 Abuse in the News
Theo Fleury claims sexual abuse by junior hockey coach in new bookby Dirk Hoag on Oct 9, 2009 10:24 AM EDTWhat many have long suspected, is finally coming to light today. In his new autobiography, Playing With Fire, longtime NHL star Theo Fleury claims to have been sexually abused by his junior hockey coach Graham James. Back in 1998 I was fortunate enough to cover Games 1 & 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals in Detroit, and during those days, Sheldon Kennedy had just brought his story of sexual abuse by James to public attention. I observed at his press conference as he talked about raising awareness for the issues that abused teens face; isolation & fear of ridicule, which often leads to substance abuse and anger management problems in adulthood. It was a sad tale, but Kennedy gamely stood in the spotlight to tell it, and helped send James to prison for his crimes.  Many had long thought that Fleury, who was a teammate of Sheldon's in junior and experienced many of the same off-ice problems that Kennedy did, was also a likely victim. As Eric Francis writes in today's Calgary Sun: "While the horrific abuse of trust Kennedy bravely told police of stemmed from a relationship that started when he first met James at age 14, Fleury's introduction to James came at a similar age, leading up to his one-year stint under James in 1984, when he joined the Moose Jaw Warriors as a 16-year-old." Kennedy played on the same team in 1984-85 and told the Sun yesterday he knew Fleury was also a victim. "I knew, but it wasn't my place to say anything," said Kennedy, who lives in Calgary and spearheads several programs aimed at curbing abuse. "I made a commitment to myself I wasn't blowing the whistle on anybody. "I did know deep down Theo was going to have to deal with it one way or another." Sheldon's book,Why I Didn't Say Anything: The Sheldon Kennedy Story, is an absolutely heartbreaking read; as a teenager he was victimized by the leading authority figure in his life, and feared the reaction from his teammates. Let's face it, whether it was abuse or not, athletes in general (and young hockey players in particular) typically have a great deal of homophobia in mind when they hear of such things, and wonder to what extent the victim "went along with it". Such thinking makes guys in Kennedy's situation even more isolated from those he should be able to trust. We can only wish the best of luck to Theo in the months ahead; surely getting these personal demons out into the open will help him, and others down the road. And sadly enough, we know there are others. Again, from Francis: "Shortly after being sentenced in early 1997, James called the Sun with hopes the paper would slam Don Cherry for suggesting on Coach's Corner James be "drawn and quartered" for what he did to innocent teens. When asked if there were more victims, James, now 55 and believed to be living in Montreal, intimated he "loved many people" -- a chilling response suggesting several other players had been abused." It just makes your skin crawl, doesn't it? Scientists find way to block fearful memoriesBy Julie Steenhuysen, Posted 2009/12/09 at 6:35 pm ESTCHICAGO, Dec. 9, 2009 (Reuters) — U.S. researchers have found a drug-free way to block fearful memories, opening up the possibility of new treatment approaches for problems such as post traumatic stress disorder, they reported on Wednesday. The findings in people build on studies in rats that showed that reactivating a memory -- by showing people objects that stimulate the fearful memory -- opens up a specific time window in which the memory can be edited before it is stored again.
"Before memories are stored, there is a period where they are susceptible to being disrupted," said Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, whose study appears in the journal Nature. Earlier studies have shown that drugs can be used to block fearful memories, but the results were not long lasting. Phelps and colleagues based their studies on findings in rats that showed that old memories can be changed or reconsolidated, but only during a specific window time after the rat is reminded of the fearful memory.
That window of susceptibility is typically between 10 minutes after re-exposure to the object to 6 hours later, when the memory stored once again in the brain. The researchers applied these findings to people in a lab setting. First, they created a fearful memory by showing the volunteers a blue square, and then delivering a mild shock. Once they had created the fear memory, they simply showed a blue square, which reminded them of the fear memory. The team waited 10 minutes and then started a training period where the volunteers were repeatedly exposed to the blue square without a shock.
Phelps said simply delaying the exposure training so that it falls within a period during which the memory is susceptible to being edited made a lasting difference in the ability to block the fear memory. A second group that was exposed to the blue square without the 10-minute waiting period, continued to show fear when exposed to the blue square. When they brought people back a year later, the group that got the training showed no fear response -- tracked by changes in the skin -- when exposed to the blue square, while other volunteers continued to have a fear response. Phelps said the important aspect of the study is the time window.
"What we think is happening is because we did it at the right time, you are restoring the memory as safe as opposed to just creating a new memory that competes with the old memory," Phelps said. She said the findings are the first of their type in humans, and she cautioned that the findings cannot be immediately applied to people with severe anxiety problems, such as post traumatic stress disorder. "We did a blue square with a mild shock," she said. "Normal fear memories are way more complex than that." But she said, the findings do open up the possibility of new training methods that can be studied to help people overcome difficult memories. "It's really exciting for the potential of treating these disorders. It's just a ways away," Phelps said. The study was supported through a grant by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health. (Editing by Anthony Boadle)
The state Supreme Court [of New Jersey] on Thursday set out a two-stage analysis that trial judges must conduct to decide whether and for how long the two-year statute of limitations in child sexual abuse suits can be tolled. The formula, which includes objective and subjective elements, will determine whether a Morris County man can pursue a suit, filed in 2004, alleging that his stepfather sexually assaulted him multiple times from 1987 and 1990, when he was between ages 10 to 12.
Superior Judge David Rand dismissed the suit as time-barred, but the Appellate Division reversed, saying the plaintiff did not appreciate that the abuse caused his emotional injuries until undergoing psychotherapy in 2002 and thus that the complaint was filed within two years of accrual of the cause of action. In Thursday's ruling, R L. v. Voytac, A-61-08, Justice John Wallace Jr. said both lower courts erred. Rand did not conduct a thorough enough inquiry into when the plaintiff should have known that the root of his problems lay with the alleged sexual abuse, which the stepfather, Kenneth Voytac, denies.
And the Appellate Division mistakenly conflated two provisions in the Child Sexual Abuse Act. An action for child sex abuse must be filed within two years after "the reasonable discovery of the injury and its casual relationship to the act of sexual abuse" but the limitations period may be tolled because of the plaintiff's "mental state, duress by the defendant, or any other equitable grounds," the act says. "We conclude that pursuant to the Act, the trial court must first determine when a reasonable person subjected to childhood abuse would discover that the defendant's conduct caused him or her injury. That is an objective test," wrote Wallace. "If that period is more than two years prior to the filing of the complaint, then the court must next determine whether the statute should be tolled because of 'the mental state, duress by the defendant, or any other equitable grounds.'"
The justices remanded the case for that analysis and said that since Rand made several factual and credibility findings, another judge should handle it. Voytac's lawyer, William Johnson, says he and his client are pleased with the ruling. "The Court correctly interpreted the act as saying there is an objective standard to be applied when determining when the cause of action accrued," says Johnson, of Dover's Johnson & Johnson. "The Appellate Division had applied a subjective standard." R.L.'s lawyer, Victor Rotolo, who runs his own firm in Lebanon, says he relishes retrying the case. "I have to go back to the beginning, but that's fine," he says. "The ruling gives plaintiffs a clear roadmap as to what they have to do." Copyright 2009. Incisive Media US Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. New Jersey Law Journal. (As we note in our book, abusers often give drugs or other substances to their victims to keep them quiet and to continue the abuse. ~ Marie & Marlene) The former president of Archbishop Ryan High School faces up to 24 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing more than $900,000 from the school and his friars order, using some of the money to pay off a former student he is accused of sexually molesting. The Rev. Charles Newman, 58, accused of taking the money from the school and his order of Franciscan friars, entered his guilty plea on felony forgery and theft charges. He was president of the school from July 2002 to Nov. 20, 2003, when he was fired. Sentencing has been set for May 8.
