Everything you missed from Matthew Sandusky’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, UConn to pay $1.3M in sex assault handling lawsuit, Online child abuse reports surge, says US watchdog

Everything you missed from Matthew Sandusky’s interview with Oprah Winfrey  By Soraya Nadia McDonald July 18, 2014

....In an interview aired Thursday night on “Oprah Prime” on Winfrey’s OWN network, Matthew told Winfrey he felt it would have been better for his children and wife if he’d kept everything to himself instead of coming forward. Matthew initially offered grand jury testimony that Sandusky was not a child molester, but recanted during trial. After he told police he had also been abused, Matthew said his family, not just him, became the target of vicious character attacks.

“I can handle it,” Matthew said, even though the abuse drove him to attempt suicide shortly after he moved in with the Sanduskys when he was 16. “I can handle people attacking me. I handled the abuse. I can take it. My wife is an innocent. My children — they’re innocent. For people to attack them — yes, absolutely, the simpler answer would have been for me to keep it, to deal with it on my own.”

Matthew said he came forward about the abuse because he didn’t want to be a “coward.” When he heard the testimony of victim No. 4 during Sandusky’s criminal trial, Matthew said he was astonished at how similar the details were.....

More than 30 boys eventually came forward to say Sandusky molested them. To avoid further litigation, Penn State agreed to a $60 million settlement with 26 victims, including Matthew, and the university disbursed payments of varying sizes. Matthew said he had no knowledge of the settlement when he came forward.

Matthew met Jerry and his wife, Dottie Sandusky, when he was seven years old through Sandusky’s Second Mile charity camp. According to The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach:

Prosecutors say that the Second Mile became a tool for harvesting children for abuse. Sandusky, they said, was a classic predatory pedophile, a man who befriended the most vulnerable boys, the ones needing a father figure, who became appreciative that someone would bring them to football games and make them feel special.

Matthew told Winfrey how he resigned himself to being molested almost as a tradeoff for being around an otherwise stable and loving family. He came from a broken home, he said, where there was physical abuse and even running water wasn’t something that could be taken for granted. He often lived with his grandparents....

Matthew began to act out when he was a young teenager. He tried to cut Sandusky out of his life altogether, but Matthew told Winfrey the coach would come to his biological mother’s home unannounced. He would pull Matthew out of school. There was no escaping him, and Matthew became a truant. He started doing drugs and stealing, and was eventually arrested.

Matthew had a choice: Move in with the Sanduskys, or go to juvenile detention.

The Sanduskys moved him into their home with five other children, all adopted. Matthew so dreaded Sandusky’s nighttime visits he tried to kill himself. He said after that, the sexual abuse largely stopped. The family legally adopted him when he was 18 and pressured him to take the family name so he would be privy to a tuition break thanks to Sandusky’s employment at Penn State....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/18/everything-you-missed-from-matthew-sanduskys-interview-with-oprah-winfrey/  

UConn to pay $1.3M in sex assault handling lawsuit
Jul 18, 2014   By PAT EATON-ROBB  Associated Press

STORRS, Conn. (AP) - The University of Connecticut will pay $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit by five women who alleged the school did not take seriously their claims of sexual assaults on campus.

The bulk of the settlement, $900,000, will go to Silvana Moccia, a former UConn ice hockey player who alleged she was kicked off the team after reporting she had been raped by a male hockey player in August 2011.

The other four women will receive payments ranging from $25,000 to $125,000.

University officials adamantly denied that they have been indifferent to reports of assaults and did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement. They said the legal fight would be costly and bad for UConn's image.
http://www.knoe.com/story/26052588/apnewsbreak-uconn-settles-sex-assault-lawsuit


Online child abuse reports surge, says US watchdog
By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News 17 July 2014
There has been a dramatic rise in reports of child abuse images posted to commonly used parts of the internet, according to a US watchdog.

They include photos posted to publicly-accessible parts of social networks.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a record number of reports in the first week of July, four times the weekly average.

It comes in a week UK authorities arrested 660 people in connection with online child abuse.

That investigation was believed to have been targeted at those using the so-called "dark net" - parts of the internet that are hidden and can be hard to access without special software.

But the NCMEC stressed there was still a significant and growing challenge for law enforcement agencies to deal with material on the open internet as well as the harder-to-reach areas....
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28359143