I know it is difficult keeping up with all the sports child molestation stories. This isn’t the Penn State football program scandal, where university officials carefully looked the other way while football coaching legend Jerry Sandusky apparently was using the campus to trap and abuse kids. This isn’t the Bill Conlin scandal, in which the sports writer just accorded the highest honor from his peers has also been accused of sexually molesting children. The topic is the Syracuse University basketball scandal, where once again an alleged molester was allowed to escape detection and prosecution for years, this time because of a perverted concept of journalistic ethics.

In 2002, ESPN and the Syracuse Post-Standard were given an audiotape on which the wife of Bernie Fine, the Syracuse University assistant basketball coach now accused of serial sex abuse, told one of the alleged victims of molestation that she knew “everything that went on” with her husband’s crimes. Both the paper and the network decided not to run stories based on the tape and the victim’s claims, and never sent it to law enforcement authorities.

They kept the tape in the files, until the step-brother of Bobby Davis, the former ball boy who made the initial recording, came forward to accuse Fine of molesting him, too. Then the tape was released, and Syracuse University fired Fine the day it aired.

The question: why didn’t the Post-Standard or ESPN give the tape to the police? How many children were molested because they didn’t? Continue reading →