he can understand how someone could be bisexual because he felt an attraction for a male friend. I think he was one of those who was omnisexual. And this is after a lot of derogatory redneck-type comments from him about gays.
Oh, I also want to add that he didn’t show any of the other textbook spath traits. He didn’t lovebomb me or try to exploit me for anything. He never discarded or devalued me. I’m the one who left him after his only fit of violence where he threw my cat across the room. He never spoke unkindly to me. He held a steady job and had a musician gig in the evening. Aside from the very obvious, I never caught him in a lie. He was, however, insensitive to my needs and deep feelings and in this way he was narcissistic. It would get worse if he was drinking. He had a very loud grating voice that carried across a room. I was forever asking him to quiet down, like you would do with a child. He liked to wear loud tye-dyed outfits with cartoon characters on it, as if to get attention. He seemed to need attention from everyone around him In many ways he was childlike. I found out later he was also abusing prescription pills. I would consider him more as a narcissist than a spath. My sense of him was that he was ungrounded and had very poor boundaries. I knew when I met him and moved in with him that I would never marry him. He just wasn’t quite right. He was a very creative and brilliant musician and had the joy and spontenaity of a child. We had a lot of fun together in the year or so we were together. I NEVER would have imagined in a million years his little secret. It sounds very strange to say this, but I believe that he is someone who was not 100% a bad person. I feel that there was some sort of glitch in his brain that would give a normal person healthy boundaries. This glitch kept him at the emotional age of about a 10-year old with no sense of propriety. He just wasn’t quite grounded, but he had a side that wanted to be. That’s why he wanted me in his life. I was a grounding influence on him. I think it’s very possible that while he was with me, he wasn’t offending. But I will never know for sure. I don’t know the extent of his infractions with children – how many or how far he went. I know he at least fondled them.
I’m telling this in the hopes it will shed light on the whole pedophile discussion. I hope no one judges me for this. It’s not something I talk about with a lot of people, and I don’t want to be attacked for my views. I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has.
I’m only sharing to make the point that not all pedophiles fall into a set category. And I don’t think all of them are sociopaths.
How is everyone on LF tonight? I haven’t been around here too much lately. This article really grossed me out. I just cannot understand how a grown person could be interested in anything remotely sexual with a child. EEWW!
Star,
My spath was also very devoted to me in the first year. The second year too. It was in the 3rd year that things got weird.
During those years, he couldn’t keep his hands off me. He was constantly fondling my breasts. Even in public.
The obvious lies about irrelevant things which he told me in the beginning, had been forgotten and any lies he told me, I believed.
He was also a musician and was out late at night “practicing” with his band members. Occasionally he would get a day job, but mostly liked to collect unemployment.
Being insensitive to my needs was also similar but I didn’t notice because my parents were the same way. I did sort of notice that he didn’t encourage me to become a better person, he just expected me to be his cheerleader but he was never mine. Like I said, I was used to that. I thought it was sort of strange that for my bday and xmas, he would buy something that HE wanted, for me.
So I think that it’s possible that your ex was covering many of his issues because he had a good mask. Remember, I didn’t know anything about my spath’s behavior for 25 years!! Only in hindsight was I able to put it all together. And the only reason I could was because I ACCEPTED the idea that he was a spath. That’s when all the little clues began to make sense.
I found out that he had a preference for 12-year old Native American girls about 5 months AFTER I left him. But I remember the sociopathic TELLS that should have cued me.
One thing that he told me was that his first sexual encounter was with a 12-yo Indian girl, when he was 10. I think he liked reliving that experience. He told me that he never wanted to grow up. Those were some of the TELLS that could have cued me, but because I had not studied spaths, I couldn’t see the connections.
As I read and learned about N’s, I learned that N’s will often look for sex partners who look like themselves, but at the age where they felt they were at their sexual peak. That’s when I remembered that my spath seemed to always have young blonde, skinny men as friends. Very blonde hair in a grown man is not a common characteristic. My spath was blonde as a teen and skinny too. Add in the strange awkwardness that these men always displayed around me, and I’m sure that he was screwing them.
As you know, I do think that they all share common characteristics. These traits go together as part of a personality disorder of pathological narcissism. The most important trait to remember is their amazing ability to hide what they are. They can fool anyone who hasn’t studied them. And even some who have.
Hi Lizzy
Yeah. The gross eeewww factor is really high isn’t it. Makes my stomach drop like a rock.
Really hard to swallow that NO ONE stood up against this man’s behavior all these years. Esp when WE know what our automatic response would be. I don’t think I would have THINKED. I would have RAGED on the SOB.
Katy-yeah, it’s disgusting-the whole thing is. When I was a child of about 8 I was chased by a pedophile and it scared me to death. I ended up talking to a cop late that night. My best friend and I were walking to her house to go swimming and we had bathing suits on with shorts on top. He stopped to ask for directions and my friend was dumb enough to engage in conversation with him-even telling him her name and how old we were. I was nervous the whole time and wanted to get away. I focused on him while they were talking and memorized his face and his truck. He actually told us how “nice we looked in our bathing suits”. He finally drove on down the road and we continued on to her house. We were almost there when he showed up again in the truck and pulled off the road. We were about 50 yards away from him crossing a field when he started running after us. We bolted and ran all the way to her house and when we got in her backyard, he turned around and went back to his truck and drove off.
My daddy called a friend of his who was a sheriffs deputy and he came over that night. I gave him the complete description of the man and his vehicle. I have always wondered if he had hurt children before or after that day, and if the cops ever found him. That is actually the main reason that I decided that I wanted to be a police officer. I wanted to arrest men like that who did those things to kids.
If I were the coach who witnessed the incident, I would have busted in, yanked him off the kid, and beat the shit out of him-then I would have called the cops and told anyone at the school who would listen to me. I’m sorry-but NO job is worth sacrificing the innocence of a child!
Sky, yes it’s very possible. Qualitatively and behaviorally, he was very different from the spath who drove me to this site. There are really no similarities whatsoever. I do feel he is an untrustworthy and toxic person, but in a different way. It’s really hard to describe. If you consider every person who has an immoral addiction and hides it is a spath, than he would be. I don’t agree with that. I think there are all kinds of toxic, dangerous people, and they are not all spaths. It could just be a matter of definition. My parents were horrible people, but I don’t consider them as spaths.
Hey Lizzy Mc Dizzy – How’s Remy doing?