Why Syracuse Isn't Penn State Like Sandusky, Fine had deep roots in the community. Like Sandusky, he spent plenty of time around young boys; for instance, he coached every summer at Syracuse's basketball camp. Fine's two accusers were stepbrothers who had been Syracuse ball boys during their teens. One of them, Bobby Davis, 40, said that Fine had abused him from the seventh grade until he was 27. Within 10 days of the ESPN article, Fine had been fired by the university. In the meantime, two more accusers came forward. It also emerged that The Syracuse Post-Standard had investigated Davis's charges in 2003, but had not written an article. The university had learned of the charges in 2005; it kept the information to itself. Boeheim, for his part, had issued a vehement defense of his assistant - "It's a bunch of a thousand lies," he told ESPN - but backpedaled after Fine was fired. In the heat of the moment, it was easy enough to assume that what had happened at Penn State had also happened at Syracuse: that the university - and the larger community, which lived and breathed Syracuse basketball - had entered into a conspiracy of silence. When I wrote a column about Fine last year, I essentially accused The Post-Standard and the school of covering up the allegations. It's now 11 months later. Sandusky is behind bars, as he should be. And Bernie Fine? Although a grand jury is still investigating, it is unlikely that charges will ever be brought. Two of Fine's accusers have recanted. One of them admitted that Davis had put him up to it. Serious questions have also been raised about a third accuser, Mike Lang, Davis's stepbrother, who had always denied that he had been abused by Fine - until the Sandusky story broke. The refusal of The Post-Standard to publish an article about Davis's allegations - charges it could never corroborate - now looks like responsible journalism rather than a dereliction of duty. The university hired the law firm of Paul Weiss to review its actions in 2005. The firm concluded that while the university had made mistakes, it had investigated Davis's allegations diligently and had come to the same conclusion as the newspaper: there was simply no proof. With the passage of time, ESPN is the one that appears to have acted irresponsibly (although the network disagrees with this assessment) - along with the rest of us who piled on. In a recent New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell described the dynamics that allowed Sandusky to get away with it for so long. "A pedophile," he wrote, "is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving and charming the adults responsible for those children." That is one reason, he concluded, that adults can be reluctant to go to the police; they have a hard time believing that their charming friend could be a child molester. As Gladwell put it to me in an e-mail, "These guys are so slippery - and the nature of the evidence so subjective - that it is much harder than people realize to make a definitive diagnosis." But there is another reason as well. What if they're wrong? What if it turns out that the accuser is lying? What happens then? In the public mind, pedophilia is such a heinous crime that it has become almost impossible to recover from a false accusation. And people realize that. "It is the enormity of the crime," says Gladwell, that weighs on people. They want to be sure, but it's hard to be sure. In Bernie Fine's case, the accusation alone cost him his job and his reputation. The chances of him ever coaching again at the college level are close to nil. The charges will cling to him for the rest of his life. Earlier this week, we saw the release of thousands of pages of documents detailing 20 years of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. They document what The Times called "a corrosive culture of secrecy," that allowed pedophilia to exist within its ranks with virtually no consequences. They are a painful reminder of the many decades our culture refused to confront child abusers squarely. Today we're all sensitized to the damage that child sexual abuse can do. That is all to the good. But as long as an accusation alone can be ruinous, there will always be some reluctance to report a suspected child molester. What the Bernie Fine case really shows is not how far we've come, but how much further we have to go.