Newman had been accused of giving $54,000 of the money to a former student, Arthur Baselice 3d, from 2002 to 2003. Newman did not face criminal charges on the sexual-abuse allegation because the complaint came to light after the statute of limitations on such cases had expired. Baselice's father told a grand jury that his son, a 1996 Ryan graduate, said that Newman repeatedly sexually abused him and introduced him to illegal, addictive drugs during his junior and senior years.The younger Baselice, of Gloucester County, died Nov. 30, 2006, of a drug overdose. He was 28. © Copyright | Philly Online, LLC. The helpless behavior that is commonly linked to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is preceded by stress-related losses of synapses—microscopic connections between brain cells—in the brain’s hippocampal region, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report in Biological Psychiatry.
The team used a six-day treatment with the antidepressant desipramine to reverse helpless behavior and restore hippocampal synapses in rats. “In clinical practice, the main problem with antidepressants is that they require weeks to exert their effect,” said lead scientist on the project Tibor Hajszan, M.D., associate research scientist in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at Yale School of Medicine. “Because there are ways to restore these lost hippocampal synapses in as little as hours or even minutes, our laboratory is currently testing rapid-acting antidepressants that could provide immediate relief from depressive symptoms.”
Mental health disorders, including depression, are rapidly becoming the second largest public health problem, said Hajszan. “This is magnified by the fact that current antidepressant drugs remain ineffective in the majority of patients,” he said. Researchers have suspected for years that changes in synapses may play a role in depression neurobiology. In this study, Hajszan and his team studied helpless behavior in rats and used electron microscopy to analyze directly what happens to hippocampal synapses in the presence or absence of helpless behavior.
“Because synapses have the potential for rapid response, synapse loss probably underlies the rapid deterioration of mood that depressed patients sometimes experience,” said Hajszan. “Thus, it is possible to elevate mood rapidly by generating new hippocampal synapses, which is attainable by certain drugs we are testing.”
Other authors on the study included Antonia Dow, Jennifer L. Warner-Schmidt, Klara Szigeti-Buck, Nermin L. Sallam, Arpad Parducz, Csaba Leranth and Ronald S. Duman. (As we note in our book, a brain can change as a consequence of abuse. ~ Marie & Marlene) For years, psychiatrists have known that children who are abused or neglected run a high risk of developing mental problems later in life, from anxiety and depression to substance abuse and suicide. The connection is not surprising, but it raises a crucial scientific question: Does the abuse cause biological changes that may increase the risk for these problems?
Over the past decade or so, researchers at McGill University in Montreal, led by Michael Meaney, have shown that affectionate mothering alters the expression of genes in animals, allowing them to dampen their physiological response to stress. These biological buffers are then passed on to the next generation: rodents and nonhuman primates biologically primed to handle stress tend to be more nurturing to their own offspring, Dr. Meaney and other researchers have found.
Now, for the first time, they have direct evidence that the same system is at work in humans. In a study of people who committed suicide published Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers in Montreal report that people who were abused or neglected as children showed genetic alterations that likely made them more biologically sensitive to stress. The findings help clarify the biology behind the wounds of a difficult childhood and hint at what constitutes resilience in those able to shake off such wounds. The study “extends the animal work on the regulation of stress to humans in a dramatic way,” Jaak Panksepp, an adjunct professor at Washington State University who was not involved in the research, wrote in an e-mail message. He added that the study “suggests pathways that have promoted the psychic pain that makes life intolerable,” and continued, “It’s a wonderful example of how the study of animal models of emotional resilience can lead the way to understanding human vicissitudes.”
In the study, scientists at McGill and the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences compared the brains of 12 people who had committed suicide and who had had difficult childhoods with 12 people who had committed suicide and who had not suffered abuse or neglect as children. The scientists determined the nature of the subjects’ upbringing by doing extensive interviews with next of kin, as well as investigating medical records. The brains are preserved at Douglas Hospital in Montreal as part of the Quebec Suicide Brain Bank, a program founded by McGill researchers to promote suicide studies that receives brain donations from around the province. When people are under stress, the hormone cortisol circulates widely, putting the body on high alert. One way the brain reduces this physical anxiety is to make receptors on brain cells that help clear the cortisol, inhibiting the distress and protecting neurons from extended exposure to the hormone, which can be damaging.
The researchers found that the genes that code for these receptors were about 40 percent less active in people who had been abused as children than in those who had not. The scientists found the same striking differences between the abused group and the brains of 12 control subjects, who had not been abused and who died from causes other than suicide. “It is good evidence that the same systems are at work in humans that we have seen in other animals,” said Patrick McGowan, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Meaney’s lab at McGill and the lead author of the study. His co-authors, along with Dr. Meaney, were Aya Sasaki, Ana C. D’Alessio, Sergiy Dymov, Benoît Labonté and Moshe Szyf, all of McGill, and Dr. Gustavo Turecki, a McGill researcher who leads the Brain Bank.
Because of individual differences in the genetic machinery that regulates stress response, experts say, many people manage their distress despite awful childhoods. Others may find solace in other people, which helps them regulate the inevitable pain of living a full life. “The bottom line is that this is a terrific line of work, but there is a very long way to go either to understand the effects of early experience or the causes of mental disorders,” Dr. Steven Hyman, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard, wrote in an e-mail message.
Related link: In humans, childhood abuse alters HPA stress responses and increases the risk of suicide. See, Epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor in human brain associates with childhood abuse. Nature Neuroscience 12, 342-348 (2009), Published online: 22 February 2009. (The problem of abuse knows no religious, cultural, or racial boundaries. ~ Marie & Marlene) Joel Engelman and Joe Diangelo are driving through their old Brooklyn neighborhood. Williamsburg is a place from another time and country. The shop signs are in Hebrew. The men scurry by in long black coats; their hair hangs in corkscrew curls. Married women wear wigs to cover their heads. Engelman and Diangelo haven't been here in years. They just met a few weeks ago, but as they begin swapping stories and the names of family members, they realize they have a lot in common. Both men are in their 20s, both were raised as strict Hasidic Jews, and both fled their upbringing for the same reason.
"Are you ready for this?" Engelman asks Diangelo, glancing at his friend in the back seat.
"Yeah," Diangelo says, his breath quickening. "Yeah, I'll do it, just a quick pass by."
Diangelo grows quiet as we approach a nondescript brownstone building: a synagogue.
"See the Hebrew sign?" he says, pointing. "You go downstairs, and that's where the mikvah is."
The mikvah is a bathhouse usually used by women for ritual cleansing. But in some Hasidic communities, like this one, fathers bring their young sons on Friday afternoons before Shabbat begins. Twenty-one years ago, when he was 7, Diangelo recalls going to the mikvah with his father to find the place packed with naked men and boys. "And I was in the tub, and I had my back turned, and somebody raped me while I was in the water," he says. He takes a shaky breath. "And I didn't know what happened. I couldn't make sense of it, really."
Diangelo says he never saw the man who abused him. These days, monitors are posted by the bath to stop any sexual activity. But back then, the boy was on his own. He told no one but began refusing to go to the mikvah. He left Orthodox Judaism when he was 17. He changed his name from Joel Deutsch and cut almost all ties with his family and friends. Now, Diangelo wears black leather and mascara. He plays in a rock band and takes refuge in the heavy-metal lyrics of Metallica. "There are so many songs, you know. They have a latest song, which is called 'Broken, Beaten & Scarred,' and one of the verses is: 'They scratched me, they scraped me, they cut and raped me.' " He laughs wearily. "And that's my life right there. When I listen to it, it gives me strength."
Allegations Of Abuse For these two men, this is a tour through aching secrets and violent memories. Diangelo and Engelman are unusual because they let their names be used. But they believe that sexual abuse is woven throughout this Hasidic community. For Engelman, the loss of innocence came at school. "This is it, right here," he says. Engelman parks his car across from the United Talmudical Academy, a hulking building on a desolate street. This was the yeshiva, or Jewish boys' school, that Engelman attended. Engelman says he was 8 years old, sitting in Hebrew class one day, when he was called to the principal's office. When he arrived, he says, Rabbi Avrohom Reichman told him to close the door.
