Player won’t give up Paterno fight
A week after circulating a petition to have Joe Paterno’s statue and legacy restored in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky horror story, Brian Masella, a former Penn State football player, isn’t relenting in his crusade.
“No, absolutely not,” Masella told the Daily News after a wave of new accusations that Paterno knew about Sandusky’s behavior as far back as 1976 were revealed in unsealed court documents.
The most damning of the accusations is that Paterno allegedly told one of Sandusky’s victims, identified as John Doe 150 in the court papers, “I don’t want to hear about any of that kind of stuff, I have a football season to worry about.”
A university report found Paterno, who died in 2012, was aware of Sandusky’s crimes in 1998, and Paterno admitted to investigators he had concerns about the assistant coach’s behavior in 2001, but those findings haven’t given Masella pause.
“We look guilty and that’s what hurts,” Masella said of his fellow players, who, it should be noted, have never been accused of any wrongdoing or even lumped into the Sandusky mess. “People think we are just slime.”
Masella, a former tight end and punter who graduated in 1975, leads a group of 200 former lettermen, including former Jet Blair Thomas, who want Paterno’s statue and a wall of team plaques returned to where they stood outside Beaver Stadium. They are also calling for a formal apology for the Paterno family.
The Paterno shrine was removed in 2012 amid the shock surrounding Sandusky’s child rape scandal.
Masella dismissed the new round of allegations, which were made under oath during a 2014 deposition and classified the claims as a money grab.
Penn State settled with 32 Sandusky victims and paid out almost $93 million in damages. The documents unsealed Tuesday are part of a lawsuit between the school and its insurance company, with the sides fighting over who has to pay those victims.
“None of these people had access to Joe Paterno,” Masella said. “None of them. These kids who said they were in the locker room and they went to his office and spoke to him. No way. If you wanted to, you would be stopped at the front door by the secretary. You’d never get near Paterno back in the day.”
Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary reported that he’d witnessed Sandusky molesting a boy in the Penn State locker room showers back in 2001, and that Sandusky regularly had boys at practices and games.
Paterno’s son, Scott Paterno, blasted the new allegations with a series of tweets Tuesday. David Clohessy, the director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said dismissing such claims is “extremely hurtful” to the victims and the players’ petition stems from a “blind, unhealthy and ultimately self-serving loyalty” to Paterno.
“Nothing can hurt Joe Paterno now,” Clohessy said. “His backers are really fighting to preserve their own myth about a largely wonderful man with a clear, horrific flaw. No one denies Paterno was told about Sandusky’s disturbing behavior and refused to call the police or do any followup at all.
“If you take him at his word, he suspected abuse ... and kept silent for years,” he said. “That, on it’s face, is highly irresponsible and immoral.”
Clohessy said the rush to blindly protect Paterno is wrong.
“It’s as tragic as it is predictable,” he said.
“It sends the most chilling message, that your pain means nothing.
“It means that football matters to us more than kids.”