In a recent civil rights lawsuit, the son of legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, along with a fellow former assistant coach, claim their reputations were “destroyed” when the school fired them during the sordid Jerry Sandusky investigation.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:
In the civil rights suit, filed Monday in federal court in Philadelphia, Joseph “Jay” Paterno and Bill Kenney say they suffered collateral damage from the siege of bad publicity for the university after Sandusky was indicted for child sex abuse in November 2011 and the elder Paterno was dismissed after decades as head coach.
Jay Paterno and Kenney were fired in January 2012, shortly after the announcement that the school had hired a new head coach, the suit alleges. At the time, it had been reported that Jay Paterno and the new coach “reached the conclusion” together that Paterno would leave Penn State.
The lawsuit, which seeks at least $1 million in damages for emotional distress and loss of earnings, argues that although the assistant coaches were never implicated of wrongdoing in the Sandusky investigation, their firings stigmatized them in the eyes of potential employers.
All Penn State has offered in response is “It is common practice for incoming head coaches to select their own coaching staff.”
The lawsuit notes that the school “terminated each of them (Paterno and Kenney) at the height of the Sandusky scandal’s dark shroud,” and that no attempt to “preserve the reputations” of the former coaches was made.
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