"He motioned for me to get on his lap, and as soon as I got on the chair, he would swivel the chair from right to left, continuously," Engelman says. "Then he would start touching me while talking to me. He would start at my shoulders and work his way down to my genitals." Engelman says this occurred twice a week for two months. He told no one for more than a decade. Reichman was, after all, a revered rabbi. Four years ago, he told his parents. And a year ago, when he heard that Reichman had allegedly abused several other boys, they confronted Reichman. When the school heard about it, they gave the rabbi a polygraph. "He failed miserably," Engelman says. "So they told me, 'This guy is gone. This guy has to go.' "
But a few weeks later, a religious leader from the school approached Engelman's mother, Pearl. He posed an astonishing question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad was the molestation? She was speechless. Then she says, the man continued, " 'We found out there was no skin-to-skin contact, that it was through clothing.' So he's telling me, 'On a scale of 1 to 10, this was maybe a 2 or a 3, so what's the big fuss?'" The school hired Reichman back. That was in July 2008 — one week after Joel Engelmen turned 23 and could no longer bring a criminal or civil case against the rabbi.
An Open Secret Reichman and school officials declined to be interviewed for this story. But Rabbi David Niederman, who heads the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, says the school did its due diligence. He says the allegation was thoroughly investigated by an independent committee of lay people and rabbis. "I'm convinced that they made a serious investigation," he says. "They felt that it's not credible." Now Engelman has filed a long-shot civil suit against Reichman and the school, claiming they broke an oral contract. Reichman's attorney, Jacob Laufer, says the lawsuit is baseless and that the community is fully behind the rabbi. "Even after these accusations were publicly made," he says, "the parents continue to compete among themselves for the opportunity to have their children be educated by Rabbi Reichman."
The Reichman case is not isolated. Four ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn have been sued or arrested for abusing boys in the past three years. That's a tiny fraction of the actual abuse, says Hella Winston, author of Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. She says that in researching her book, she encountered dozens of alleged victims who told her sexual abuse is an open secret in the Hasidic community. But the community is so insulated and the rabbis are so powerful that few dare to come forward. "If I become known as an informer, then people also won't want to have anything to do with my family," she explains. "They won't want to marry my children, won't want to give me a job. This is the fear."
But more and more accusations against rabbis have begun to circulate. Last August, politician and radio talk show host Dov Hikind devoted an hourlong program to sexual abuse. He interviewed Pearl Engelman, who spoke under an alias, about her son's case. The calls flooded in. Hikind, who is an Orthodox Jew himself, represents this area in the New York Assembly. He says after the show, people started showing up at his office with their stories. "Fifty, 60, 70 people," he says, "but you got to remember for each person who comes forward, God only knows how many people are not coming forward."
Ongoing Investigations Hikind refuses to release the names of alleged perpetrators, although he is working with the district attorney's office. He says the people who confided in him are afraid to go public, which creates a perfect situation for abusers. "If you're a pedophile, the best place for you to come to are some of the Jewish communities," he says. "Why? Because you can be a pedophile and no one's going to do anything. Even if they catch you, you'll get away with it." "To me, it does not make sense," says Niederman, of the United Jewish Organizations, "that so many people have been violated and for so many years they have been quiet. Something does not add up. It's being blown out of proportion — big time."
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes says he has 10 active sexual abuse cases involving Orthodox Jews — including a school principal who was recently arrested on a lead from Hikind. And Hynes says there could be many more. Yeshivas are private schools, which means they don't have to report accusations of sexual abuse to civil authorities. "I've got no way to know if there's a pattern of concealing the conduct," he says. Hynes says the Jewish leaders — like Catholic bishops — try to handle these affairs internally, through a rabbinical court. It's a practice that infuriates him. "You have no business taking these cases to religious tribunals," Hynes says. "They are either civil or criminal in nature. Or both. Your obligation is to bring these allegations to us and let us conduct the investigation."
Hynes says he's trying to work out a memorandum of understanding with the rabbis, in which they promise to bring the prosecutor every allegation of abuse. Pearl Engelman is skeptical: The rabbis have hardly been forthcoming in her son's case. Still, she loves her community and worries these allegations have tarnished it. "This is a community of the most wonderful people, hardworking people who lead righteous lives," she says. "And it's just a few corrupt people who give us a bad taint." Her son Joel isn't so sure it's that few. Anyway, for him, any remedies come too late.
"Pretty much, I left my childhood here," he says. "After I left here, I had a totally different picture of school, religion and life." But Engelman hopes that his story will shine a light on the secret and, perhaps, protect the next generation of children in this community.
Joel Engelman, featured in the story, is a co founder of Survivors for Justice, an organization formed by vicitms of sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community. A confidential hotline is available. Responding to numerous requests, CinemaSalem will reprise the award-winning documentary film about how the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal impacted one Salem family. "Hand of God", directed and produced by Salem native, Joe Cultrera, will screen at the theater January 30-February 5 in the new 20-seat Screening Room.
The film tells the story of Joe's brother, Paul Cultrera, who through courage and persistence, over a 30-year struggle, survived abuse as a child, and worked to confront the church and expose the scandal ten years before the Boston Globe reported on widespread and recurring abuse in the Boston Diocese. The 96-minute film sold out four shows at CinemaSalem in the summer and fall of 2006, and interest in the film has remained high, according to CinemaSalem co-owner, Paul Van Ness. "Several times a month, people ask us to screen "Hand of God". I think this story of betrayal and courage in our own backyard really hits home for people."
"Hand of God" has won numerous awards at film festivals throughout the world, including the Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Kansas, Tupelo and S.N.O.B Film Festivals, Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Ashland Independent Film Festival and a Special Recognition Award at the Boston International Film Festival. The film was also featured on the PBS public affairs series, Frontline, where it became one of that program's most talked about shows.
The film garnered rave reviews from critics across the country. The Kansas City Star wrote, "(It's) quite possibly the most gripping and illuminating documentary ever made from the point of view of a sexual abuse victim...The film works not only as journalism but also as cinematic art." The Missoulian adds, "Hand of God is like a symphony that builds through a leisurely first movement, quietly foreshadows a coming tempest, then unleashes itself. And when that tempest comes, it is a fine and glorious example of speaking truth to power. Hand of God is exceptional documentary work."
Contacts: (As we note in our book, most abusers are well-known to the family and/or the victims. The so-called "stranger danger" problem is less common than the dangers existing from the perpetrators in the midst of the community. ~ Marie & Marlene) Two teenage boys told cops they endured years of sexual abuse at the hands of a Brooklyn high school principal who was arrested over the weekend, police said. Emanuel Yegutkin, 30, was suspended Sunday from Elite High School, a private Jewish school in Bensonhurst with mainly Russian-American students. Yegutkin forced a 17-year-old into lewd sex acts from the age of 7 to 14, cops said. He subjected a 19-year-old to five years of fondling, beginning when the teen was 12, police said. Neither child attended Elite, school officials said. "This has nothing to do with the school," said Elite High School Headmaster Tzvi Koff. "But we have to protect our students. He no longer has access to the school building and he is not part of our institution anymore."
The disgraced educator - who also worked in upstate Gilboa as a lifeguard at Oorah summer camp last year - was charged with endangering the welfare of a child and sexually abusing children for more than a four-month period, according to a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney's office. A message left at Yegutkin's Ocean Parkway home was not returned. Oorah Camp Director Elisha Lewenstein said Yegutkin came highly recommended. "We investigated him before we hired him and never had a complaint," Lewenstein said.
