Penn State ex-president files libel lawsuit papers

Former Penn State president Graham Spanier has filed notice he intends to bring a defamation lawsuit against Louis Freeh, the former FBI director enlisted by the university to investigate the administration's role in an alleged coverup of child sex abuse at the university.

Spanier's attorney, Elizabeth Ainslie, filed the notice in Centre County Court and listed Freeh and his law firm as defendants. Spanier, who served as president of Penn State from September 1995 to November 9, 2011, is seeking unspecified monetary damages and is demanding a jury trial, according to a cover sheet attached to the filing, known as a writ of summons.

The lawsuit notice came a day before the one-year anniversary of the public release of Freeh's investigative report, which painted Spanier and two other former university administrators as the masterminds of a coverup of abuse allegations against ex-defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky.

Spanier, 64, has denied the allegations in the report and in the perjury and obstruction of justice charges brought against him last fall by the state attorney general's office.

According to prosecutors, Spanier kept emails, handwritten notes and other incriminating evidence from investigators for 11 months before his Nov. 9, 2011, firing, compounding a "conspiracy of silence" that began a decade earlier as a plot to protect Sandusky from arrest.

A preliminary hearing for Spanier, former athletic director Tim Curley, and former university vice president Gary Schultz is scheduled for July 29 in Dauphin County Court.

Ainslie did not immediately return telephone and e-mail messages. Freeh is the chairman of  the law firm Pepper Hamilton LLP. A spokesman, William McCusker, said in an e-mail Thursday night the firm would not comment on the lawsuit, "due to the pending felony charges against Mr. Spanier."

"Over the past year, Penn State has made a dedicated effort to reform the problems that led to Mr. Sandusky's ability to victimize children on the university campus," McCusker continued. "I trust that the changes and improvements that Penn State has put in place will help to build a constructive and protective environment where children will not again suffer abuse."

Freeh's report, released July 12, 2012, said Spanier and Curley conceded to persuasion by the university's football coach, Joe Paterno, not to take a February 2001 allegation to law enforcement. The report also included recommendations for 119 policy changes Freeh said would foster an environment at Penn State that "protects children and not adults who abuse them."

"Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State," the lead investigator, former FBI director Louis J. Freeh, said at a press conference last year announcing his findings. "The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized."

Spanier's stature, as the former president of the university, could insulate Freeh from a defamation claim because state law requires aggrieved public officials and public figures to prove the defendant knowingly made false statements or acted maliciously to disregard the truth.

Duquesne University law professor Wesley M. Oliver, who analyzed Sandusky's trial for NBC News, said Thursday that "while Freeh's conclusions are debatable" they fell "within a zone of reasonable interpretation."

"Spanier's clearly a public figure, so as long as Freeh's conclusions don't rise to the level of being maliciously wrong, then Spanier can't prevail," Oliver said.

A jury convicted Sandusky in June 2012 on 45 counts of child sex abuse related to at least 10 victims over the last two decades, including the 1998 and 2001 incidents. A judge sentenced him last October to 30 to 60 years in state prison.

Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant who witnessed the February 2001 abuse, reported it to Paterno and later to Curley and Schultz. None of them alerted the authorities and Sandusky continued to freely use the football facility, McQueary said.

Paterno's influence and the administrators' willingness to protect Sandusky from punishment amid the dual reports of abuse in campus showers were indicative of a cloistered culture at Penn State where doing what was right crumbled under the weight of fear at all levels, Freeh said.

At the top, Freeh said, Spanier, Curley, Schultz and Paterno (who died of cancer last year) cowered at the notion of bad publicity for the university and its heralded football program. At the bottom, Freeh said, the janitors who witnessed Sandusky abusing a boy in a campus shower in November 2000 feared being fired if they alerted authorities.

"They were afraid to take on the football program," Freeh said. "They said the university would circle around them. It was like going against the president of the United States. If that's the culture at the bottom, then God help the culture at the top."

Spanier, Curley and Schultz were prepared to alert the state Department of Public Welfare to the 2001 allegation, but Curley backed off the plan after speaking with Paterno, according to e-mails Freeh said his investigators uncovered in March.

Freeh called the e-mails "the most critical evidence" in the case.

Curley e-mailed Spanier and Schultz on Feb. 27, 2001, two weeks after McQueary went to Paterno, and told them he had changed his mind about an agreed-upon plan to alert the authorities.

"After giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe yesterday," Curley said, he instead wanted to tell Sandusky "we feel there is a problem" and would offer him "professional help."

If Sandusky were cooperative, Curley said, according to the report, "we would work with him" to inform Sandusky's charity for troubled youth, the Second Mile. If Sandusky did not cooperate, Curley said, "We don't have a choice and will inform" the state Department of Public Welfare and the Second Mile.

According to the report, Spanier replied, "This approach is acceptable to me," and acknowledged the university's potential liability if the abuse did not stop: "The only downside for us is if the message isn't 'heard' and acted upon and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it. But that can be assessed down the road. The approach you outline is humane and a reasonable way to proceed."