Originally Posted by Mutt

i read the report - jesus christ, it's almost the end of 2011, this guy was known as a pedophile by so many people going back to the late 90's. it's unbelievable how this guy was allowed to go on and on and on.

i want to defend Paterno, of all the people in this disaster, he is the least to blame. It's unclear what exactly he was told by the graduate student, I believe Paterno when he says he never heard there was anal sex, what he was told was 'horsing around' and 'inappropriate' touching - when a 57 year old man is inappropriately touching a young boy it doesn't matter if anal or oral sex is going on, something very bad, a crime, is going on. Paterno turned the matter over to his superiors. So what was Joe Paterno to do, he's the head football coach at Penn State, he reported what he knew and I assume he believed his superiors would do the right thing.

Should he have continued to check with his superiors to find out what was going on? Should he have called the police and said 'i'm Joe Paterno, i had a graduate assistant report he saw an ex-coach of mine and a boy 'horsing around' inappropriately in a shower over here at the football building, I reported it to my bosses at Penn State but I don't trust them to do the right thing so that's why I'm calling you'?

Originally Posted by kane

What I read today was that an assistant came to Paterno and told him that he saw Sandusky having sex with a kid in the showers. Paterno then called up the athletic director for Penn State, met with him and told him what the assistant said. This, apparently, was the second time a charge like this had been leveled against Sandusky.

The AD did nothing about it, but help cover it up and Paterno never followed up. Once he realized that nothing was going to be done he could have gone to the police himself or at the very least he could have fired Sandusky, but he did nothing. It was almost like he didn't want to know what was going on and hoped it would just go away.