Yegutkin, a one-time rising star within the Orthodox Jewish community, lost a second prominent job yesterday: volunteer medic for the Flatbush Hatzoloh ambulance service. "If anybody in Hatzoloh is accused of any criminal issue, we suspend them until the issue is cleared up," Hatzoloh spokesman Heshey Jacob said. Yegutkin "suspended himself" when he was contacted yesterday, Jacob said. Yegutkin's arrest is the latest blow to Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish community. Since October, at least four Orthodox Jewish men in the borough have been charged with sexually abusing children. (As we note in our book, grooming is a technique perfected by abusers to gain their victims' confidence. ~ Marie & Marlene) A paedophile royal butler was jailed today for a minimum of six years after he admitted committing a string of sexual offences against young boys. Described by police as a "brilliant groomer", Paul Kidd, 55, of Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, even took one of his victims for tea with the Queen Mother. Kidd started grooming one of the boys when he was aged 12 as he met him as a patient on a hospital ward where he worked as a trainee nurse. Another was 14 years old when he first spoke to Kidd on the CB radio airwave, Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court heard.
The defendant was senior footman to the Queen Mother from 1979 to 1984 and previously worked as a royal butler to The Queen from 1977. Judge Mushtaq Khokhar told him: "You were someone who had influenced your victims to such an extent they were under your spell. "They would do anything you asked them to do. I regard you as someone who is dangerous and presents a risk to all the young people you may come across." He gave Kidd an indeterminate sentence and recommended that he remain in prison for at least six years for public protection until he could be considered for parole. A federal appeals court has permitted a lawsuit over alleged sexual abuse to proceed against the Vatican, creating potential liability for the seat of the Roman Catholic faith for the activities of Catholic clergy in the U.S. Monday's ruling, issued by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, marks the first time a court at so high a level has recognized that the Vatican could be liable for the negligence in sexual-abuse cases brought in the U.S.
The ruling is seen as a breakthrough by those allegedly abused by priests. Investigators and grand juries have found several instances where the church failed to report alleged abusers and covered up alleged misdeeds to protect them. Jeffrey S. Lena, the attorney for the Holy See, said he was not "presently inclined" to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision. It remains to be seen whether the Vatican, which is a sovereign state recognized by the U.S. government, will make further arguments that it is immune from U.S. civil proceeding.
Catholic dioceses in the U.S. have paid out at least $1.5 billion to alleged abuse victims, most of this since the scandal broke open nationwide in 2002. The appeals court found that the church government may be held liable for actions taken in the U.S. based on the Vatican's policies or directives. "What the court has allowed us to do is proceed against the Vatican for the conduct of the U.S. bishops because of the bishops' failure to ... report child abuse," said William F. McMurry, the attorney for three men who claim they were abused as children by priests in the Louisville, Ky., archdiocese. He is seeking class-action status in the district-court case.
The ruling marks the first time that a federal appeals court recognized that the Vatican could be liable under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a 1976 law that governs when a foreign nation or its agents can be sued, said Marci Hamilton, a constitutional-law scholar who is part of the legal team in the Louisville case."If someone can crack that barrier of immunity, it opens the door to other claims against the Catholic church," says Jonathan Levy, a Washington, D.C., attorney who represents concentration-camp survivors in a suit against numerous parties including the Vatican bank. The Vatican, in that case, prevailed in its claim of sovereign immunity.
Mr. Lena, the lawyer for the Holy See in the Louisville case, said Monday's ruling is a small step and one that is far from establishing whether Vatican policy contributed to thousands of incidents of abuse that have been alleged over several decades. "We're miles away from liability," he said. The ruling is "very incremental." One of the central pieces of evidence in the case is a 1962 memo, issued by the Vatican and disclosed by reporters in 2003, which directs Catholic bishops to keep silent about claims of sex abuse. The document was approved by Pope John the 23rd. Monday's ruling will allow the plaintiffs' case to proceed in U.S. District Court in Louisville. Among the legal questions yet to be decided in the case is whether U.S. bishops are employees of the Vatican, and whether they acted on the Holy See's orders. (As we note in our book, this article cites the repression so common to young male abuse victims. ~ Marie & Marlene) ...Father O’Brien is accused of molesting a former Fordham Prep student over a period of several years, starting when the alleged victim was a student at the high school from 1964 to 1966. The alleged victim, a 58-year-old who spoke at length to the paper on the condition of anonymity, said that the priest molested him on numerous occasions, including several of which he claims occurred during a trip through Europe with Father O’Brien and five other Prep students.
“I don’t know if I was raped or penetrated, but I was violated,” Father O’Brien’s accuser told the paper. “He would jump in the bed with me and I would just shut down, close my eyes and go somewhere else,” he said of the man he recalled as “a real father figure.” After the alleged incidents of sexual molestation, the now-middle aged man said he “just repressed it all,” even to the point that he allowed Father O’Brien to perform his marriage ceremony. The alleged victim also claims to have had an encounter with Father Drake in the Fordham University Seismic Observatory, next to Freeman Hall. Inside the observatory, Father Drake attempted to molest him: “I was literally running around in circles around this table to get away from him until I could escape.”
He repressed the memories until 1997, when he met a counselor for victims of clergy sex abuse who, he says, helped him go through the process of bringing his allegation to the attention of the University. “I was after an apology, some kind of an explanation to what had happened,” he said. According to a copy of a 1997 settlement available online, the ensuing lawsuit involving Father O’Brien was settled for $25,000. In addition to the Jesuit priest, the New York Province of the Society of Jesus, the Archdiocese of New York, Fordham University, and Fordham Prep were named in the settlement and released from any “past, alleged or actual, current and future liabilities.”
When the paper attempted to confirm the terms of the settlement by contacting the office of Rev. Thomas R. Slon, S.J., the executive assistant to the head of the New York Jesuits who spoke with the Times, he was unavailable for comment. Peter Feuerherd, a communications consultant for the Province who spoke with the paper, said he was not familiar enough with the situation to comment. In the Times article, Father Slon would neither confirm nor deny the terms of the 1997 settlement regarding Father O’Brien. Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, when asked by the paper to confirm the terms of the settlement, said the Archdiocese “could not find anything in the files.”
According to the anonymous accuser, the most emotional day of his life came when he met Father O’Brien again in 1997. At that meeting, Father O’Brien blamed his actions on alcohol abuse and would not apologize. “I wanted an admission of guilt,” the alleged victim told the paper. He says he was never concerned with taking the Jesuits down. “It’s [about] accountability,” he said. Two groups have accused Fordham University of harboring priests who were accused of sexual abuse. The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests and BishopAccountability.org provided the New York Times with documents detailing a settlement between the school and the Rev. Eugene O'Brien, a former principal of Fordham Prep, according to an article published on Oct. 21. In addition, Richard Cerick, a 53-year-old lawyer, claims he was raped by the Rev. Roy A. Drake in 1968. Drake lived in Murray-Weigel Hall until 2006, when he was transferred to a treatment center for troubled priests. Drake passed away at the center.
In the Times article, Cerick said he did not file a complaint with the school until he learned about Drake's whereabouts in 2005. "They allowed Father Drake, who lived and worked for decades on Fordham's campus after abusing me, to continue working and residing there," Cerick said in the article. "This is incomprehensible. The innocent deserve protection."
O'Brien served as principal and president of Fordham Prep from 1960 to 1979, during which time an unnamed student claimed he was molested, according to the Times. That case was settled in 1997 for $25,000 by the Archdiocese of New York, the Society of Jesus and Fordham University. A spokesman for the archdiocese said he was familiar with the claim brought by Cerick but could not comment on the terms of the 1997 settlement. A spokesman for the Jesuit order of New York also declined to comment. The Fordham University administration had not released an offical statement by presstime. A retired city cop bared his private pain Thursday, claiming he was molested by a popular Harlem priest who was recently bounced from the pulpit amid charges he fondled children for decades. Breaking nearly 30 years of silence, former NYPD Officer Eric Crumbley Sr. said Msgr. Wallace Harris baptized him, taught him - and tormented him. "I was sexually molested numerous times on various occasions," said Crumbley, 42. Crumbley said in an interview that the abuse started in 1979, when he was 13, and lasted until he was 16. The prominent monsignor, now 61, found excuse after excuse to grope him, said Crumbley, who has a second career as the pastor of the nondenominational Harlem Faith Center.
