Sandusky says he only 'horsed around' with boys

NEW YORK (AP) — The former Penn State assistant football coach at the heart of a massive sex scandal said he showered with young boys and hugged them but called the allegedly criminal contact "horseplay."

FILE - In this Nov. 5, 2011 file photo, former Penn State football defensive coordinator Gerald "Jerry" Sandusky sits in a car as he leaves the office of Centre County Magisterial District Judge Leslie A. Dutchcot in State College, Pa. Sandusky, who is charged with sexually abusing eight boys in a scandal that has rocked the university, said in an telephone interview with Bob Costas Monday night on NBC News' "Rock Center" that there was no abuse and that any activities in a campus shower with a boy were just horseplay, not molestation. (AP Photo/The Patriot-News, Andy Colwell, File)

Jerry Sandusky told NBC News' "Rock Center" on Monday night that he was not a pedophile but, in retrospect, should not have showered with the boys he's charged with sexually assaulting.

In an interview with Bob Costas, Sandusky, once considered the heir apparent to coaching legend Joe Paterno, proclaimed his innocence in the face of a series of startling allegations detailed in a grand jury report issued last week.

"I am innocent of those charges," Sandusky said. "... I could say that I have done some of those things. I have horsed around with kids. I have showered after workouts. I have hugged them, and I have touched their legs without intent of sexual contact."

Sandusky is accused of sexually assaulting eight boys over a 15-year span, with some of the alleged crimes happening at Penn State, where he had access to campus as an emeritus professor following his 1999 retirement as Paterno's top defensive assistant.

Asked whether he was sexually attracted to underage boys, he said "sexually attracted, no. I enjoy young people, I love to be around them, but, no, I'm not sexually attracted to young boys."

Asked if there was anything he had done wrong, Sandusky said, "I shouldn't have showered with those kids."

When pressed about how two people could claim to have witnessed Sandusky engaged in sexual contact with boys on two different occasions, Sandusky replied that "you'd have to ask" them.

The scandal has hit hard the community called Happy Valley, where "success with honor" is the motto. Paterno and University President Graham Spanier have lost their jobs and Athletic Director Tim Curley and senior vice president Gary Schultz face perjury charges.

The interview with Costas was Sandusky's first public comment on the charges. He had previously maintained his innocence through his attorney, Joe Amendola.

"We anticipate we're going to have at least several of those kids come forward and say 'This never happened. This is me. This is the allegation. It never occurred,'" Amendola said on the NBC broadcast.

The New York Times reported on its website late Monday that close to 10 additional suspected victims have come forward to authorities since Sandusky's arrest, according to people close to the investigation. The paper said police were working to confirm the new allegations.

A spokesman for Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly declined to comment on the interview, citing the active investigation.

Amendola earlier told CNN that his client was just behaving like "a jock."

"Jerry Sandusky is a big overgrown kid," Amendola said. "He's a jock, and for anybody who's ever played sports, you get showers after you work out."

Wide receivers coach Mike McQueary told a grand jury that in March 2001 when he was a graduate assistant, he saw Sandusky sodomizing a boy about 10 years old in a shower at the Nittany Lions' practice center. McQueary did not go to police but instead told Paterno, Curley and Schultz, although it is unclear how detailed a description he gave. Schultz, in turn, notified Spanier.

Sandusky told NBC there was no sexual contact.

"We were showering and horsing around, and he actually turned all the showers on and was actually sliding across the floor, and we were, as I recall, possibly like snapping a towel — horseplay," he said.

Amendola accused the attorney general's office of having "thrown everything they can throw up against the wall." He said some of the allegations, such as putting a hand on a boy's knee, do not constitute criminal conduct and other cases include no direct complaint by the boy.

"They have other people who are saying they saw something, but they don't have actual people saying, 'This is what Jerry did to me,'" Amendola said. "We're working to find those people, and when the time comes, and if we are able to do that, we think this whole case will change dramatically."

The Associated Press has made several efforts to reach Sandusky by phone and through Amendola, but messages haven't been returned. The AP also knocked on Sandusky's door and left messages at least three times over the past week.

When Sandusky retired in 1999, at just 55, he cited his desire to devote more time to The Second Mile, a charity he founded in 1977 to help at-risk kids. According to the grand jury report, however, Sandusky was a sexual predator who used the charity and his Penn State connections to prey on young boys.

Though he was not particularly close with Paterno, he remained a familiar sight around the Penn State football complex. He was given an office in the East Area Locker building, across the street from the football building, as part of his retirement package, and would take Second Mile kids around the football facilities.

The Sandusky interview came on the day when it was announced the president of The Second Mile had resigned. Jack Raykovitz, a practicing psychologist who had led the group for 28 years, said he hoped his resignation, accepted Sunday, would help restore faith in the group's mission. The Second Mile also announced it had hired Philadelphia's former longtime district attorney Lynne Abraham as its new general counsel.

Separately, the Big Ten has decided to take Paterno's name off its championship trophy. League commissioner Jim Delany said that it is "inappropriate" to keep Paterno's name on the trophy that will be awarded Dec. 3 to the winner of the conference's first title game.

