The 238-page report, which was compiled by a team led by Richard Thornburgh, a former United States attorney general, and released Sunday, said an even larger investigation into the scandal by Louis J. Freeh, a former F.B.I. director, was “factually wrong, speculative and fundamentally flawed.”
According to the Thornburgh report, the Freeh inquiry, which was ordered by the Penn State board of trustees and released in July, falsely accused Paterno of helping to cover up Sandusky’s repeated abuse to shield the university from adverse publicity, and wrongly blamed the “football culture” at Penn State for helping foster Sandusky’s crimes.
The Freeh inquiry failed to conduct interviews with “most of the key witnesses,” the Thornburgh report said, including Penn State’s top executives, its police and the district attorney’s office in Centre County, where the university is. Also, no one testified under oath for the Freeh investigation, the Thornburgh report said, and witnesses were allowed to speak anonymously.
Since Sandusky was arrested in late 2011, the Paterno family has been adamant that Paterno, who died last Jan. 22, did not cover up Sandusky’s crimes and that he followed university protocol in 2001 when he reported to his superiors an accusation about Sandusky that had been brought to his attention. At the time, Mike McQueary, then a graduate assistant, told Paterno of an encounter between Sandusky and a child in a Penn State locker room shower. Paterno said he relayed the account to Tim Curley, the athletic director, and Gary Schultz, then a university vice president.
The university fired Paterno after the scandal broke. The N.C.A.A. used the Freeh report as the basis for its decision to impose penalties on the university and the football program, including a $60 million fine, a loss of scholarships and a four-year postseason ban.
The Thornburgh report, which was titled “Critique of the Freeh Report: The Rush to Injustice Regarding Joe Paterno,” repeated many of the claims made by the family. Freeh, who had declined to address criticisms of his report, issued a statement Sunday.
“I respect the right of the Paterno family to hire private lawyers and former government officials to conduct public media campaigns in an effort to shape the legacy of Joe Paterno,” Freeh said. “However, the self-serving report the Paterno family has issued today does not change the facts established in the Freeh report or alter the conclusions reached in the Freeh report.”
Freeh noted that Paterno declined to speak with him even though he spoke with a news reporter and his biographer. Instead, Freeh cited Paterno’s testimony under oath before a grand jury and included documents provided by Paterno’s lawyers in the report. Several other university officials did not speak with Freeh, including Schultz and Curley. Curley has been on administrative leave. He, Schultz and Graham B. Spanier, the university president fired in the wake of the scandal, all face charges, including perjury, obstruction of justice, endangering the welfare of children and criminal conspiracy.
“Mr. Paterno was on notice for at least 13 years that Sandusky, one of his longest-serving assistants, and whose office was steps away, was a probable serial pedophile,” Freeh said. “I stand by our conclusion that four of the most powerful people at Penn State failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.”
The Thornburgh report draws the opposite conclusion about Paterno, who spoke to the investigators his family hired. The report said that Freeh had “unilaterally anointed himself the judge, jury and executioner by deciding to redefine Jerry Sandusky’s personal crimes as a Penn State and Joe Paterno football scandal.”
Freeh did not properly acknowledge that Sandusky was a “masterful manipulator” who deceived an entire Penn State community to “obscure the signs of child abuse” and “fooled qualified child welfare professionals and law enforcement, as well as laymen inexperienced and untrained in child sexual victimization, like Joe Paterno,” the Thornburgh report said.
Paterno, the report said, knew little of Sandusky’s personal life. In fact, “the Freeh report missed that they disliked each other personally, had very little in common outside work and did not interact much if at all socially.”
The information that Paterno was given about Sandusky’s abuse in 2001 was “too general and vague for him to disregard decades of contrary experience,” the report said. A psychologist hired by the Paterno family to examine his life determined that Paterno “acted honestly and in good faith throughout the Sandusky scandal,” starting more than a decade ago when some of the first reports of child abuse were brought to his attention.
Paterno Family Challenges Accusation of Cover-Up
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Paterno Family Challenges Accusation of Cover-Up
