Film & Television

ESPN knew of the allegations against Syracuse assistant coach Bernie Fine in 2003, and were also given a copy of the damning tape of Fine's accuser speaking to Fine's wife, but chose to do nothing with the information.Just when it appeared that the worst possible institutional corruption had been exposed at Penn State and possibly Syracuse, we now learn that the problem is even more horrific than we first imagined. In the Penn State scandal, the primary uproar outside the allegations against Jerry Sandusky was about the fact that so many people had knowledge of the allegations and did nothing. Now, we learn that the Syracuse situation is possibly even more disturbing. In the Syracuse incident, both law enforcement and at least two separate media outlets were contacted about the allegations against Bernie Fine as early as 2002 - and still nothing happened.

The original accuser provided ESPN and the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper with both his personal account of his allegations and a damning taped conversation that he had with Laurie Fine, the accused's wife, during which Laurie Fine acknowledges that her husband has likely molested Bobby Davis and other young boys. And armed with all of that information, neither media outlet saw fit to do anything meaningful. To their credit, the Post-Standard did investigate the allegations for a time, but could not find enough evidence to publish a story.

Apparently, ESPN's only concern was whether or not they could corroborate the story enough to publish or air it. It turns out that the corroborating witnesses at the time would not speak to ESPN or changed their stories. But ESPN never went to authorities with the information because they were told by the accuser that he had spoken to local police and been told that the statute of limitations had expired on such potential charges. So, ESPN took the word of the accuser about his second-hand information regarding the statute of limitations on child sex crimes in the state of New York, but didn't bother to "corroborate" that information?

Let's hope that ESPN does as good a job covering its own egregious failure of character and morality as it did while tearing down Penn State and its corrupt institution.

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