"Harris repeatedly manipulated seemingly innocent, everyday situations to his advantage to create any excuse to touch me improperly - more specifically, to fondle or to grab my genitals," Crumbley wrote in a letter sent yesterday to the New York Archdiocese. Harris could not be reached to respond to the allegations. Well-connected and well-respected, Harris delivered the invocation at Gov. Paterson's inauguration in March and coordinated Pope Benedict's April Mass at Yankee Stadium.
His devoted parishioners at the Church of St. Charles Borromeo were stunned when he was stripped of his priestly duties on Aug. 3. Two unidentified men had accused Harris of molesting them 20 years ago when he was a teacher at Cathedral Preparatory Seminary, an upper West Side high school. The Manhattan district attorney did not pursue the old charges because the five-year statute of limitations had expired. The identities of the two men who made those allegations - which Harris denied - were never made public.
Crumbley said he was not one of the two men. He is stepping forward now, he said, to help his healing process and to encourage other victims to speak out. "I'm not hiding behind anything," he said. "I say, 'I am a victim.'" Save for telling a few close confidants, Crumbley said, he kept the molestation a secret. "As a result, for years I have lived with intense anxiety, sleeplessness and night terrors," said the divorced dad of three. "The experience also has affected my personal relationships with women."
Crumbley, who was a cop for 15 years before retiring in 2002, said that after others accused the priest, he felt ready to speak. He shared his story with his family and congregation and plans to meet with archdiocese officials. Crumbley said Harris not only baptized and confirmed him but was also his godfather. Harris later taught him at St. Joseph's Elementary School and at Cathedral Preparatory, he said. A classmate confirmed Crumbley attended the schools. Archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling said the review of Harris' status is in its initial stages and an advisory board will determine his future as pastor. "You could do great things," Crumbley said, "but that does not negate the fact that this person is a pedophile." (For more on Dr. Levine, see story below. ~ Marie & Marlene) A renowned pediatrician and bestselling author who served for 14 years as chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston is accused of sexually abusing at least seven boys in his care, according to a civil lawsuit filed in Suffolk Superior Court yesterday. The lawsuit, filed by an unnamed plaintiff who was 8 years old when the alleged abuse began, said Dr. Melvin D. Levine "sexually assaulted, battered, and abused" him between 1980 and 1985. "Levine, during his treatment sessions, under the guise of performing repeated but unnecessary physical examinations, sexually assaulted John No. 5, including numerous acts of genital fondling, masturbation, and other attempted and threatened acts of assault," the lawsuit asserts.
In a faxed statement, Levine's lawyer, Edward Mahoney of Boston, said the doctor is innocent. "Dr. Mel Levine has provided pediatric care to more than 15,000 children over 40 years and categorically denies that he has ever been abusive in any way toward any patient," said Mahoney, who questioned the motives of the lawyer filing the suit. "He adamantly denies these claims. Dr. Levine is distressed about the distorted or misinterpreted memories from decades past and questions the motivations."
Levine, 68, who has appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to promote his books, did not return messages left at his home in Rougement, N.C., where he moved after leaving Children's Hospital. In a separate statement, officials at Children's Hospital said Levine worked there between 1971 and 1985, specializing in children with developmental and educational issues. "This work led to Dr. Levine developing a national reputation as an expert in these fields," the statement said.
Children's Hospital is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit. The hospital's statement said it "never had any complaint from any patient or parent of any patient suggesting inappropriate conduct of any nature by Dr. Levine." It added: "Children's Hospital's most important goal is to protect children's health and promote their well-being. Our staff is trained and experienced in detecting abuse and mistreatment of children. Such behavior, if identified, is treated with the utmost seriousness and addressed immediately."
Levine, who trained as a resident at the hospital in 1965, is now a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School in Chapel Hill. University officials did not return calls. He is the author of at least six books, including "A Mind At A Time," which was a New York Times bestseller, and helped found All Kinds of Minds, a nonprofit institute that studies learning. He studied at Brown University, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England, graduated from Harvard Medical School, and received the C. Anderson Aldrich Award for outstanding contribution to the field of child development in 1995, according to a biography on the All Kinds of Minds website.
"Dr. Levine's groundbreaking framework for understanding why children struggle in school provides a straightforward, practical system for recognizing variations in the way children learn and use their strengths to help them become more successful students," according to the biography.
The lawsuit filed yesterday was not the first against Levine alleging abuse. A federal suit filed in 1988 asserted that between 1978 and 1984 Levine conducted "improper and repeated examinations of the plaintiff's testicles out of the presence of the plaintiff's parents." The lawsuit was dismissed. In 1993, the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine received a complaint from a former patient of Levine's who said the doctor had fondled his penis and asked him repeatedly about whether he was having wet dreams. That charge was also dismissed.
"The significance of this case is that now we have evidence of seven complaints of sexual abuse over a 17-year period and multiple instances for the people who were abused," said Carmen L. Durso, who is representing five of the alleged victims and held a press conference yesterday at his Boston office. "We need to find out if there are more people and whether they will support the allegations of these people, and we need to find out what Children's Hospital's role was. We don't have answers as to why Levine was able to do this with such ease." The other alleged victims said Levine abused them when he worked in Boston, when they ranged in age from 5 to 13. The complaint did not provide details of the abuse alleged in those cases or answer why they waited so long to come forward.
The plaintiff who filed the lawsuit "was unable to recall and to understand" the abuse until February 2006, the complaint said. It says he has been in therapy since. Durso did not specify the damages his clients are seeking. © Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. On July 29, 2008, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (CSAAS) evidence is admissible only for the limited purpose to explain traits sometimes found in abused children that might otherwise undermine their credibility. The trial court must inform the jury of that limited purpose of CSAAS evidence and recommends that the jury be charged in accordance with Model Jury Charge (Criminal), Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (2001).
In this case, the State called Dr. Anthony D'Urso as an expert witness on child sexual abuse. Dr. D'Urso described CSAAS as "typical sequences of behavior that kids exhibit who are victims of child abuse and neglect." He emphasized that CSAAS was not a tool for diagnosing whether a child suffers from sexual abuse and that whether it applies to a given child depends on the particular facts of the case. He described the five sequences of CSAAS: (1) secrecy; (2) helplessness; (3) entrapment, coercion, or accommodation; (4) delayed or unconvincing disclosure; and (5) recantation. Dr. D'Urso noted, however, that a child may suffer from the syndrome without undergoing all of the sequences of behavior and that disclosure may be purposeful or accidental. The Program in Law and Public Affairs will host a live recording of Book TV on C-SPAN2 featuring Marci A. Hamilton, Visiting Professor and the Kathleen and Martin Crane LAPA Fellow at Princeton University, on Wednesday, May 28th at 4:30 p.m., in Wallace Hall 300. This event is free and open to the public. Professor Hamilton will discuss her timely new book, Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008), David Clohessy National Director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), will introduce Professor Hamilton.
Recent events such as the raid on the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) sect in Texas resulting in the removal of over 400 children for fear of rampant abuse, and the Pope's visit to the United States, in which he directly addressed the ongoing clergy abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, have brought the once-taboo subject of childhood sexual abuse to the forefront. But despite increasing awareness of the problem, the U.S. has not succeeded in establishing an effective means of deterring and preventing it, leaving the children of today and tomorrow vulnerable.
In her book, Professor Hamilton predicts a coming civil rights movement for children and explains why it is in the interest of all Americans to allow victims of childhood sexual abuse this chance to seek justice when they are ready. She proposes the elimination of the arbitrary barrier that has kept survivors of childhood sexual abuse out of court - the legal statute of limitation. Removing this merely procedural barrier permits the millions of survivors to make public the identities of their perpetrators and to receive justice and much-deserved compensation. Standing in the way, however, are formidable opponents such as the insurance industry and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
Marci A. Hamilton is an internationally recognized constitutional law expert specializing in church/state relations, and a tireless crusader for children's rights. She is a Visiting Professor and the Kathleen and Martin Crane Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton.
