Yesterday, Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI, released the report of his investigation into the Penn State scandal. Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach under the legendary Joe Paterno, was convicted last month of 45 charges related to his abuse of young boys, and Freeh was retained by the university’s board of trustees to find out exactly what happened and why.
Freeh’s report is scathing. The front page of this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer proclaimed in the largest headline typeface I’ve ever seen:
DAMNING
JUDGMENTÂ
Under the headline were the photos of the four Pennsylvania State University officials who the report says enabled, through their inaction, Jerry Sandusky to abuse young boys: President Graham B. Spanier, Vice President Gary Schultz, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and yes, Joe Paterno. The Inquirer reported:
Joe Paterno, former Pennsylvania State University president Graham B. Spanier, and other top administrators conspired for more than a decade to keep quiet sex-abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky, according to the findings of an internal investigation released Thursday.
Fearing bad publicity, the head football coach and the president, along with athletic director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, a former vice president in charge of campus police, “repeatedly concealed critical facts” and exhibited a “callous disregard for child victims,” enabling the former assistant football coach to prey on boys for years, said Louis Freeh, a former FBI director commissioned last year to lead the investigation.
“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State,” Freeh said at a news conference Thursday in Philadelphia. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect children whom Sandusky victimized.”
Multiple times, while reading the news coverage, I gasped. Even after years of writing about people’s extreme capacity for evil, and the ability of institutions and individuals to turn a blind eye, I found some of the revelations to be shocking.
Read: Louis Freeh report: Joe Paterno, Penn State officials conspired for silence, on Philly.com.
If you want to read the full report, the Inquirer has an interesting annotated version of it online:
Giant sucker
When Sandusky was convicted—on the same day that a Catholic Church official was convicted of failing to protect children—I wrote about the real value of the verdicts: They were a warning that big, powerful institutions could no longer sacrifice the innocents to protect their reputations.
Here is the real value of the Freeh report: Millions of people now know what it feels like to be hoodwinked, deceived, betrayed, and to have their ideals shattered—just like all of us have experienced with sociopaths.
All those fawning football fans of “Nittany Nation.” All those Penn State students who rioted when Joe Paterno was fired. All those alumni who were furious at the board of trustees for the impersonal way that they cut the coach loose. All those people who believed in Joe Paterno’s motto, “Success with Honor.” Today, they are all sick to their stomachs.
Here’s what Stewart Mandel, a Sports Illustrated blogger, wrote:
Today, I feel like a giant sucker.
Amid the media firestorm that followed the release of the Jerry Sandusky Grand Jury report last November when it seemed like every columnist, blogger and talking head in the country was racing to see who could get the angriest; when Joe Paterno morphed from coaching legend to devil incarnate in the course of a bye week; when all manner of Penn State cover-up allegations skipped straight past conspiracy theory to universally accepted fact I took a cautious stance. While the charges against Sandusky were indisputably vile, the details of how Paterno and Penn State administrators handled Sandusky over the years were still vague and incomplete. Surely more information would provide some sensible explanation for why Sandusky was not apprehended sooner; surely the leaders of an esteemed university could not be so nakedly negligent and sinister.
The facts came out Thursday in the meticulously sourced Freeh Report, and boy do I feel naïve. It turns out what really happened was even worse than the most caustic cynics could have imagined.
Here’s what Gene Wojciechowski wrote on ESPN.go.com:
Joe lied. It’s that simple. And that heartbreaking.
Joe Paterno, who for so many decades represented all that was good and honorable in college athletics, lied. Through his teeth.
Even I wanted to believe—six months ago, I wrote an article postulating that maybe Joe Paterno really didn’t know what Sandusky was doing, that he couldn’t conceive of such evil in his midst. Obviously, I was wrong.
And here’s what the Penn State student newspaper, the Daily Collegian, wrote:
We put our faith in these men. We put our faith in our university. Others did the same.
But, as it’s becoming painfully clear, so much of this mess was allowed to continue because too many people clung to the belief that individuals and institutions were idyllic so much so that they were either blinded to the mistakes right in front of them or flat-out refused to deal with the ones that were brought to their attention.
And that weight that we’re collectively carrying now, with the wake-up call provided by the fallout since last autumn and the report issued this week, is largely a lesson in the dangers of blind faith.
View of the world is shattered
Emotionally, the horrified Penn State faithful are experiencing what we’ve all experienced in our interactions with sociopaths.
The most crushing aspect of tangling with these predators is how, once it ends, once we are devalued and discarded, once we learn the truth—that they never loved us and it was all a scam—our entire view of the world is shattered.
