Jerry Sandusky said he was misinterpreted and that a key witness was wrong when he concluded that the former assistant football coach at Penn State was engaged in sex with a young boy in the shower.
Just because the two were showering together — that doesn’t mean they were having sex, Mr. Sandusky said, during an interview with NBC.
“That would have been the last thing I would have thought about,” Mr. Sandusky said, as reported by NBC. “I would have thought maybe fooling around or something like that.”
A key witness at Mr. Sandusky’s trial, Mike McQueary — a graduate assistant at the university in 2001 — had testified that he heard a “skin-on-skin smacking sound” coming from the shower and that the sounds were definitely due to anal sex, The Associated Press reports.
In the interview, Mr. Sandusky also maintained that he didn’t touch boys inappropriately, but rather “hugged them,” AP says.
“Maybe I tested boundaries,” he said, as AP reports. “Maybe I shouldn’t have showered with them. Yeah, I tickled them. I looked at them as being probably younger than even some of them were. But I didn’t do any of these horrible acts and abuse these young people. I didn’t violate them. I didn’t harm them.”
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Mr. Sandusky, 69, is serving a 30- to 60-year sentence on 45 counts of child sexual abuse.