Professor Hamilton has represented numerous survivors of childhood sexual abuse, particularly those involving circumstances where the abuse was made possible by religious organizations. In recent weeks, she has appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America," "World News with Charles Gibson," "CBS Saturday Morning," and CNN.com to comment on the recent FLDS case and the Pope's visit to America. Professor Hamilton holds the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, and is the Founding Director of the Cardozo Intellectual Property Law Program. She is the author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008) and God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press 2005, 2007). She is also a columnist on constitutional issues for Findlaw. Professor Hamilton clerked for Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Each weekend, Book TV features 48 hours of nonfiction book programming from Saturday 8:00 AM to Monday 8:00 AM ET. For additional information, please telephone 609-258-8377 or visit the Princeton Law and Public Affairs Web site. (We discuss how sexual abuse can intersect with insurance coverage--or not--in Chapter 15. ~ Marie & Marlene) On June 5, 2008. The New Jersey Supreme court ruled that the homeowner’s policy language that excludes coverage for the “intentional or criminal acts of an insured person” operates to exclude coverage for all insureds [in this case, the parents of the abuser] under the policy, and not merely for the insured [Joseph, the mentally retarded son, who sexually abused his niece] who committed the intentional or criminal act.
John's dad (the victim's grandfather) argued that the insurance exclusions were inapplicable because his son's acts could not have been intentional due to his mental incapacity. Allstate contended that the dad did not raise that argument in his Petition for Certification and therefore the Court should not address it in the appeal. The Court agreed with Allstate’s contention and did not reach that issue. See Proformance Ins. Co. v. Jones, 185 N.J. 406, 414 (2005). WASHINGTON — Pope Benedict XVI came face to face with a scandal that has left lasting wounds on the American church Thursday, holding a surprise meeting with several victims of sexual abuse by priests in the Boston area. The handful of victims, now adults, gave the pope a notebook listing some 1,000 boys and girls who were abused in the Boston archdiocese alone going back several decades, a Vatican official said. The pope himself had requested the meeting, said the official, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, which took place at the papal nuncio’s residence. The pope prayed and spoke personally with each of them, in a meeting that lasted about 25 minutes. Some wept, Father Lombardi said.
The victims at the meeting were not immediately available for comment, but three were interviewed on CNN later in the night. “He congratulated me on my upcoming wedding,” said Faith Johnston, who said that the pope had read a summary of their lives before meeting them. She said she cried during the meeting. It was absolutely emotional,” Olan Horne, another victim, told CNN. “It was a moving experience,” said Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston, who organized and attended the meeting, speaking to reporters afterward. “It was very positive and very prayerful.”
The meeting made clear that for all the messages that Benedict wished to send during his five-day trip to the United States, his first as pope, the one concerning priestly abuse was most central. He raised the issue first with reporters on his trip from Rome on Tuesday, and did so for a third time Thursday morning during a huge open mass at Nationals Stadium before nearly 50,000 people, his first major encounter with America’s diverse church. “No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse,” the pope said in his homily. “It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention.”
The surprise meeting far overshadowed the rest of the pope’s schedule, the third day of his trip to America and a day before he leaves for New York to address the United Nations. But he also gave a substantial address to Catholic educators, many of whom have been struggling with funding shortages, changing missions and conflicts over whether Catholic schools are Catholic enough. He spoke to about 200 college presidents and the superintendents of Catholic schools in the nation’s 195 dioceses.
At a time when many dioceses are closing down parochial schools for K-12 students, Benedict stressed the importance of keeping them open, especially to serve immigrants and the underprivileged. He also used the occasion to clarify limits, saying that although academic freedom is valuable, it must not be used to “justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church.” He had additional healing work to do at his evening encounter with Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain religious leaders. On a previous trip, to his German homeland, Benedict had set off a paroxysm of anger with comments that appeared to denigrate Islam. He has also offended Jewish leaders by reinstituting a prayer for the conversion of the Jews in the Latin prayers on Good Friday. On Thursday, he offered an olive branch to Jewish leaders, and affirmed that all religions should have a common goal of working for peace. But he also issued a challenge, saying that interfaith dialogue that does not deal with existential “truth” is insufficient. And he talked of the need to protect religious freedom, pointing out that religious minorities in some countries are subject to discrimination and prejudice.
For years, victims of abuse in the United States had beseeched the Vatican for a meeting with the pope, first asking John Paul II, who died in 2005, and finally, six years after the outbreak of the scandal, one was granted. The scandal affected nearly every diocese in America, revealed more than 5,000 abusive priests and more than 13,000 victims and has cost the church more than $2 billion in settlements and legal fees. It also has cost the church trust and respect, both of which the pope is clearly aimed at restoring. But reaction from victims and their advocates varied, with some praising the meeting as an important step and others saying that still it was not enough. “This is a small, long-over due step forward on a very long road,” Joelle Casteix, southwestern regional director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said in a statement. “We’re confident the meeting was meaningful for the participants and we’re grateful that these victims have had the courage to come forward and speak up. “But fundamentally it won’t change things,” she said. “Kids need action. Catholics deserve action. Action produces reform and reform, real reform, is sorely needed in the church hierarchy.” But Gary Bergeron, who said he was abused by a priest in Lowell, Mass., said: “I think we moved the ball down the field this week. The fact that we finally got the pope to actually stand up and put a statement on record, I really think he set the bar this week.” Mr. Bergeron, author of the book “Don’t Call Me a Victim,” went to Rome in 2003 and tried to meet with Pope John Paul II, with no success. "We made some progress this week, and that’s what’s important,” he said.
Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney who represented hundreds of people abused by priests, none of whom attended the meeting with the pope, said he hoped that the pontiff would meet with more victims. “He certainly will need more than a half hour to understand the pain victims are feeling because of being sexually abused by priests,” he said. While some abuse survivors were encouraged to hear of the encounter, others said they would not feel comforted until the church calls bishops and those in the hierarchy to account. While the meeting with victims was historic, and a surprise, it is the address the pope gave to Catholic educators that is likely to receive the most scrutiny.
Benedict praised Catholic schools that have “helped generations of immigrants to rise from poverty to take their place in mainstream society.” And he encouraged Catholics to continue to contribute generously to Catholic schools “to ensure that they are accessible to people of all social and economic strata.” There have been sporadic controversies over what kinds of curriculum, outside speakers, faculty members, campus clubs, drama and art are acceptable at Catholic colleges and universities.
Catholic universities and colleges have come under fire for hosting speakers who favor abortion rights, like Hillary Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and the actor Stanley Tucci, who was dropped from an event at Catholic University. The University of Notre Dame was recently criticized for allowing a campus staging of “The Vagina Monologues,” a feminist theater piece. The Pope did not refer explicitly to the controversies. However, he said that church teachings must shape “all aspects of an institution’s life, both inside and outside the classroom,” in an insistence on adherence to church doctrine that Benedict stresses for Catholics in all parts of their lives, from their personal behavior to what kind of politicians they support. “Divergence from this vision weakens Catholic identity, and, far from advancing freedom, inevitably leads to confusion, whether moral, intellectual or spiritual,” the pope said.
For faculty, he said: “I wish to reaffirm the great value of academic freedom. In virtue of this freedom you are called to search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you. Yet it is also the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university’s identity and mission.” The educators in the room were encouraged by the pope’s speech, and applauded his call to keep schools open for poor students. The Rev. Robert A. Wild, the president of Marquette University, said after the pope’s speech: “What was most striking to me is what it was not. We were not being told that most Catholic schools are not faithful to our message. It was not a finger-waving exercise. It was mostly to encourage us.”
At the new Nationals Stadium, with a gorgeous view of the Capitol and Potomac, the outdoor mass combined the spiritual with the spectacular: Some 46,000 people waved Vatican flags and shed tears when Pope Benedict arrived in his transparent popemobile, in a ball-field setting complete with sausage and $20 souvenir pope hats. The mass was the pope’s first real encounter with the American church, and they poured out affection as much as shined a mirror of their diverse self back onto Benedict: conservative and liberal, black, white, Latino and Asian. Although Benedict is avowedly part of the church’s more orthodox wing, some at the mass said he seemed on this American trip eager to address the full church, in all its complexity.
