BELLEFONTE, Pa -- BELLEFONTE, Pa. - The boy, only 11 in 1998, said he felt uncomfortable when Jerry Sandusky, then a powerful assistant football coach from the Pennsylvania State University, first wrestled with him on the carpet and then invited him to undress so the two of them could take a shower together.
As Sandusky went on trial this week in Bellefonte, Pa., to face child sex-abuse criminal charges, the boy - now a 25-year-old from Colorado known as alleged victim No. 6 - told jurors that he "went with it, because it was Jerry Sandusky, and I didn't want to make him mad." One of eight boys to testify against Sandusky, he first told his story to police 14 years ago, after his mother told authorities what her son had said about the shower.
As the trial resumes Monday and the prosecution prepares to wrap up its case, one key question lingers: How could so many people ignore so many allegations of abuse for so long?
As the testimony has made clear so far, many people in positions of authority knew or clearly were in a position to know, including the coach's wife and colleagues, along with prosecutors and police. But nothing happened to Sandusky until a 52-count indictment came down in November.
"There's a simple answer: He was a winning coach," said Lois Baron, a retired education professor at Concordia University in Montreal who wrote a book in 2008 that examined abuse issues and the psychology of young athletes.
Experts said it was an all-too common phenomenon: Friends and co-workers are reluctant to report suspicions of sex abuse if they involve a respected community leader. That was certainly the case with the award-winning Sandusky, 68, who ran a charity for troubled kids and invited them to his home, where they could play pool and shuffleboard and spend the night.
And they said the problem was exacerbated when you mixed in sports figures and the all-American drive to win.
"These people give us a tremendous sense of well-being and possibility, and we don't want to admit to ourselves that they're flawed," said Margaret Heffernan, a former chief executive from New Hampshire who wrote a book last year called "Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril."
As London prepares to host the Olympics next month, Heffernan said, she's been having similar arguments with people "who insist that these games are pure." But she said many people needed to think that way.
"A great deal of our sense of the logic and justice of the world hinges on heroes, role models, people we admire and respect," she said. "This is particularly true of winners. We need the good guys to win and the bad guys to lose, because that proves that the world is rational and fair."
At Penn State, people "were motivated not to see what they didn't want to see," said Ann Tenbrunsel, an author and professor of business ethics in the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. She called it "motivated blindness" and said "this can happen anywhere," citing the example of an outside auditor who might not expose accounting errors because of fears over losing the account.
Child sex-abuse expert Kenneth Lanning of Virginia, who worked for the FBI for 30 years, said the Penn State case "is actually extremely common" and that such cases force the public to confront the possible "nice-guy molester" who isn't necessarily part of their framework.