Better late than…

From the BTN:

BTN will air a Penn State Special Report at 9 PM ET tonight following Thursday’s release of the Freeh Report as to Penn State’s handling of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse case. Hosted by Dave Revsine, the show will include BTN Analysts Gerry DiNardo and Howard Griffith in-studio and Glen Mason from Minneapolis, as well as  Malcolm Moran, Penn State professor and the Knight Chair in Sports Journalism, from State College, and others.

Also, here is Sally Jenkins’ column in the Washington Post. Jenkins, of course, had the last interview with Paterno before his death in January. It would seem he lied to her face.

Jenkins writes:

Paterno didn’t always give lucid answers in his final interview conducted with The Washington Post eight days before his death, but on this point he was categorical and clear as a bell. He pled total, lying ignorance of the ’98 investigation into a local mother’s claim Sandusky had groped her son in the shower at the football building. How could Paterno have no knowledge of this, I asked him?

“Nobody knew,” he said.

Everybody knew.

Never heard a rumor?

“I never heard a thing,” he said.

He heard everything.

“If Jerry’s guilty, nobody found out till after several incidents.”

Not a whisper? How is that possible?

Later she writes:

We can’t un-rape and un-molest those boys. We can’t remove them from the showers and seize them back from the hands of Sandusky. That should have been an unrelenting source of rage and grief to Paterno. Yet in perhaps the most damaging observation of all, the Freeh report accuses Paterno and his colleagues of “a striking lack of empathy” for the victims.

Everything else about Paterno must now be questioned; other details about him begin to nag. You now wonder if his self-defense was all an exercise in sealing off watertight compartments, leaving colleagues on the outside to drown. You wonder if he performed a very neat trick in disguising himself as a modest and benevolent man. The subtle but constant emphasis on his Ivy League education, the insistence that Penn State football had higher standards, now looks more like rampant elitism.