No one will ever confuse me with being Josh Pastner’s biggest fan. After a 2021 ACC Title, an NCAA appearance, and coaching his players Moses Wright (ACC POY) and Jose Alvarado (ACC Defensive POY) to the two biggest individual ACC awards, I had to eat some crow.
Now Josh Pastner’s get his final vindication. Accused of sexual assault by his former friend Ron Bell, a ruling came in on Monday per this ESPN article.
Ron Bell, a former friend of Pastner’s, was convicted Monday on six misdemeanor counts: two counts of solicitation of influencing a witness, two counts of attempted tampering with a witness, false information and facilitation of fraud, scheme and practice.
There were few if any people that actually believed there was any truth to this story as Ron Bell was shown to an unreliable witness from the very beginning.
I’m genuinely happy for Pastner, that he can officially have this episode behind him. It undoubtedly caused him tremendous, stress when his only mistake was in choosing a bad friend.
2021 saw Pastner vindicated in many ways – from his coaching ability to his character.
His tenure seems to have reached a point of a reset, and as I said in my eating crow article.
What he does following this season -who knows? He definitely has earned more time to see if the 2020-2021 season was just a one off year or the foundation of something more.
