Jerry Sandusky's son arrested on child sex charges
Jerry Sandusky's 41-year-old son was accused Monday of attempting to entice two teenage sisters into sexual acts, more than five years after his father's arrest on charges that he sexually abused young boys set off a scandal that continues to roil Pennsylvania State University.
Centre County prosecutors accused Jeffrey S. Sandusky, one of six children adopted by the former assistant football coach, of soliciting naked photos from a 16-year-old girl last year and of asking her older sister for oral sex in 2013, when she was 15.
The teens are the daughters of his then-girlfriend, with whom he was living.
The allegations came to the attention of Pennsylvania state police in November, when the father of the younger girl discovered text exchanges from Sandusky asking his daughter for naked photos. He then alerted authorities.
Both teens, the charging documents state, rebuffed Sandusky's advances and his attempts to persuade them to keep silent about them.
"You did what you did, and I'm not going to give you a chance to try and justify it," one wrote Sandusky in a 2016 text message quoted in court filings. "You literally tried to guilt me into doing it, and you even told me specifically what I 'needed' to do. You know who does that? Rapists and Abusers."
Sandusky allegedly advised the younger girl that his requests for naked photos were "not weird because he studied medicine," the arrest affidavit states. Still, he urged her not to show the text messages to anyone.
When the girl later shared the texts with her mother, the woman confronted Sandusky, who allegedly claimed that he was trying to help her daughter remove sexual photos of herself from the internet. He told her he needed additional naked photos of her to do so, the documents state.
Jeffrey Sandusky, who works as a corrections officer at the Rockview State Prison, stood by his father in late 2011 as his crimes led to the downfall of Penn State's iconic football coach, the late Joe Paterno, and criminal charges were filed against the university's former president, Graham B. Spanier, and two other officials. They are due to stand trial next month for covering up the former assistant coach's crimes.
He was a frequent presence in the courtroom throughout his father's 2012 trial, often sitting silently alongside the assistant coach's wife, Dotty, and many of his five adult siblings.
His brother Matt would later allege that he had been sexually abused by their father, and volunteered to testify against the former assistant coach at his trial. Prosecutors, however, never called Matt Sandusky to the witness stand.
Jerry Sandusky has maintained his innocence and continues to fight his conviction while serving a 30- to 60-year sentence in a state prison in Greene County. On Monday, the state Supreme Court appointed Jefferson County Court Judge John Foradora to preside over the appeal after the previous judge, Senior Judge John M. Cleland, removed himself and accused the former assistant coach's lawyers of impugning his integrity.
After a brief court appearance Monday in Bellefonte, Jeffrey Sandusky was jailed on $200,000 bail on charges including statutory sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, and corruption of minors. His lawyer, Lance Marshall, did not return calls for comment.
The state Corrections Department on Monday suspended Jeffrey Sandusky from his job without pay as a result of the charges, a spokesman said.