There was a point in time early on where I had similar thoughts about Paterno. How could someone with his standing in the college football fraternity have knowledge of these acts and not do anything? As the stories circulated we learned that many people within Penn State knew about Sandusky and despite some reporting and some asking questions everyone at Penn State shrugged their shoulders and went about their way including Paterno. Would people still hold out hope for Paterno's reputation if we swap young girls getting raped by Sandusky instead of young boys? The answer is no. Because society devalues the life of young boys predators like Sandusky ran freely on the sidelines of Penn State. If Sandusky is caught in the Penn State showers with an underage girl they would never field another football team and Paterno would have died in jail.
This is why it's difficult to discuss this: we're always starting with the end in mind.
We know that there were rapes, and
we know that Paterno
should have known and acted,... but he didn't. Why? We don't yet know that, and we possibly never will. Again, I'm not even remotely trying to pretend that what happened wasn't awful. I plainly acknowledged that Sandusky was raping children, literally. I can't imagine much worse. If I was a parent of one of those children, I think that it's quite likely that I would have killed Sandusky. That's not a boast or a brad, or whatever; that's just my gut reaction whenever I hear of such things, and how I feel when I'm trying to watch over and protect my children. Maybe it's just the cultures I've known, but I know of very few fathers who wouldn't have done the same. Apparently, Sandusky was aware of this, too, as he targeted fatherless boys.
I've learned more than I ever wanted to know about what Sandusky did, and I have no interest in feeling sorry for those above Paterno who we know did the cover-up. I'm saying that I don't believe that Paterno understood that Sandusky was literally raping children. Maybe I'm wrong, and Paterno was okay with that, but I doubt it. It's too easy for us to sit back and say that we know all of this, but we still don't know what he knew, or when he knew it. I know enough about the roles of the AD and the chancellor to know that
they knew enough to dive in deeper. There's an uncomfortable area still left unexplained which is either that Paterno didn't grasp what was being reported to him and then did what he said he did--passed it on to his superiors--because it wasn't something that he knew how to deal with, or that he was okay with his assistant coach raping kids. Which seems more plausible? I'm pretty sure that if the witnesses had come in and said, "Joe, I just saw Sandusky raping a kid," Joe Paterno doesn't sweep that under the rug and pretend that everything's okay.
I suspect that the assistant coach--who admitted under oath that he was confused by what he saw, and that he called his own father because he was confused and scared--said something more oblique and ambiguous, probably along the lines of, "Coach, I just saw something that made me very uncomfortable, and I think that you need to know about it.... I saw Sandusky taking showers with those kids in his program." How likely is it that the main adult witness to what happened was so confused and scared that he called his dad before going forward, yet he would then boldly and brazenly go into the office of the most legendary head coach in America and tell him that his almost equally legendary defensive coordinator appeared to be raping kids in the shower? It's human nature to question yourself when what you see seems unbelievable. Cognitive dissonance is a real thing, and we all do it with different areas of our lives, and it's incredibly common when confronted with something that shocks our perceptions of the world. I'm NOT saying that that's what happened, but it's more logically consistent with everything else that has come out. When the AD and then the chancellor were informed of a lot more of the details,
they were in a position where they were required to dig into the details.
If you're Joe Paterno--85-year-old devout Catholic who thinks that sex outside of marriage is sinful, that homosexuality is sinful, yet everyone around you says that those things are okay and should be celebrated--you probably push it off to somebody else whose job it is to take care of uncomfortable things like that, and you try not to think too much about it. I'm pretty sure that that's what almost every male of that generation with a similar worldview would have preferred to do. I'm not saying that that's what they or he
should have done; I'm saying that that's what that generation would have preferred to do when confronted with something as uncomfortable as that. I can't imagine my grandfather asking a co-worker about reports that he was taking a shower with children. He'd probably tell him something like, "Don't do that. It's inappropriate. What the hell is wrong with you?" and that would be that. He'd probably tell someone in authority over him, and he'd feel like he'd done his part. That's how a lot of these scandals got to be worse, so it's not like that equates with being innocent. It just is what it is, and I suspect that that's more likely what happened.