Joe Paterno ought to be ordering up a big bouquet of roses this week and sending them to one Laurie Fine. A nearly decade-old tape of Fine, wife of newly fired Syracuse basketball assistant coach Bernie Fine, makes it sound like she's known for years that her husband was sexually abusing ball boys. And then there's her little secret that really blows Paterno's own lack of action in the child sex scandal at Penn State right out of the park!
The taped conversation between Laurie and Bobby Davis, one of several adult men accusing Bernie Fine of abusing them when they were just kids, includes the woman all but spelling out her belief that her husband was molesting kids over the years. Horrifying in and of itself, how about the reason she was so comfy chatting with Davis?
Why because he's her ex-boyfriend, of course! Davis told ESPN that the two had an affair when he was 18.
Um. Um. Um.
I understand Davis was 18 years old, and that's legal in New York State. But Laurie Fine met this guy via her husband when he was a kid. She was the wife of one of the Syracuse coaches when they met. She wasn't technically a teacher or a coach, but it's close enough to be extremely inappropriate. Plus, Davis was actually still in high school at the time of the alleged affair.
Let's keep going, shall we? Bobby wasn't just any kid. He was a kid who Laurie Fine thought her husband had sexually abused. And she proceeded to sleep with him ... while her husband was allegedly still abusing him?
Don't. Know. Where. To. Begin.
So let's take this from the top, shall we? The person who had the biggest chance to put a stop to the whole sick twisted alleged sex abuse scandal at one of the nation's top basketball programs seems to have been too wrapped up in her own bizarre world to do it. Laurie Fine certainly didn't put a stop to having kids stay at their house. And when there was an investigation into Bernie Fine being a molester back in 2005, she didn't help nail her husband to the wall.
It doesn't make Paterno or Mike McQueary's lack of action at Penn State any less reprehensible. But it looks like Laurie Fine just created a whole new category of failing kids.
Did Laurie Fine have a responsibility to act on this, even if she just "thought" Bernie "might" be abusing kids?
Image via Murray State/Flickr