Happy Valley, a searching documentary about the child sex-abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University, concludes with a scene of Matt Sandusky, the grown adoptive son of convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky, constructing a basement rec room in his home as his own small children romp around nearby. Matt plays only a small part in the complex story, but his sad situation epitomizes a movie that looks past his father’s crimes and the cover-up by Penn State officials to ponder the culture that permitted them. In June 2012, as Jerry was standing trial for having sexually assaulted ten boys over the course of 15 years, Matt came forward to announce that he too had been a victim of his father’s abuse. Loyalty to his adoptive family inhibited him for years, Matt explains to director Amir Bar-Lev (My Kid Could Paint That, The Tillman Story), and now that he’s broken his silence, his mother and siblings will have nothing to do with him. In the Sandusky household, at Penn State, and in the Happy Valley region surrounding it, a strong sense of community can be a double-edged sword.
The support for Paterno is understandable if not defensible: around Happy Valley he was known as a man of high character who stressed academic performance and whose Nittany Lions maintained the second-highest graduation rate (85 percent) of any school in the Big Ten Conference. He famously turned down a seven-figure offer from the New England Patriots to stay at the university, and he and his wife, Suzanne, donated $4 million to the construction of a campus library. But in July 2012, six months after his death from lung cancer, the university released a report, assembled by the law firm of former FBI director Louis Freeh, arguing that Paterno and the others had “empowered” Sandusky to continue his abuse. In Paterno’s case, the Freeh report cited two fairly ambiguous e-mails from Curley to Schultz and Spanier: the first, from May 1998, was interpreted to mean that Curley and Paterno knew about a previous complaint involving Sandusky, whereas the second, sent in February 2011 after McQueary reported the shower incident, was interpreted to mean that Paterno had quashed a plan to turn Sandusky in to the authorities.
Directed by Amir Bar-Lev
