Attorney: Accusers have 'financial stake' in case against Sandusky

As Jerry Sandusky's sex abuse trial begins, authorities are reviewing emails and documents as they reportedly consider bringing more charges against former Penn State officials for allegedly concealing what they knew about his conduct. NBC's Michael Isikoff reports.

By Kim Kaplan, NBC News, and M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com

Updated at 1 p.m. ET: The attorney for former Penn State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky told jurors Monday that the young men who accused Sandusky of sexually abusing them did so for money.

Michael Isikoff and Tom Winter of NBC News contributed to this report by Kim Kaplan of NBC News and M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

Sandusky, 68, denies all 52 counts alleging he abused 10 boys over 15 years. Two grand jury reports accused him of having used his connection to the one of the nation's premier college football programs to "groom" the boys, whom he met through his Second Mile charity for troubled children.

A jury of seven women and five men heard opening statements in Centre County Court in Bellefonte, Pa., ending months of pretrial wrangling in the high-profile case that led to the firing of head coach Joe Paterno, who won more games than any other major college football coach in history, many of them with Sandusky at his side.

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Paterno died in January, a few weeks after he was dismissed for having failed to report Sandusky's alleged abuse.

Full coverage of the Jerry Sandusky trial

Accompanied by his wife, Dottie, and his son Matt,?Sandusky arrived at the courthouse about 8 a.m. ET with his attorney, Joseph Amendola. He smiled briefly for the cameras but said nothing to reporters or to spectators who had lined up beginning about 5:30 a.m. for the few seats allotted to the public, PennLive.com reported.

Plea deal a long shot in Sandusky child sex-abuse case

"Jerry Sandusky has always said that he is innocent,"?Amendola said in his opening statement, noting that as long ago as 1998, local prosecutors had declined to bring charges against Sandusky.

He suggested that the eight alleged victims who are expected to testify were already troubled as youths, saying they knew Sandusky in the first place only because teachers and government agencies had referred them to Second Mile because "they had issues."

"You saw those eight photos," Amendola said, referring to photographs of the eight accusers as young boys that the prosecution had presented in its opening statement

"Cute kids ? why would they lie?" Amendola asked. "Folks, I don't know, when it comes to money ... the evidence is going to show that six of these eight young men who are going to testify have sued.

"The evidence will show these young men have a financial interest in this," he said. "The testimony is going to be awful, but that doesn't make it true, and that's the bottom line."

(Although the men are being identified by name in court, NBC News and msnbc.com do not identify the victims of alleged sexual assaults.)

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But in his opening statement earlier in the morning, Joseph McGettigan, the deputy state attorney general who is leading the prosecution, said the case is about "systematic behavior by a predator."

McGettigan told the jurors that they would be hearing from the alleged victims. All of them are now adults, but he asked the jurors to "bring your insight (and) understanding of the way children experience things and react to things."

"They were boys. They didn't understand why this happened to them," he said.?

One of the alleged victims, McGettigan said, will describe abuse that began when he was 11 years old.

"He was so innocent he wasn't even sure what a part of a man's body should look like and whether it should be touching him," McGettigan said.

McGettigan also indicated that prosecutors would call Michael McQueary to testify, answering one of the key pretrial riddles.

McQueary, a former Penn State assistant coach, told a grand jury that he witnessed Sandusky assaulting a boy in a shower in a Penn State locker room and that he told Paterno about the incident.

But McQueary's accounts of the incident have varied. For example, he testified that he was certain that the incident took place in March 2002 and that he immediately reported it to university officials. But the prosecution says it occurred in February 2001 ? more than a year earlier ? a discrepancy the defense is sure to highlight.

Amendola said he didn't think McQueary had lied. Instead, he said, "what we think is that he saw something and made assumptions."

"Why do people lie? Maybe Mike McQueary got pushed into a corner or something, though we'll hear different versions from him," he said.

The jury's composition reflects the area's strong connection to Penn State, which dominates life and culture in the nearby city of State College. It includes a Penn State senior, a retired professor and a woman who's been a football season ticket holder since the 1970s. The woman's husband also works for the medical group where the father of a key witness, Mike McQueary, previously worked.

Jerry Sandusky trial: Many jurors have Penn State ties

Judge John Cleland, who was brought in to oversee the trial after all of the local judges recused themselves, said the jury wouldn't be sequestered.

Veteran judge sits at center of Sandusky storm

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