Lawyers discredit alleged Sandusky victim

STATE COLLEGE, Pa., Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Lawyers for a former Penn State official fired in the wake of a sex abuse scandal said a man claiming to have been victimized by Jerry Sandusky is a fraud.

Tom Farrell, defense attorney for former Penn State athletic director Gary Schultz, said the unidentified man who says he was the boy a graduate assistant saw Sandusky raping in a shower is a "charlatan" seeking to profit from the fallout after the abuse became public, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday.

Privately, prosecutors and police alike have questioned whether the man, whose identity has not been made public, is who he says he is. At Sandusky's trial prosecutors stressed the identity of the boy, known only as Victim 2, remained a mystery. The man's story has changed to conform with emerging details of the case, including initially denying he was the boy and changing what year he said the abuse took place, prosecutors acknowledge. Those reservations led to their presentation at trial that the boy's identity is unknown.

When the graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, told Penn State coach Joe Paterno what he'd seen in the shower a day later, Paterno notified university President Graham Spanier and Schultz, who prosecutors say failed to call police for fear of bad publicity.

Farrell, Schultz's lawyer, says the man claiming to be the boy in the now-infamous 2001 incident is hindering his client's defense. The alleged victim has not filed a civil suit.

A group of lawyers representing the man who claims he is Victim 2 said his client is being attacked as part of a legal strategy to deter Sandusky's victims from speaking out.

"Mr. Farrell's comments are nothing more than a regurgitation of Jerry Sandusky's failed defense strategy attacking his victims, many of whom initially denied being abused," the lawyers said in a statement. "The identity of the boy in the shower is not now, nor has it ever been, in doubt."