We cannot conceive that someone who continually professed undying love was lying through his or her teeth. We cannot believe that the sociopath may very well get away with all the abuse committed against us. We feel like we can never trust again, and the world as we knew it is gone.
The idyllic “Happy Valley” of Penn State is gone. But perhaps the Nittany Nation, and people in general, can grow from the disillusionment, as we have grown from the betrayals that we experienced. With healing, it’s possible to replace idealism and naïveté with perception and wisdom.  That would be good for all of us.
Oxy,
your words are profound, succinct and accurate.
What can we do about the fearful? Why are they so afraid? Why do jobs matter so much more than integrity?
The psychopaths have no values except material values. It’s all they understand because they have no connection beyond the shallow surface. Nothing is meaningful to them. The only reason they even value material things, like money, is because they see other people value them.
Jesus told us to be in this world but not of this world. He told us not to worry.
Matthew 28-30.
It’s hard not to worry, we are so indoctrinated into what the spaths have programmed into us. When we connect those material values to our value as human beings, we believe the spaths and they own our souls.
Yes….money. Money, power, status, prestige, and all centered around something that has NO IMPACT upon the good of humanity, on any level.
Long ago, sporting events ceased being a fun pasttime, and became a source of obscene revenue. OxD, you are 100% spot-on: there is something INHERHENTLY WRONG when a math, science, ethics, arts, or technical professor earns so little and must work like sled-dogs to earn tenure. Not to say that “all professors” are worthy of tenure or a teaching position, but it is a glaring indication that our culture and societyares falling back into the pre-collapse postures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Gladiators….that’s what we value, today.
If we look back upon every culture up to present date, there is a distinct and obvious pattern of moral and ethical decline. I am not talking about “organized religious morals,” here. I’m talking about human morals and ethics: what is profoundly “right,” and what is profoundly “wrong.” We read, with nodding acceptance, about how Rome fell into debauchery and tolerance of all levels of abuse before it collapsed into rubble, as an Empire.
We’re on the same trajectory, and there’s really no way to stop this freight train from derailing. It’s all about money, sex, violence, and reality shows.
Ugh…
Well, here is one move in the right direction.
http://msn.foxsports.com/collegefootball/story/penn-state-paternoville-renamed-nittanyville-joe-paterno-jerry-sandusky-louis-freeh-report-071612
I think there is something we can do and I don’t think that the train derailment is inevitable.
We can write lots of letters. Let our representatives, newspapers, and schools know what we think. Demand change and accountability.
It isn’t all “about them.” It’s also about us-our passivity and our expectations that somebody else is going to do something about it.
We are that somebody else.
We are not without power or influence. We simply choose not to use them.
Brown University removed Paterno’s name from its outstanding male freshman athlete award.
Paterno graduated from Brown in 1950.
http://news.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/2012/07/brown-distancin.html
http://www.providencejournal.com/
20-some-odd people heard or saw Kitty Genovese stabbed and murdered over a period of about a half hour and NO ONE even called the cops much less tried to help her.
That happened years ago and I don’t think anything is any different now…when that woman spoke out against Paterno coddling his team players and allowing them to get by with bad behavior, SHE went, and others observed this and just kept their heads down so they wouldn’t be “next.” Gutless wonders.
