A committee of Penn State trustees has given the university's mediators authority this week to begin taking firm settlement offers to victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Jerry Sandusky.
Nittany Lion Shrine at Penn State University
Michael Rozen, a principal in the firm that's leading the talks on behalf of the university, said Tuesday evening this marks the first time he and partner Ken Feinberg can go to plaintiffs with monetary offers that carry the weight of board approval.
Rozen said he and Feinberg have started having those discussions with some plaintiffs already, and hope to extend offers to all 30 over the next several weeks.
Last fall, Penn State trustees gave its legal sub-committee the authority to oversee Feinberg and Rozen's negotiations.
The committee's latest green light - apparently given Monday via a conference call - means the talks have hit an advanced stage. The negotiations have been complicated and sensitive, attorneys have said.
However, Rozen cautioned no settlements will be finalized yet, even where there is a quick agreement to proposed damages.
That's because, he explained, in the interest of gaining "global peace" trustees will want to be assured that this process will result in the closure of at least a vast majority of the cases before they complete agreements with any one victim.
In addition, Rozen said, there would be "a number of other steps that need to be pursued and gone through."
Depending on the case, he said, that could mean anything from additional fact-finding about the specifics of the alleged assaults to discussions of non-monetary terms intended to ensure a Sandusky-like scandal never happens again.
Two plaintiffs lawyers reached today declined to discuss the status of their negotiations publicly, but said that they agreed with Rozen's description of the process.
Immediately after Sandusky's June 2012 conviction on 45 criminal counts, Penn State President Rodney Erickson said the university would launch a private process through which it hoped to settle any civil claims arising from Sandusky's acts.
That process has now yielded claims from 30 different men, Rozen said, all of whom allege that they were the victims of some form of sexual abuse at the hands of Sandusky, the once-celebrated defensive coordinator for Joe Paterno's football teams.
The cases now on the table date back to the 1970s, meaning several of the victims' claims have exceeded the state's statute of limitations for civil claims.
Even so, Penn State's openness to settle, Erickson and trustees have said, is an important part of coming to terms with significant mistakes made along the way and doing "its part to help victims continue their path forward."
Though neither Feinberg nor Rozen have ever said that they are operating under an aggregate dollar cap, based on other mass tort sexual abuse settlements, damages here could easily run into the tens of millions of dollars.
University officials have expressed confidence that insurance policies will cover the lion's share of the damages, though other pots of money could be available from reserves at The Second Mile, Sandusky's youth charity, or future adjustments to planned capital spending at Penn State.