Ex-PSU coach recalls learning of Sandusky complaint

Jurors heard Thursday that a former Penn State head football coach testified that Mike McQueary told him years before Jerry Sandusky’s arrest that he had made a complaint about Sandusky to university administrators.

The deposition by Tom Bradley was read during the fourth day of trial in McQueary’s defamation and whistleblower lawsuit against the university over his treatment after Sandusky’s 2011 child molestation arrest.

Bradley said he fielded a rumor that made him approach McQueary, a fellow assistant under Paterno, in 2004 or 2005.

“I’m not sure how this happened, but somebody said something and I asked Mike about it. He said there was an incident,” Bradley said in May 2015. “I don’t know his exact words.”

Bradley said he asked McQueary what he did.

“He said, ‘I turned it in to Joe and Curley and Schultz,’” Bradley said, references to then-head coach Joe Paterno, then-athletic director Tim Curley and then-vice president Gary Schultz.

He said he did not remember if McQueary used the word, “sexual.”

“It was not a long, detailed description, if that’s what you’re asking me,” Bradley sad

Bradley also said he believes the school mistreated McQueary, citing a bowl game bonus McQueary wasn’t given at the end of the 2011 season. Bradley was briefly the school’s head coach after university trustees fired Paterno, in part over his handling of the McQueary complaint.

Bradley said he never discussed the McQueary incident with Sandusky, although he would occasionally see him in team facilities after Sandusky retired in 1999.

Questions about whether rumors regarding Sandusky had cropped up before the investigation that produced charges have long hung over the Penn State football program.

A lawyer for Bradley, now UCLA’s defensive coordinator, told The Associated Press this summer he never witnessed any inappropriate behavior and had no knowledge of alleged incidents in the 1980s and 1990s.

The lawyer, Brett Senior, said Thursday he was not aware the testimony was being read. “I think whatever’s been said is old and stale,” Senior said.

Outside the courthouse after Thursday’s session, McQueary declined comment about Bradley’s deposition.

McQueary has testified he saw Sandusky sexually abusing a boy in a team shower one evening in 2001 and reported it the next day to Paterno.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Former Penn State University assistant football coach Mike McQueary, right, leaves the Centre County Courthouse Annex in Bellefonte, Pa., on Monday.