Mike McQueary Is Awarded $7.3 Million in Penn State Defamation Case
A Pennsylvania jury on Thursday, in a defamation case against Penn State
University, awarded $7.3 million to Mike McQueary, the former assistant
football coach who in 2001 told Coach Joe Paterno that he had witnessed
Jerry Sandusky sexually abusing a child in the locker room shower.
The
jury, which deliberated for about four hours, found that Penn State had
defamed McQueary with a statement in 2011 defending its former athletic
director and vice president against a charge of perjury related to what
McQueary said he had told them about Sandusky, a longtime defensive
coordinator at Penn State.
Judge
Thomas Gavin, who presided in the case, still has to rule on McQueary’s
accusation that Penn State retaliated against him after he testified at
Sandusky’s 2012 trial. McQueary was not allowed to coach at Penn
State’s first game after Paterno was fired in connection with the
scandal, in 2011, and McQueary’s contract was not renewed.
Even
before Thursday’s ruling, the scandal had already cost Penn State well
over $100 million in N.C.A.A. penalties, legal fees and settlements to
victims of Sandusky’s sexual abuse. Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing 10 boys and was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.
McQueary
testified to a grand jury in 2010 that in 2001 he told Paterno, and
later Athletic Director Tim Curley and the university vice president
Gary Schultz, that he had witnessed the abuse. The testimony helped
prosecutors eventually charge Sandusky, who is now 72.
The
Pennsylvania attorney general subsequently charged Curley and Schultz
with perjury after they told a grand jury that McQueary did not tell
them Sandusky had committed something as serious as sexual abuse. The
perjury charge was dismissed, but Schultz, Curley and Graham B. Spanier,
the former university president, still face criminal charges of failure
to report suspected child abuse and endangering the welfare of
children.
McQueary,
testifying at a hearing a month after the scandal came to light in
2011, provided the first public account of his reporting the abuse to
Paterno.
At
the time he witnessed the abuse, McQueary, who was a backup quarterback
for Penn State in the mid-1990s, was a graduate assistant.
McQueary’s
testimony in December 2011 helped show that Paterno, one of the most
successful and beloved coaches in college football history, had heard
that Sandusky had abused a boy at least a decade before Sandusky’s
behavior became publicly known. Court documents released this summer
showed that Paterno heard such an allegation as early as 1976.