John Ziegler, a documentary filmmaker, played excerpts of interviews he conducted with Jerry Sandusky on the Today show Monday, clashing with Matt Lauer.
Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach serving a minimum 30-year prison sentence for child sexual abuse, is portrayed somewhat sympathetically.
Ziegler’s documentary, “The Framing of Joe Paterno,” has not been received positively from Paterno’s family, who sought to distance itself from Ziegler.
In the brief tape excerpts, Sandusky, who did not testify at his trial, questioned Penn State’s investigation, conducted by former FBI director Louis Freeh.
He said witness Mike McQueary, a former assistant coach, misinterpreted what he saw in the Penn State shower, when Sandusky was raping a child.
McQueary testified that he reported it to Paterno.
”That would have been the last thing I would have thought about,” Sandusky said. ”I would have thought maybe fooling around or something like that.”
Jerry Sandusky also said that Paterno, the legendary Penn State head coach, would not have let him coach if he had suspected Sandusky was a pedophile.
“If he [Paterno] thought I was [a pedophile], I’d say no,” Sandusky, whose final season was 1998. “If he had a suspicion, I don’t know the answer to that.”