“He is open to things and that gives a feeling of hope to people who have felt left out,” said Barbara Thomas, 51, an administrative assistant from Columbia, Md. In a shift of perception that the Vatican clearly hoped would be common on this trip, Mr. Thomas said she found him “a little more open, not so stern as what the general impression had been.” Steve Brown, 55, a doctor from Fairfax, Va., said seeing pope was particularly important to him because he is suffering from terminal cancer. “Seeing him person gave me a warm feeling of being at peace,” he said. “Just his aura — a kind of spirituality that emanated from him. Before I wasn’t as moved with him as I was with John Paul II. Now, seeing him, I feel moved.” (Ian Fisher reported from Washington, and John Sullivan from New York. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company.) YONKERS - A Yonkers monk has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing four boys from the same family last year, authorities said yesterday. Dominick Bokulich, 34, also known as Brother Leopold, was living at St. Felix Friary at 15 Trinity Plaza in Yonkers at the time of the incidents, which took place during 2006 and 2007, Yonkers police said.
Bokulich, a member of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal who is originally from Sullivan County, pleaded guilty Tuesday to first-degree sexual abuse and course of sexual conduct, felonies, and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, misdemeanors, before Westchester County judge Jeffrey A. Cohen.
Yonkers police detectives received a tip in October from the Westchester District Attorney's Office that Bokulich had sexually abused three boys who live in Yonkers. The abuse allegedly occurred at a residence in Yonkers and in areas outside Westchester. He was arrested Oct. 12. He is due to be sentenced on June 10. Cutting-edge new research helps answer the puzzling question of why post-traumatic stress doesn't happen to everyone who endures horrible trauma. In this case, the trauma was child abuse. The researchers found that survivors of child abuse were particularly likely to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress as adults if they also had specific variations in a stress-related gene. Among adult survivors of severe child abuse, those with the specific gene variations scored more than twice as high (31) on a scale of post-traumatic stress, compared with those without the variations (13). The worse the abuse, the stronger the risk in people with those gene variations.
The study of 900 adults is among the first to show that genes can be influenced by outside, nongenetic factors to trigger signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. "The study is groundbreaking," the largest of just two reports to show molecular evidence of a gene-environment influence on PTSD, said Karestan Koenen, a Harvard psychologist doing similar research. She wasn't involved in the new study.
"We have known for over a decade, from twin studies, that genetic factors play a role in vulnerability to developing PTSD, but have had little success in identifying specific genetic variants that increase risk of the disorder," Koenen said. The results suggest that there are critical periods in childhood when the brain is vulnerable "to outside influences that can shape the developing stress-response system," said Emory University researcher and study co-author Dr. Kerry Ressler. The study appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Ressler noted that there are likely many other gene variants that contribute to risks for PTSD, and others may be more strongly linked to the disorder than the ones the researchers focused on. Still, he and outside experts said the study is important and that similar advances could lead to tests that will help identify who's most at risk. Treatments including psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs could be targeted to those people, Ressler said. Several study authors, including Ressler, reported having financial ties to makers of psychiatric drugs.
About a quarter of a million Americans will develop PTSD at some point in their lives after being victimized or witnessing violence or other traumatic events. Rates are much higher in war veterans and people living in high-crime areas. Symptoms can develop long after the event and usually include recurrent terrifying recollections of the trauma. Sufferers typically avoid situations and people who trigger the memories and often have debilitating anxiety, irritability, insomnia and other signs of stress.
Though preliminary, the study provides needed insight into a condition expected to hit rising numbers of veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. The agency paid for the study. Insel said the results help explain why two people in the same jeep see a roadside bomb, and one simply experiences it as "a bad day but goes back and is able to function," while the other later develops paralyzing stress symptoms. "This could be quite a wave that will hit us over the months and years ahead," Insel said.
Study participants were mostly low-income black adults, aged 40 on average, who sought non-psychiatric health care at a public hospital in Atlanta. They were asked about experiences in childhood and as adults and gave saliva samples that underwent genetic testing. Almost 30 percent of the participants reported having been sexually or physically abused as children. Most also had experienced trauma as adults, including rape, attacks with weapons and other violence. The researchers focused on symptoms of PTSD rather than an actual diagnosis, and found that about 25 percent had stress symptoms severe enough to meet criteria for the disorder, Ressler said.
Childhood abuse and adult trauma each increased risks for PTSD symptoms in adulthood. But the most severe symptoms occurred in the 30 percent of child abuse survivors who had variations in the stress gene. The researchers were not able to determine if the symptoms were reactions to the child abuse or to the more recent trauma - or both, said co-author Rebekah Bradley, also of Emory University.
The study is an important contribution to a growing body of research showing how severe abuse early in life can have profound, lasting effects, said Duke University psychiatry expert John Fairbank, co-director of the Duke and UCLA-run National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. He was not involved in the research.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from NIMH A suspended Catholic priest already accused of molesting a 10-year-old boy has been hit with sexual abuse charges that he forcibly touched a man. The Rev. Gerald Twomey, 53, of Uniondale, was arraigned in Suffolk County 1st District Court in Central Islip Wednesday on charges of forcible touching and third-degree sexual abuse, said Robert Clifford, spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota. The alleged incident occurred in "a private home in 1996," Clifford said.
Twomey, the former pastor of Our Lady of Fatima Church in Manorhaven, was placed on administrative leave in June after allegations surfaced that he had sexually abused a 10-year-old boy while he served at St. Anne Church in Brentwood 10 years earlier. The boy was recovering from a car accident and said he was abused at home, according to a letter written by an official with the Diocese of Rockville Centre to the Suffolk County district attorney's office.
Authorities were prevented from filing criminal charges against Twomey, a priest since 1981, because of the statute of limitation for sex abuse, which was five years at the time of the alleged abuse of the boy."We're saddened by the news of the arrest. We'll continue to fully cooperate with law enforcement," said Sean Dolan, spokesman for the Diocese of Rockville Centre. (As we note in our book, sexual abuse of boys is a widespread problem, unconfined to the Roman Catholic church. ~ Marie & Marlene) NEW HAVEN (AP) - A former music director at a prominent Greenwich church who was convicted of possessing child pornography hired a pedophile and failed to tell the authorities when that man sexually assaulted a choirboy, prosecutors disclosed on Tuesday.
The music director, Robert F. Tate, faces 9 to 11 years in prison under federal guidelines when he is sentenced on Thursday, prosecutors said in court papers.
Mr. Tate, 65, was choir director for 34 years at Christ Church, an Episcopal church, and he created a music program that gained an international reputation. Former President George H. W. Bush attended the church while growing up, and funeral services for his parents were held there.
Prosecutors said Mr. Tate permitted two sexual predators to remain in the church's choir at various times. They also said that he rehired an assistant organist who had been dismissed for sexually assaulting a choirboy and that he failed to tell the authorities when the organist assaulted another choirboy.
"We now know that the former assistant organist was a serial child predator who sexually abused children wherever he went," prosecutors wrote.
"Mr. Tate has great shame about much of his conduct over the years," said his lawyer, Francis O'Reilly. "The reference by the United States attorney causes him great shame, knowing a child was harmed by his conduct."
Mr. Tate was immediately terminated when the pornography was discovered on his laptop computer, said Eugene J. Riccio, the church's lawyer.
Mr. Tate's case also led to the conviction of a former lawyer for the church for destroying Mr. Tate's laptop computer containing child pornography. The lawyer, Philip D. Russell, was sentenced to six months of home confinement. When it comes to sexual abuse, the religious orders have flown under the radar.
About a third of all Catholic clerics serve in religious orders — they're the Jesuits who teach high school or the Franciscans who serve the poor.
The sex abuse scandal that broke five years ago focused on parish priests and forced dioceses to push big reforms. But when it comes to religious orders, their reforms are voluntary, and the orders are not accountable to anyone. As a result, abuses may go undetected.
