Paterno apparently reported it to his AD, which technically kept him on the right side of the law.
But like all of you, I would have then removed this dirtbag from campus and told him not to let me catch his arse around here again. Instead they chose to keep him around the football program.
I wanna know what did Graham Spanier know, and when did he know it?
Re: “Paterno knew this vile scumbag was raping boys in the shower and did nothing.”
For Paterno to “know” this, under what the law defines as admissible evidence in court, he would have had to see it himself. If it happened, the only person who knew about it (as defined by law) and whose testimony to that effect would have been accepted by a court was McQueary. Paterno knew only that McQueary said it happened, i.e. hearsay evidence.
I once acted on a credible-sounding allegation from a very prominent pro-life Web site that an identifiable doctor and hospital left a baby (as defined by law, not the pro-life camp) to die. I sent a copy of the Web page to the state’s hospital regulatory agency, which investigated and found the accusation to be false. The pro-life site was lucky to not be sued for libel (along with the actual source of the allegation) by the doctor and hospital they named. The site also lost my trust because the owner never responded to my E-mail to the effect that the accusation was found to be false.
This is something one must consider before one goes beyond what one is supposed to do according to the law and/or organizational policy, which Paterno did. There is an ideal point between complicity through total silence, and engaging in what might turn out to be libel, slander, or the moral equivalent of a lynching—anybody remember the Durham Dirtbag and the Duke 88 who jumped on Mike Nifong’s bandwagon?