Penn State Scandal: New Allegations Against Jerry Sandusky
It's hard to imagine the allegations against Jerry Sandusky getting any worse than allegedly molesting multiple young boys, but a shocking new report has hit the mark.
Mark Madden, a columnist for the Beaver County Times, told a Boston radio station that Sandusky might have been pimping out children with his Second Mile foundation to rich Penn State donors. Madden, who first wrote about the Sandusky scandal in April, told the Dennis and Callahan show that two prominent columnists were currently investigating the claim.
Madden first wrote in April -- long before the story became a worldwide headline -- that Penn State higher-ups, including Joe Paterno, needed to explain the circumstances surrounding Sandusky's abrupt retirement in 1999.
His latest allegations were labeled as rumors on the show, but other prominent journalists have backed up his claims to an extent. CBS Sports' Gregg Doyel tweeted on Thursday that the latest rumor was on the state attorney general's radar, while SportsbyBrooks tweeted on Wednesday night that a new, major allegation against Sandusky would horrify the public.
The allegations are hard to comprehend, but so are the majority of the other allegations against the 67 year-old former Penn State defensive coordinator. Sandusky has been charged with 40 counts of child sex abuse, including allegedly having sex with a 10 year-old boy in the showers of Penn State's football locker room.
The backlash against Sandusky and the subsequent cover-up by Penn State led for widespread dismissals within the school. Paterno, who had been the head coach at the school since 1966, was fired on Wednesday along with school president Graham Spanier.
Paterno and Spanier received a lot of heat before their dismissals for not taking the allegations against Sandusky in 2002 to the authorities. A young graduate assistant -- reported to be wide receivers coach Mike McQueary -- walked in on Sandusky molesting a young boy in the Penn State football locker rooms and informed Paterno of what he saw.
Paterno passed along the information to athletic director Tim Curley, who is currently on administrative leave, but no one at Penn State ever informed authorities.
Even worse, Madden believes that Paterno and the rest of the administration knew about Sandusky's alleged affinity for showering with children for years.
My opinion is when Sandusky quit, everybody knew -- not just at Penn State, Madden said of Sandusky's alleged molestation of a child in 1998. I think it was a very poorly kept secret about college football in general, and that is why he never coached in college football again and retired at the relatively young age of 55. [That's] young for a coach, certainly.
He isn't the only one to think that it was widely known information. Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer told reporters on Thursday that the whole community might have known about Sandusky's past.
Having been in this profession a long time and knowing how close coaching staffs are, I knew that this was a secret that was kept secret, Switzer told The Oklahoman. Everyone on that staff had to have known, the ones that had been around a long time.
You think that a 13-year assistant ... hasn't told someone else? he said. His wife? His father? People knew. The community knew.
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