The trophy had been named the Stagg-Paterno Championship Trophy. Paterno had more wins, 409, than any other major college coach while football pioneer Amos Alonzo Stagg won 319 games in 57 years at the University of Chicago.

The trophy will now be called the Stagg Championship Trophy.

Source: The Associated Press

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Sandusky scandal threatens to finally derail Paterno's career

(CNN) -- He's known to generations of football fans simply as JoePa, the hard-nosed football coach who peers through his trademark thick eyeglasses and sees something more in the young men he coaches -- and demands they see it, too.

In 46 years as Penn State's head coach, Joe Paterno has amassed a reputation not only as a football wizard -- he's won more games than any other major-school coach -- but for his focus on academics and civics.

"He teaches his players how to win in life as well as football, and he teaches every Penn State fan how to make the world a better place through integrity, honesty and excellence," Penn State alumnus and donor Patrick Malloy said in 2007 in committing $5 million to a university endowment bearing Paterno's name, according to the coach's official Penn State biography.

After five decades, that reputation seems at peril of unraveling amid concern over Paterno's reaction to a graduate assistant's 2002 report that he had seen former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky performing anal sex on a young boy in the shower room of the football complex.

On Tuesday, Paterno's son, Scott Paterno, said on Twitter that reports in the New York Times, citing people briefed on the matter, that university officials were planning an end to Paterno's 46-year coaching tenure were "premature."

"No discussions about retirement with JVP," Paterno said, using his father's initials.

Paterno said Sunday in a statement that he'd never been told the graphic details revealed in the grand jury report but that he nevertheless passed the allegations on to his boss. He had, he said in the statement, done "what I was supposed to."

Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly said Monday that Paterno is not a target of the investigation, which has resulted in charges against two top university officials accused of failing to report the abuse, in addition to Sandusky.

But that may not help restore what had until this week been a shining reputation, SI.com columnist Michael Rosenberg writes on the website.

"We don't yet know who is legally guilty," he said. "But several prominent employees at the state university are morally guilty. And one of them is Joe Paterno."

Paterno, 84, began his career at Penn State in 1950 as a 23-year-old assistant under head coach Rip Engle.

Sixteen years later, he took the reins of the Nittany Lions football program, beginning a head coaching career that has netted him 409 wins, five undefeated seasons, two national titles and a spot in the College Football Hall of Fame.

He also put a premium on academic achievement. Paterno contributed $3.5 million to the university in 1998, endowing faculty positions in liberal arts, architecture, landscape architecture and the university's library system, according to his bio. He also helped fund an interfaith spiritual center and a sports museum.

He also has challenged his own athletes to succeed academically. His 2009 team had an 89% graduation rate, and his teams have produced dozens of academic award and scholarship winners, according to his bio.

"Coach Paterno was absolutely instrumental in my life in showing me and teaching me that there are no cutting corners," Tom Bill, who played quarterback at Penn State in the late 1980s and early 1990s, told CNN in 2004.

Paterno became embroiled in the Sandusky saga when, in 2002, a graduate assistant came to him to report a disturbing scene he had witnessed the night before, according to a grand jury report released last week.

According to the report, the assistant told Paterno that he saw Sandusky in the shower with a boy who looked to be about 10 years old. Sandusky was having sex with the child, according to the grand jury report and prosecutors.

The distraught assistant ran from the building and called his father, who advised him to report the incident to Paterno, according to the grand jury and prosecutors.

The next day, Paterno passed the report up to his boss, Athletic Director Tim Curley, saying -- according to the grand jury report -- that the graduate assistant had told him he had seen Sandusky "fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy."

The reports never made it to police.

Curley and another university official who learned of the 2002 incident, Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, have been charged with failing to report the abuse to authorities and misleading the grand jury investigating Sandusky's conduct.

Paterno has not spoken to the press about the incident and canceled his weekly news conference Tuesday.

In his Sunday statement, Paterno said he did his duty in referring the allegations to his superior but said the assistant never "related to me the very specific actions contained in the grand jury report."

"If this is true we were all fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things, and we grieve for the victims and their families," he said in the statement.

Kelly says prosecutors believe that Paterno met his responsibilities under state law by reporting the incident to his boss, but that has not stopped a rising chorus of calls for his resignation.

In a letter to the editor of Penn State's student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, freshman Sarah Kurtz said she chose the school based on its record of integrity and wrote of her "absolute disgust" that the accusations had not been handled more forcefully.

"If Penn State wants to fix this now I believe it is urgent that they ask every guilty member from Penn State President Graham Spanier to coach Joe Paterno to step down from their positions gracefully to save the name of the university and the degree I will eventually earn."

SI.com Executive Editor B.J. Schecter said Monday on CNN that the allegations can't help but harm Paterno's reputation.

"Everything he's done and all the games he's won, it doesn't matter," Schecter said. And that's what everybody is saying. You can win the most games in Division 1 history, but if you don't do what's right and protect children and turn someone in that you may have been very close to, then that supersedes everything you've done on the football field."

Source: CNN

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