Pennsylvania State University's tab for the Sandusky case: $3.2 million

Pennsylvania State University has incurred nearly $3.2 million in legal, consultant, and public relations fees as a result of the case against its former assistant football coach charged with molesting boys, the university said Monday.

A small portion of the cost is expected to be recovered through insurance policies, the university said. The rest will be covered with money other than tuition, taxpayer money, or alumni donations, the school said. The university said the fees would be covered by interest on a repaid loan and an athletic project that it maintains is not taxpayer money.

Included in the $3.2 million is $1.43 million for the school's internal investigation headed by Judge Louis Freeh after Jerry Sandusky's grand jury indictment on child sex-abuse charges in November. That breaks down to $1.1 million for Freeh's law firm - Freeh, Sporkin & Sullivan, of Wilmington, Washington, and New York - and $283,000 for public relations work for Freeh connected to the investigation, a university spokesman said. An additional $500,000 went to the Ketchum public relations firm of New York for crisis management for the board of trustees.

The university also rang up a $210,000 bill for the legal defense of its suspended athletic director Tim Curley and former senior vice president Gary Schultz, both charged with perjury and failure to report a 2002 incident of Sandusky's allegedly molesting a boy in a campus shower. That amount also includes legal coverage for former president Graham B. Spanier, who has not been charged in the case but had to appear before the grand jury.

The cost figures - covering expenditures through Dec. 31 - were posted on a website the university launched Monday evening to follow through with its promise of being more open with information. There was no information on how much the university has spent on the case since December.

"It's a work in progress," university spokesman Bill Mahon wrote in an e-mail. "The site will expand over time to include additional information."

The site - www.openness.psu.edu - also includes employment contracts for president Rodney Erickson, football coach Bill O'Brien, and acting athletic director David M. Joyner. Details of those contracts, including Erickson's annual base salary of $515,000, had been previously released.