There is hope buried in all of this. The fact that the report left no stones unturned, that the newspaper published the results, that Paterno’s name was removed from Brown’s outstanding male freshman athletes…and so forth. Ox Drover…thanks for the reminder of Cain and Able, Judas and Christ. A reminder that this stuff isn’t “personal” – as has been hard for some of us to grasp given the number of S/P betrayals so many of us have experienced…but it really isn’t “about me”…it’s “about THEM”….it’s been occurring since the beginning of time. Donna has the videos now on YouTube—woo-hoo!!—maybe, just maybe, all of this will be the tip of the iceberg that starts even the smallest of awareness that this evil does exist in our world. Maybe changes, even miniscule changes, will begin to happen? In the Sandusky case, the children, many of whom are now adults, can feel that we are now listening to their stories and believing them. I always believed them. The “dripping shame” that so many people exude today when presented with even a glimmer of possbility that this kind of evil does exist. Does anyone here know what I mean by “dripping shame”? Shame-based people dump their shame by their tone of voice, their damning glances, their choice of words, for example. Shame is dumped when a victim isn’t believed, when the perpetrator’s actions are rationalized, when someone says “oh, it wasn’t so bad, was it?”, “oh, don’t you think that’s all in the past now?”, or when someone gives you a dirty shaming slimey look but doesn’t acknowledge a vulnerable comment. Often, shame can be felt in the air, like slime. SHAME = SLIME. I am symbolically giving all that shame back to you slimey shamers. Clean up your own side of the street. I admit, I am guilty of it, too. Perhaps that means dealing with your own issues that you’ve arrogantly denied for a lifetime. Yes, it’s frightening to be vulnerable. No, most of us have never learned how to deal with these issues until now, so it’s even more frightening. I can tell you from personal experience, it is not easy and it can take what seems like forever. When dealing with one’s own shame issues, shame creeps in like a sneaky snake. The majority of us were raised with what our parents thought were healthy doses of it. It takes discipline to keep moving forward. Shame is one component that makes us vulnerable to the S/P. The S/P knows just when to slime us with it. And, this is why Donna’s Lovefraud information is so crucial to S/P awareness. Romance is one area where the S/P flourishes. It can happen through work relationships, family relationships, friendships, any time two people come together there is the possibility of sociopathic involvement. This is why this education is crucial because S/P is like a cancer in our society today…as evidenced by Lovefraud and by the Sandusky report to the board of trustees at Penn State.
Last, but certainly not least, thank you, Donna, for this blog and website that provides a place for us Lovefraud-ers to grow past the emotional hurt and the myriad of damage to our lives. We have a homebase to be empowered through information and sharing.
Penn State is a reflection of the overall apathy and ignornace of our society.
In our haste to speak and think “freely” and embrace our freedoms in this country we have given a critical part of our power away to pathologicals.
As our population grows in this country, we have been educated to “turn” it over to the professionals. This is where we made our biggest mistake. Look at other insitutions that we have just “turned” our lives over to in this world. Churches, preists, coaches, congressmen, senators, doctors, laweryers, teachers, therapists, and coaches. Do you see a pattern here? These places have become breeding grounds for the personality disordered. They flock to these jobs like flys to *&(^. It is a picnic everyday “sucking” the “suckers”. And we get PAID for this opportunity.
As far as I am concerned, this is everyone’s problem. The fact that it happened at a college campus in Pennsylvania is a sad reflection of the sickness in our entire culture. A wake up call. A call to arms. We are allowing the sick to run our lives and then we get “upset” when some guy is caught with his pants down an at “admirable” college in our country.
We need to put down our Iphones, turn off the computers, mute our TVs and start paying attention to our lives. The lives of our children that we are turning over to this ever growing population of psychopaths.
My goal is to educate, educate, educate everyone that will listen about the epidemic we have created with our “blind” trust.
As a friend recently advised me – “trust, but verify.”
hope52: I absolutely agree. There is much to be done – by everyone.
Ah, but historically, this is always what we have done. Education is recent on the timeline of man. We’ve always had overlords and deferred to those with knowledge, power, and money. This included religions as well as governments.
The Gutenberg Bible is considered one of the pivotal points in the history of man because it was the first time a printing press made Bibles available to the common man (along with a whole lot of other information.) Prior to that, it was pretty much only the clergy who could read and write.
We’ve really haven’t wanted to be bothered with getting involved because it has been easier letting somebody else take care of things. That being said, it was hard to know was going on when the fastest method of communication were messages sent by horseback.
We do not have a true democracy in the US. We have the potential for one, but since 1776, we have turned over the power to a handful expecting them to do the grunt work so we can go about our business and take care of things that are important to us.
What we need to do is embrace our power and learn to use our voices. We haven’t really reached that place yet. We keep waiting for “them” or “somebody” to take care of things.
The beauty of humanity will come about when we take to heart, “what you do to the least of My children, you do to Me” and “to love your brother as you love yourself.”
I also abide by, “to whom much is given, much is expected,” and that includes the fact that we have been given life, brains, intelligence, and voices. We are supposed to use these even if we haven’t reached high places or hallowed halls.
We need to define what is hallow.
But as long as we keep turning our backs, won’t rock the boat, chalk it off to others, want others to do the work, and remain fencesitters, we get what we accept.
G1S, yes…..use our voices in whatever capacity that might be. Through advocacy, legislation, professional capacities, WHATEVER medium we are able to work best with.
Me? Oh, I’m going to do a body of work that expresses what I’ve experienced, I HOPE! LOL Then, I’m going to talk to every journalist, novelist, playright, screenwriter, and lyricist about the collective carnage of sociopathic behaviors and entanglements.