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Howard Eskin asks Ed Rendell about Jerry Sandusky child-abuse case

The question was if there were parallels to Roger Goodell's handling of the Ray Rice scandal.

Last week, Ed Rendell ripped Roger Goodell, saying the NFL commissioner knew, or should have known, about incriminating evidence in the Ray Rice domestic-abuse scandal.

Today, Howard Eskin turned the tables and asked the ex-governor if he knew, or should have known, about incriminating evidence in the Jerry Sandusky child-abuse scandal.

First, Rendell reaffirmed that he thought Goodell lied about not knowing of anyone at the NFL seeing a tape showing Rice, then a running back with the Baltimore Ravens, knocking out financee Janay Parker in an elevator at the Revel casino in Atlantic City.

Goodell said he never saw the footage until it was released on Sept. 8 to the public by gossip-news site TMZ.

"Yeah, it defies belief to say that he's telling the truth," Rendell told Eskin on SportsRadio 94 WIP. "First of all, it's clear the NFL got the tape. ... The head of NFL security is my former state police chief when I was governor, Jeffrey Miller. ....  There's no question that if the tape came into the NFL, or even if it didn't, Jeffrey MIller would have gotten that tape. It wasn't like the tape was in Fort Knox or under guard. There's no question he would have said, 'Boss, you got to see this.' There's no question in my mind. There's no logical explanation that backs up what the commissioner is saying."

Then Eskin asked Rendell to explain the term plausible deniability.

"Let's assume for a moment," Rendell replied, " that they got the tape and that Jeffrey Miller or someone in the NFL organization came to the commissioner and said, 'Do you want to see this tape?' and they said, "It's pretty horrific,' and the commissioner, he said, 'No, I've made my decision. I don't want to see it. Because that way I have plausible deniability.'"

"But that's ludicrous!" Rendell continued. "Tell me what planet we're living on. The first tape shows them [Rice and Parker] coming out of an elevator. She's unconscious. He's dragging her by the hair. She was conscious when she went into the elevator. What did she do? Fall and hit her head on an elevator button? Clearly, everyone knew what happened in the elevator. So it's ludicrous to say the tape was in the office but 'I never looked at it.' That makes no sense. "

Then Eskin began drawing parallels between Goodell as the head of "a gigantic business," and Rendell as the governor of  a state, asking, "If you're in that situation, ... would you do the same thing, and how would you deal with that?"

Rendell said the owners were, ultimately, the board of directors and could fire Goodell, the CEO. Goodell should have been disciplined or even have disciplined himself, perhaps fining himself $5 milion, Rendell said.

Then Eskin brought up the case of convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky, which was allegedly covered up by officials at Penn State. The sports talker said some people have questioned how much Rendell knew, or should have known.

"You're the governor, you're on the board of trustees, so you are technically in the same situation, with the same person technically as the head of your security," Eskin said. "... Was there plausible deniability on your part with what the state had to know?"

In a lengthy reply, Rendell said the state police and the Penn State board of trustees were not informed for years, and that in occasional conversations with Joe Paterno, the head coach never broached the subject with Rendell.

Here's what Rendell said:

"Well, the problem is, no one told the board. First of all, although the governor has a seat on the board, and has four other appointments, I had a representative and I never attended a board meeting, number one. But more importantly than that, the Penn State officials never told the board about this, never told the board about it. First time the board learned about it is when it came out in public. That's the first time I learned about it.

" The state police," he continued, "has no jurisdiction in Penn State. Penn State has their own police force, and remember, even one step further, Penn State isn't a state institution. They're what's called a state-related institution. So, if the board had been informed about this, and one of my four or five appointees had brought the situation to my attention, what I would have done is I would have called [Penn State] president Graham Spanier and said, 'Look, turn this guy over to the police as fast as you can. Make a public show of it, because you want to make it clear that you're acting to prevent further instances of child abuse. '"

Rendell went on to say: "Joe Paterno and I would talk three or four times a year. He would call me if he saw something in the papers that I was taking it on the chin, and I would call him about the team on occasion, and I wish Joe Paterno, the first time he heard that stuff, had called me, I would have said, 'Joe, take it to the prosecutor's office right now, because pedophiles are recidivists, they're the ultimate recidivists, and you want to stop this guy before he hurts anybody else.'

"Yeah, but didn't the state police know? At one time ... " Eskin said.

"Those were the campus police," Rendell said.

"Where there's smoke there's fire, and it went on for, what, ten years? Didn't the state police know about that?" Eskin persisted.

"What you're talking about Howard is one of the very first incidents that was turned over to the Penn State police force. And I think they turned it over to their administration. ... Actually, I take it back, the first case , you remember, was turned over to the Center County district attorney, the fellow who disappeared. And he decided not to prosecute because he said there wasn't enough corroborating evidence."

" You believe there was a coverup, but in case of using that term plausible deniability, you're telling me it never got to your level," Eskin said.

"It never got to anyone on the state police level, " Rendell said, "because the  Penn State police did what they should. They saw a case. They turned it over to the local prosecutor. He didn't make it public, and later it was reported he decided  not to prosecute because there wasn't any corroborating evidence. ... That was the only time there was any information taken to the outside. The rest of the time it was held within the Penn State family, or the Penn State administration."

"Again," Rendell continued, "had the Penn State police turned it over to the state police, it might have had a different trajectory. I wasn't governor at the time, but it might have had a different trajectory even then."

Tom Ridge was governor of Pennsylvnia in 1998, when Center County prosecutor Ray Gricar declined to prosecute Sandusky. Rendell served as governor from January 2003 to January 2011. Jerry Sandusky, former Penn State assistant coach and founder of Second Mille, a nonprofit benefitting underprivileged children, was first indicted on child-abuse charges in November 2011, following a two-year grand jury investigation. That December, more counts were added.

Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts in June 2012 and sentenced to 60 years in prison that October.

Current Gov. Tom Corbett, who was state attorney general from 2005 to 2011 and a candidate for governor in 2010,  was basically absolved of any political misconduct related to the Sandusky case in a report released in June by State Attorney General Kathleen Kane. The report, however, concluded that investigators missed opportunities to bring charges sooner because they failed to be aggressive enough.

The Eskin-Rendell interview can be heard in its entirety here.

Contact staff writer Peter Mucha at 215-854-4342 or pmucha@phillynews.com. Follow @petemucha on Twitter.