Are we seriously going to go round and round on this again?Child told Paterno of sex abuse in 1976, court papers allege - PennLive
Sandusky Victim: Joe Paterno told me to drop abuse accusation - CNN
Because society?
At this point I don't know who to believe. We have one line brought forward by an insurance company to avoid paying a settlement which references testimony that can't be examined or refuted. We have a story where the sole named source has allegedly been convicted of two counts of harassment, and is alleged to be a serial harasser of the Paterno family. The shit that's come out recently is not exactly unimpeachable. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. I get that. But the allegations are not open and shut. They're just lobbing another grenade into the shitstorm. There's another one out there saying six assistant coaches allegedly saw things, but doesn't say who they are, and at least one alleged source is flat-out calling the story untrue. Who to believe? No one's bringing enough evidence to the table; they're all just slinging shit. I'm not going to defend Paterno if this whole thing is true, because the allegations are disgusting and indefensible. If anyone aided and abetted Sandusky, hang 'em. But bring a Goddamned airtight case first, in a court or in some freaking shoe-leather reporting. Don't just stir up a damned lynch mob.
I still believe certain people want to view people like me as somehow different and obsessed with football to the point of being morally bent, and OK with what happened. That's still utter shit, with the exception of freaks like John Ziegler. Penn State's alumni and fanbase are no different than any other large D-1 state school's. I believe down to my shoelaces that people are and were using this "football culture" crap to avoid examining the fact that this, like other kinds of sexual assault, is a societal problem. It gets screwed up over and over again, because the people that get away with it do so by manipulating people. I do not owe you an apology for this. This holds true regardless of who did or did not try to sweep anything under the rug in State College.
My initial read was that Paterno had good intentions and fucked up. I won't apologize for trying to make a judgement by looking past the Internet torches and pitchforks and trying to see what actually happened. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wasn't, though. At this point, I don't know. Hopefully we'll see sooner rather than later, because I'm sick of this shit. And I'm sick of people like you rubbing my face in it.
Edit: Doctor Barron, the President of the University, puts it in much better terms than me dashing off an Internet post. His last sentence says it all.
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