Ousted Penn State football coach Joe Paterno never once confronted top aide Jerry Sandusky about allegations that he was molesting little boys, the accused sex predator claims.
Despite an eyewitness account of a shocking sexual encounter in the Penn State locker-room showers in March 2002, Paterno didn’t say a word about it to Sandusky, the former defensive coach insisted in an interview yesterday with The New York Times.
Nor did Paterno mention a 1998 investigation by Penn State campus cops into a mom’s claim that her son was taking showers with Sandusky, the retired coach insists.
“I never talked to him about either one,” Sandusky said. “That’s all I can say. I mean, I don’t know.”
During two extensive interviews with the paper, the shamed coach gave a telling answer about his feelings toward kids.
“If I say no, I’m not attracted to boys, that’s not the truth because I’m attracted to young people,” he said.
“I enjoy spending time with young people. I enjoy spending time with people. My two favorite groups are the elderly and the young. The young because they don’t think about what they say, and the old because they don’t care.”
Sandusky also creepily details a chaotic home life filled with needy kids he thought of as his own.
“It was, you know, almost an extended family,” he said of his relationship with kids from the charity he founded.
Hugging and wrestling with the boys, he said, seemed natural.
“I think a lot of the kids really reached out for that,” he said.
He said prosecutors, during a three-year probe, simply twisted the facts of his dealings with boys from the charity he founded, Second Mile.
“They’ve taken everything that I ever did for any young person and twisted it to say that my motives were sexual or whatever,” Sandusky said. “I had kid after kid after kid who might say I was a father figure. And they just twisted that all.”
Sandusky did admit, however, that his allegedly sick relationship with underprivileged boys sometimes did cause a strain with Paterno.
“I would have dreams of we being in a squad meeting and that door fly open and kids come running through chasing one another, and what was I going to do?” he said. “Because, I mean, Joe was serious about football.”
He said his wife, Dorothy, had her own concerns about the chaotic mechanics of their household.
She once warned him not to neglect their own adopted kids “for the sake of other kids,” Sandusky said.
“I remember the kids were downstairs, and we always had dogs,” he said. “And Dottie said, ‘You better do down and check on those kids — you know, those Second Mile kids — after football games.’
“I went down, and I look, and there goes a kid flying over a couch. And I go, ‘I don’t think she wants to see this.’ Yeah, I mean, it was turmoil.”
Prosecutors have outlined a sickening pattern of predatory behavior by Sandusky toward the vulnerable boys who cycled in and out of their house.
Yet Sandusky said he was only looking out for the kids.
“I would call kids on the phone and work with them academically,” he said. “I tried to reward them sometimes with a little money in hand, just so that they could see something.
“But more often than not, I tried to set up, maybe get them to save the money, and I put it directly into a savings account established for them.”
Sandusky will be in court Dec. 13 for a preliminary hearing on the bombshell sex scandal that has rocked the Penn State campus, and decimated Paterno’s career.
Paterno was fired last month for not doing enough to alert authorities after he learned of the alleged locker-room shower assault in 2002.