Video: Sandusky accuser goes public
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Thirty-year-old Travis Weaver is the first accuser of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky to speak publicly about the sexual abuse he claims he suffered.
Weaver said Sandusky performed oral sex on him in the upstairs bedroom of the Sandusky home, right across the hall from Sandusky’s wife, Dottie.
Weaver said Dottie Sandusky never saw any of the abuse but he suspects she had an idea of what was going on.
“How could you not know?” asked Weaver.
Sandusky faces 48 child sex abuse charges. He maintains his innocence.
Weaver said he had never told anyone of the abuse and buried his memories. He said he thought he was the only victim until he saw reports that Sandusky had been arrested on charges of molesting other boys last fall.
“I was shocked,” Weaver said in an interview with NBC’s Rock Center. “I couldn’t believe he just kept doing it to all these other kids.”
Weaver said he feels guilty about the alleged victims who said they were abused after him.
“I wish I would have said something to him. I think if I had said something to him a lot of this stuff wouldn’t ‘a happened to all these other kids,” he said.
Weaver said he met Sandusky in 1992 at the Penn State outdoor swimming pool when he was just 10 years old. He was there with his younger brother as part of Sandusky’s Second Mile summer camp.
“It was like meeting my hero,” he said.
The sexual abuse began to occur gradually, he said. It allegedly started in the Penn State locker room.
“After the shower was over, he’d dry me off with a towel,” Weaver said. “He’d say he was trying to wrestle with me. And then it progressed into oral sex.”
Weaver said Sandusky abused him more than 100 times in the Penn State locker room, at the Sandusky home, and in a hotel in Pasadena, Calif, where Weaver and the Sandusky family stayed while on a trip to the Rose Bowl.
“We went to a professional football game, and (Sandusky and I) left early and went back to the hotel. And he performed oral sex on me in the hotel,” Weaver said.
Weaver said that when he was 14, he moved away from the State College area to get away from Sandusky.
Weaver has filed a civil suit against Sandusky, Penn State and the Second Mile, alleging that the institutions could have done more to stop the abuse.
Friday night, the jury found Sandusky guilty of 45 counts of child sexual abuse.
He faces hundreds of years in prison.
