The Penn State Child Sex Abuse Scandal
In the pantheon of iconic college football coaches, few stood taller than Joe Paterno. The Penn State coach had led the Nittany Lions to two national championships and won 409 games — more than any other Division I coach in history — over a glittering 45-year career. That legacy now lies in tatters following revelations that, under his watch, former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly abused at least eight minors, including raping a 10-year-old boy (Sandusky has denied the charges). In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, Penn State's president and athletic director lost their jobs; after it emerged that Paterno had knowledge of some of the alleged incidents, but didn't take action against Sandusky's behavior, he was forced to resign as well. The high-profile coach's departure triggered a bizarre spectacle of rioting and protests at Penn State and helped blow the whistle on at least one other college sex abuse scandal: at Syracuse University, where two former ball boys came forward to claim that associate head basketball coach Bernie Fine had molested them in the 1970s and 1980s (Fine has denied the allegations). Jerry Sandusky now faces 40 counts of sexual abuse as well as at least one civil suit, where the plaintiff claims more than a hundred individual incidents of abuse. For Paterno, though, the incident has deflated his legend. Regarding his vaunted faith in "moral influence" as a virtue, "no one seemed to wield it better than Paterno," wrote TIME's Sean Gregory. "We now know that no one fumbled it worse."