Check out 'The Soloff & Zervanos Show' Podcast on WWDB Talk 860 - Click Here!

Penn State Faces Yet Another Sandusky Sex Abuse Civil Suit

Posted in Sexual Abuse on Friday, November 22, 2013.

It was only a few weeks ago that we wrote about a significant development in the Sandusky sex abuse civil lawsuits against Penn State. Late last month, the university agreed to settle with 26 of Jerry Sandusky’s victims for nearly $60 million.

As of earlier this week, Penn State is facing another lawsuit from a plaintiff referred to as “Victim 9” during Sandusky’s criminal trial. The victim is now 20 years old and has named Sandusky and the University as defendants in his sexual abuse lawsuit.

The accusations made in the lawsuit are powerful and tragic. The young man was allegedly sexually abused by Sandusky for four years as a young teenager. He, like many of Sandusky’s later victims, alleges that he would not have been abused if Penn State officials had intervened when they first had reason to suspect Sandusky.

One of the plaintiff’s attorneys noted that “it’s now clear that Penn State enabled Sandusky to sexually abuse more than 20 other children before Sandusky preyed on this boy. Each of those tragic assaults provided Penn State with the opportunity to stop Sandusky, opportunities which Penn State squandered.”

Victim 9 provided testimony against Sandusky at his criminal trial, and six of the 45 criminal counts were related to abuses he suffered. The young man has said that the sexual abuse, which occurred between 2005 and 2009, started with fondling and eventually escalated into forced oral sex and rape.

As a result of the abuse, Victim 9 now suffers psychological problems that include post-traumatic stress disorder, flashbacks and depression.

Although Jerry Sandusky committed these heinous crimes against innocent young boys, these civil lawsuits reinforce the important idea that university officials were complicit in allowing the abuse to continue through their deliberate inaction and secrecy.

According to Victim 9’s lawsuit: “Penn State provided Sandusky the tools with which to ply the craft of a pedophile long after Sandusky’s formal ties with the university were supposed to have been severed.”

Source: Reading Eagle, “Sandusky’s sexual abuse ‘Victim 9’ sues Penn State, Sandusky,” Nov. 22, 2013

Tags: