A jury awarded former Penn State quarterback and assistant football coach Mike McQueary $7.3 million in damages Thursday following a two-week defamation trial against his former employer.
One of the key components of the defamation case revolved around a 2011 statement made by former Penn State president Graham Spanier in which he defended two program administrators whom McQueary claimed did not act upon a 2001 report of sexual abuse by former Nittany Lions defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky.
The jury awarded McQueary $1.15 million in defamation damages, $1.15 million in representation damages and $5 million in punitive damages, according to the Associated Press, and took about four hours to reach its decision, per The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“What Penn State has done to Mike McQueary is outrageous,” McQueary’s lawyer Elliot Strokoff told the jury in his closing argument. “He should not have been a scapegoat in this matter, and certainly not for five years.”
McQueary also claimed to be the only Penn State employee who was not reimbursed for legal fees in the Sandusky case, the only assistant from former head coach Joe Paterno’s staff to not receive an interview to be on Bill O’Brien’s staff when the current Houston Texans’ head coach took over the program, and received severance payments months after other Paterno staffers received theirs. McQueary also argued that “the administrators’ collective failure to act on his 2001 report was an intentional misrepresentation that’s caused him [McQueary] ‘irreparable harm to his ability to earn a living, especially in his chosen profession of coaching football,'” according to PennLive.com.
McQueary, 42, is currently unemployed, divorced and living with his parents.
“Mr. McQueary was not damaged by any action of the university,” Penn State attorney Nancy Conrad said in her closing argument. “Mr. McQueary, as he testified and as he recognized, if he was harmed, was harmed by national media and public opinion.”
In 2012, Sandusky was convicted of sexually assaulting 10 boys and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.
Judge Thomas Gavin will decide “in the coming weeks” whether McQueary’s 2012 ouster from the football program was unjustified, according to Philly.com.
Featured Image: Gene J. Puskar/AP
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Jake Russell
