The Penn State cover-up
Penn State officials knew of a 2001 report about Jerry Sandusky and decided among themselves not to tell anyone outside the university. Their emails describing that decision are why this is a confirmed cover-up rather than a failure of memory.
Why this verdict
Confirmed by criminal conviction of three senior administrators for child endangerment and by their own contemporaneous emails, while noting that the Freeh Report's characterisation of Joe Paterno's role remains contested.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That senior officials at Pennsylvania State University received reports of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach, sexually abusing boys, and chose not to report them to police or child protection authorities in order to protect the university and its football programme.
Sandusky's crimes are documented in his 2012 conviction on 45 counts. They are not this entry's subject; the decision not to report them is.
02Where it came from
Sandusky founded The Second Mile, a charity for vulnerable children, which gave him access to the boys he abused. A 1998 police investigation into an incident at the university closed without charges. In 2001 a graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, reported witnessing Sandusky assaulting a boy in a campus shower to head coach Joe Paterno, who passed it to athletic director Tim Curley.
03What the record shows
✓ CONFIRMED — It happened. The documents exist.
The cover-up is documented in the participants' own words. Emails among Curley, senior vice-president Gary Schultz and president Graham Spanier in February 2001 discuss reporting the incident to child welfare authorities, and then record a change of course after Curley spoke with Paterno — the exchange includes Curley proposing a more humane approach of speaking to Sandusky directly rather than involving outside agencies, and Spanier responding that the only downside was vulnerability if the matter were not reported.
That correspondence surfaced during the investigation, and it is what distinguishes this from an institution failing to notice. A decision was made, in writing, not to report.
The criminal outcomes followed. Spanier, Curley and Schultz were charged; all three were ultimately convicted of or pleaded guilty to child endangerment in 2017 and served jail sentences. Louis Freeh's report for the university's trustees in 2012 concluded that the four most senior officials had concealed critical facts.
The entry states one contested point rather than smoothing it. The Freeh Report's specific findings about Paterno — who died in January 2012, before charges — were disputed by his family, who commissioned a review by Dick Thornburgh criticising Freeh's methodology and inferences. Paterno was never charged and never tested in court. The convictions of the three administrators do not depend on Freeh's characterisation of Paterno, and this entry rests on the convictions and the emails.
04What it cost
The NCAA imposed unprecedented sanctions, later partly rescinded. Penn State has paid well over $100 million to settle claims by survivors. Pennsylvania overhauled its mandatory reporting law, extending the categories of people required to report suspected child abuse and the penalties for failing to, which is the concrete legislative consequence. The case is now taught alongside the Catholic Church cover-up documented separately in this archive, and for the same reason: the decisive evidence in both was the institution's own internal correspondence about what not to write down.