Penn State Scandal: Mike McQueary's Testimony Makes Everyone Look Awful

Since the sexual-abuse scandal broke at Penn State, one of the crucial figures in the discussion has been former assistant football coach Mike McQueary, the only apparent witness to any of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged attacks on young boys.

Today, McQueary has gone on record for the first time with what he saw in that PSU locker room in 2002.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, McQueary testified during a preliminary hearing for two ousted university officials—Tim Curley and Gary Schultz—who are accused of failing to report accusations against Sandusky to the proper authorities and of lying to a grand jury. He said that while he wasn’t absolutely certain that what he saw between Sandusky and the unnamed boy was intercourse, he does “believe [Sandusky] was sexually molesting the boy.”

McQueary testified that he’d reported the incident to Joe Paterno and (later) to the two subjects of the hearing. Asked why he hadn’t gone directly to the police, McQueary stated that he “thought [he] was talking to the head of the police,” referring to Schultz, whom he says had been in charge of the campus police force.

As might have been expected, given how this story has developed so far, McQueary’s statements show that mistakes were made at every level. McQueary himself isn’t excluded, considering that he (at minimum) failed to verify that he was speaking to anyone in a law enforcement capacity about having witnessed what was clearly a crime.

Curley and Schultz, as in previous reports, come off as having buried the story to protect the football team, considering that neither of them went to the police either. However, no one comes off worse here than Paterno, because for the first time, McQueary’s description of their conversation makes clear that the iconic coach knew exactly how serious the allegations against Sandusky were.

Even given that Paterno went to Curley—then the athletic director—with the allegations, it’s unconscionable that he continued to allow Sandusky to bring young boys to PSU facilities with no sanction or supervision. Previous reports of what Paterno had heard left some questions as to how he interpreted McQueary’s report, but McQueary’s description of the coach “slumped back in his chair” at the end of the conversation makes it impossible to doubt that Paterno knew something was drastically wrong and failed to take decisive action about it.