ESPN and Paterno: This One Got Through Me

Thanks to my anonymous friend for picking this up.

Deadspin picked this up in the name of following up the ESPN Special Report on Todd Hodne.

ESPN E:60 is asking about Joe Paterno's legacy, ten years after his removal and death.  The program is supposed to air Monday.

You know, this is the same ESPN which has done more to protect Penn State University from being rightfully BURNED INTO MOTHERFUCKING ASH.

As I said to one commenter, there is a certain...  vibe...  about Happy Valley, PA and the university which resides therein.

I can give you Penn State's and Joe Paterno's legacy -- and I don't even need to get into the concept of Jerry Sandusky, who had just founded Second Mile to groom little victims in the name of access to Penn State Football, the only thing of any real value int Happy Valley, PA for the thirty years Sandusky assisted Paterno and even beyond.

And if ESPN has it's way, even to today!

So let me take a few swings at this.

Everything on this list is fact which comes from the Todd Hodne story.

• Attacked a fellow freshman player at school camp for the football team on Long Island.  Four years before he came to Penn State.  With a knife.
• At least sexually assaulted, if not raped, a girl at the freshman dance in his school -- making his reputation as FOOTBALL MAN (reg tm) and undoing hers for not just submitting to the only real reason their private school even fucking existed!  This was also in 1973!!!
• Beat a senior with a deadly weapon when the senior tried to haze him.  Again, 1973, maybe early 1974.
• A coach was fired from the school for not protecting Hodne, and trying to warn his parents about what was going on.  Both the head coach and the AD of the school only wanted to know how hard this monster could hit...
• The fellow freshman from the first incident was too intimidated by Hodne to leave him, even though there were further violent incidents between the two over 1973-1977.
• Food robbery and record store robbery after his first year at Penn State.
• And then the rapes which we know about started in September of 1978, after Hodne had been suspended for the 1978 season by Paterno for those robberies.
• The article even admits the abject FALSITY of "Things like that don't happen in Happy Valley", when the truth is no one has the guts to say anything about it, Because Football.
• Another Fall 1978 binding and rape by Hodne, after one of an interminable number of drunken binges on the part of the PSU Football Team.
• Another investigated rape, the night Hodne was suspended from the Nittany Lions team!
• The article states that Hodne, to the Nittany Lions, had two other girlfriends to begin with -- probably raping them too, but no one cared to notice and neither reached out to ESPN.
• Hodne, at this point, is expelled from Penn State and homeless, living in his car.

At this point, Hodne is convicted during Spring Break 1979 of 12 felonies, including the rapes.  The judge, unbelievably, allows him home with his parents to await sentencing.

And it's at that point the shit REALLY hits the fan:

• Followed his high school "girlfriend" (almost certainly having been raped already by Hodne -- the article expressed she had relief at his convictions) TWO THOUSAND MILES to Florida to attack her again just days after the guilty verdicts!
• One victim April 23rd, 1979.
• Another victim May 12th.
• Another May 22nd.
• ANOTHER May 31st.

He's finally caught again, pleads guilty to two of the five rapes, and when everything is put together, gets 7-21 years in prison.

That's five victims (and more -- see below!), by the way, completely responsible to the county because Hodne, even though HE WAS NO LONGER IN THE SCHOOL, was protected because he was Football Man!

• He admits, in jailhouse interviews, he raped for the same power he had on the football field.
• He also admits he has no other coping mechanism of any kind except for football, and the injurious level of hits even NFL scouts were beginning to look for in that day and age!
• There was a sixth victim, a grandmother of a family -- 79 years old -- completely obliterated in her home during the spree.

The New York State Parole Board, as if they wanted to see Hodne commit more violence, including murder, unanimously let him go on parole on May 2, 1986.

• Within nine months, he's doing crack cocaine.
• And then he finally does it:  After being evicted for being undesirable, he murders a Long Island cabbie on August 11, 1987.

And that's just Hodne.

Here's some more the ESPN article reported:

• A 1975 "jock frat house" gang rape, reported to PSU authorities, almost-certainly by the football team in another of their drunken runs.
• The University was openly covering up the number of rapes which were already happening on the campus from freshmen female students.
• Even though the student paper reported 12 rapes/sexual assaults in Happy Valley from January to September of 1978 -- the true number was THREE TIMES THAT, at the very least!
• One student dressed up as a female police officer and pistol whipped his victims.
• One snuck into the girls' dorms and had his way with them in the shower!
• One of the women at the rape crisis center said that all investigation pretty much went stone cold stop if the perpetrator was believed to be a Nittany Lions football player.
• And then, even by the article's and probably Paterno's admission, he lost the team in 1979, including one player who should be lucky he was not shot before the Liberty Bowl by heading to the wrong part of Memphis to start trouble.
• 2002, Penn State, after an investigation, expels a player from the school for sexual assault -- Paterno demands he be allowed to play in the bowl game anyway!

===================

There's your answer, ESPN.

No E:60 necessary.

Joe Paterno, jointly and severally with the entire Football Man Network built in and around Happy Valley, Pennsylvania and Penn State University, has a legacy of broken female minds and bodies at the feet of the only people relevant to that institution.

And ESPN is covering it up because, even by their own admission, without this kind of violence, there is no football -- and, without football, there is no ESPN!

The entire university needs to go, and there's no other acceptable penalty -- and the fact is that not only did ESPN ensure that didn't happen, it allowed the football program to survive and win at least conference championships since.  And the only GODDAMNED reason they haven't won a national title yet is because they don't have SEC-level recruiting and can't compete with the SEC!

I still remember, as a freshman boy myself, literally watching in the middle of phy-ed, IN PUBLIC, a football player (a senior) putting a floor hockey stick up a girl's skirt.

And by the time I was 19, I was well and full aware that this was considered NORMAL BEHAVIOR and ACCEPTABLE -- except for one thing.

You had to have Legitimate Purpose FIRST.

Hence, I was ruled that I had a sexual charge every time I tried to hug somebody, and that cost me one college.

The belief of what I was going to do two years later should've cost me a second.

And the fact of the matter is, Paterno and "409 Club":  All that does is basically indicate I was not welcome at either of those universities AND NEVER WAS.  Because if I was FOOTBALL MAN, then every depravity believed that I would have committed/was committing (which, even though it makes no difference, I deny -- but I recognize the law doesn't care (UW-River Falls, UW-Eau Claire, or Deborah Gibson)) would've been swept under the goddamn rug.

Hell, given this country and the fact we've elected two pedophile rapists (one of each party, before anyone gets any ideas -- Clinton being the other one!) to the Presidency in my adulthood, perhaps I might well be qualified to be President.

... if only I had the Legitimate Purpose of Todd Hodne, right???

This world better thank Deborah Gibson -- she and the positivity message she echoes are the only reasons I didn't become another Todd Hodne, another monster like so many men are allowed to be, because it's too inconvenient because "WE MIGHT LOSE ON SATURDAY AND NOT WIN A NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP!"

ESPN, THAT IS JOE PATERNO'S LEGACY.  He is not, in any way, shape, nor form, alone in this regard -- nor is ESPN.

But that IS his legacy -- AND YOURS, since you are so married to football.