Paterno family drops lawsuit
NCAA official claims move as total victory
HARRISBURG — The family of the late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno dropped a lawsuit Friday against the NCAA over its use of a report in the Jerry Sandusky child molestation scandal to punish Mr. Paterno and the university.
Paterno’s estate, his son Jay and former assistant coach William Kenney discontinued their case. The NCAA called it a voluntary decision and said no payment was involved.
NCAA chief legal officer Donald Remy claimed a total victory for his organization, which he said acted reasonably in adopting conclusions from a university-commissioned report authored by a team led by former FBI director Louis Freeh.
“The Paterno family characterized this case as a ‘search for the truth,’” Mr. Remy said. “Its decision today, after years of investigation and discovery, to abandon its lawsuit rather than subject those facts to courtroom examination is telling.”
He said the Paterno family wasted time, effort and money in the case. Messages left for the Paternos and their lawyers were not immediately returned.
The lawsuit had claimed that the college sports’ governing body damaged the Paterno estate’s commercial interests through its use of the Freeh report. Mr. Kenney and Jay Paterno alleged the Freeh report rendered them unable to find comparable coaching work.
The Freeh report concluded Joe Paterno and other administrators hushed up a 2001 complaint about Sandusky showering with a boy for fear of bad publicity.
Paterno, who died in early 2012, was never charged criminally, but former Penn State president Graham Spanier was convicted in March of misdemeanor child endangerment for his failure to report the complaint about Sandusky. Former athletic director Tim Curley and former vice president Gary Schultz earlier pleaded guilty to the same charge. The three are to report to county prison July 15 to serve two or three months.
The judge who sentenced the three said Paterno could have called police “without so much as getting his hands dirty. Why he didn’t is beyond me.”
The Paterno family and his legion of supporters have long objected bitterly to the Freeh report’s depiction of the hall of fame coach as having failed to do the right thing in 2001. Sandusky had been one of Paterno’s top assistants for decades before his 1999 retirement.
Paterno told a grand jury in 2011 he did not know of child molestation allegations against Sandusky before 2001. But an insurer has alleged, a judge noted in a court document last year, that a child told Paterno in 1976 that Sandusky had molested him, a claim the Paterno family has denied.
Jay Paterno, a Penn State assistant coach for 17 years, was elected by alumni in May to the university board and starts as a trustee next month.
The university removed a Joe Paterno statue from outside the stadium in the wake of the scandal. The NCAA took away 111 of his wins, but they have been restored and with it his status as major college football’s winningest coach with 409 victories.
Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of 45 counts of sexual abuse of 10 boys and is appealing his 30- to 60-year sentence.