Jerry Sandusky Scandal In Happy Valley

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In the movie Happy Valley, I think there were many factors that caused the Jerry Sandusky scandal to go unpunished and unnoticed when the whole community knew. I think the obvious and most prevalent reasons we saw was the success of the program, the Nittany Lion Pride, and as well as the total stigma around Joe Paterno. To Happy Valley, football was life, the players and the coaches, as well as the community lived and died by the wins and losses of the program. Hearing the testimony of a young male who graduated in 2013 from Penn State said it all. He had the mentality throughout the documentary of “football comes first, this is what we do.” He put aside the fact that innocent children were taken advantage of scarred, and believed that …show more content…

He was not the only one with this mentality however, and this is precisely why this scandal never came to light until victims began to testify. The success of the team and the passion of the fans were only the half of it however, the aurora surrounding Joe Paterno and his long lasting relationship with the university made it an even harder pill to swallow. I think that no one wanted to believe that “goddesses” such as Joe Paterno, and his staff, as well as Jerry Sandusky could commit such heinous crimes and do their best to pretend it didn’t exist. They said in the film that Sandusky was Paterno’s right hand man, meaning he had that same loving, caring, and father like mentality that Joe Pa carried with him for his 55 years at Penn State. In an interview Paterno conducted in the movie, he was called the “beacon of integrity,” that he was loyal, put the money aside and truly cared about not just winning, but that he was able to make his players into better men then when they entered the school. He graduated 87 percent of his players, the highest in the nation, and was looked at like dad to most players. For these reasons alone, you can see why the Penn State faithful fell in love with him, and failed to believe or even report any wrongdoing that he committed in

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