Reporting Only to Rome
Father Aaron Joseph Cote — known as A.J. — is a Dominican friar, part of a religious order founded nearly 800 years ago. As a Dominican, he was entrusted with preaching the Gospel and living a contemplative life — until two years ago, when he was sued for allegedly abusing a minor.
Cote's case is unusual because, if news accounts are any measure, religious orders have escaped much of the scandal that engulfed the larger church.
In a deposition videotaped in August 2006, Cote looks grim as attorney Jeff Anderson questions him. Anderson represents a young man who accused Cote of sexually abusing him in 2001 and 2002. Anderson: "Do you have a sexual attraction to post-pubescent adolescents?"
Cote: "I refuse to answer on the ground it may incriminate me."
Anderson: "Do you know the word 'pedophilia'?"
Cote: "I refuse to answer on the ground that it may incriminate me"
And so it went for the better part of an hour.
Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine monk, served for 12 years at St. John's Abbey in Minnesota. In those years, he heard one confession after another of fellow Benedictine brothers who had abused children. Of 300 monks at St. John's Abbey, 32 were "perpetrators against children," Wall said.
Wall finally quit the priesthood in 1998 and began investigating clergy sex abuse for victims and their lawyers.
Wall found no shortage of work: He figures he has investigated two dozen religious orders, ranging from the Franciscans and Dominicans to the Marists and Salesians. Most recently, Wall turned his gaze on Jesuit missionaries sent from Oregon to Northwest Alaska. Last month, the Jesuits settled with more than 110 Eskimos for $50 million.
Wall and others believe the rate of abuse in the religious orders is higher than among the parish priests — although no one knows for certain because the orders are not required to submit their records to anyone in the United States. They report only to Rome. And they are not bound by the charter signed by the U.S. Bishops in 2002 that promised to stop protecting suspected abusers and report them to police.
Wall says abusers from the orders are easier to tuck away. A bishop in San Diego, for example, can transfer a problem priest only so many places. But religious orders are international, which Wall says is convenient.
"You get them out of the state. You avoid any kind of criminal liability because you get them out of the area, so that the statute of limitations can run," he said. "But you keep them in the family so it just looks like, well, 'The abbot assigned Father Dominic to St. Augustine's in the Bahamas.'"
That is pretty much what happened to Father Cote for more than 20 years. Cote denies he has abused anyone, and neither he nor his attorney responded to requests for an interview. In fact, no Dominican official connected to this case would grant an interview — even after several requests over two months.
But videotaped depositions in Cote's case serve as a rare window into the Dominicans' world. The depositions reveal a system in which warning signs can go undetected or ignored, and a problem priest can find refuge in new assignments for years.
The First Red Flag
In October 1985, Cote, then a seminarian, led a youth retreat near Washington, D.C.
In a taped deposition last year, Anderson read an assessment from Cote's file to Father Raymond Daley, who was the leader of the Dominicans in the 1980s. The assessment said that Cote paid too much attention to boys and that he stayed out all night and returned in the morning with a teenager named Will. It said he had two glasses of wine before the service, that his talk on sex discussed oral sex and that he bared his chest during his talk.
When asked if he had any recollection of the assessment, an elderly Daley answered softly, "I do not," a refrain repeated by Dominican leaders throughout the depositions.
A year after the youth retreat, Cote was ordained and eventually sent to Somerset, Ohio, to oversee two small parishes. His secretary, Jill Sullivan, told NPR that the young cleric instantly captured the hearts of the children. But she soon began to wonder about the youth group he started.
"You never saw any girls," Sullivan said. "There were only boys. And at a teen youth group, why wouldn't you see any girls?"
Sullivan started hearing rumors about Cote's relationship with the boys. And then one morning, she found some papers on her desk — Xeroxes made the night before on the copying machine.
"And I noticed they were of boys, their rear ends, their genitals, and I went to Father A.J. and said, 'What is this?' He wouldn't look at me, and he said, 'I'll take care of this. It won't happen again.'"
Parishioners began to complain about Cote's conduct with children. According to two parents interviewed under oath, they worried that Cote held sleepovers for boys and might be serving them beer. The parents met with a senior priest in the area, who wrote of complaints to Dominican leaders in New York.
The Dominicans apparently received the letter but now say it is missing. Dominican leaders said under oath they never heard complaints of a sexual nature.
1989: Chimbote, Peru
In 1989, the Dominicans transferred Cote to one of their foreign missions, in Chimbote, Peru.
The pattern began again. Cote launched a youth group for teenage boys, and boys stayed over at the house that he shared with another priest. That priest testified that Cote hugged and kissed the boys with an intimacy that alarmed parents.
Cote favored one boy in particular, who stayed overnight in Cote's room, the priest said.
The priest said under oath that he reported to the head Dominican in Peru four times. The Dominican leader in Peru — who is no longer alive — wrote the head office in New York that parishioners had witnessed "improper conduct on the part of Father Cote." But, he added, these complaints were just "hearsay and rumor."
Anderson, the attorney, asked Father Thomas Ertle, who was the Dominican leader at the time, why he didn't take action. Ertle said he relied on his fellow friar's word that nothing was amiss and on the word of Cote.
"He gave me no indication that there was anything immoral in his contact or association with them," Ertle said of his conversation with Cote.
"And did you rely upon him in Cote's representation that there was nothing immoral?" Anderson asked.
"Yes."
Anderson doubts that leaders didn't know of any sexual abuse or chose to "see no evil."
"I took the depositions of every official, every provincial and every vice-provincial that presided over A.J. Cote," Anderson said. "And each of them lied."
Anderson says the Dominicans are a small order. There are only a few hundred in the U.S. It is a tight-knit spiritual family.
"They live in community, which means they live together, and they report to one another regularly," Anderson said. "And there is no way that the reports made in Somerset, Ohio, in Chimbote, Peru, and elsewhere didn't go to the leaders of the Dominican order."
2000: Germantown, Md.
Soon after the complaints surfaced, Cote asked to leave Peru. Back in the U.S., he moved from one assignment to another for a decade. No allegations surfaced during this period. Then in 2000, Cote landed as a youth pastor at Mother Seton parish in Germantown, Md. There he met 14-year-old Brandon Rains.
Rains testified last year that his friendship with Cote began when Cote "took a special liking to me," by waving or winking at him from the altar during the Mass.
And Cote eventually spent a lot of time with Rains after his parents learned the boy had begun using and selling marijuana in the ninth grade. Rains' mother told NPR they felt the only refuge was his church youth group.
"He spent so much time with Father Cote," she said, holding back tears. "He was like the one safe, positive person in his life that we would allow him to see. Not his friends. We thought that was the source of the trouble."
She added: "I felt like I just handed him over."
By midyear, Rains testified, Cote was taking him to a private apartment or hotels to watch pornography. He masturbated in the boy's presence and persuaded Rains that he should do the same, Rains said.
Rains said Cote did this about 10 times and touched him once.
In August 2003, Rains confided in his parents about Cote's behavior and filed a report with police in Maryland. His stepfather, Joe McMorrow, says he called the Dominicans, who assured him they would investigate.
"And then, months passed," McMorrow said. "We had very little contact with the Dominicans; most of it we initiated."
Something just didn't seem right, McMorrow said. "One day, I went out on the Web, and I find that A.J. Cote is a youth minister at a Catholic parish in Rhode Island."
Not the Whole Story
How could this happen?
Father Dominic Izzo, the current head of the Dominican Province, said in his videotaped deposition that he didn't consider Brandon Rains' allegation credible. Anderson asked Izzo what would have made it credible. First, Izzo said, if Cote's psychological evaluation indicated he was a pedophile. Second, he said, if the police had found concrete evidence of abuse.
"The investigation would have said that yes, this did happen on this date," Izzo said. "That did not happen. And so we took the advice of professionals." He said that he sent all the information they had about Cote to the Rhode Island Bishop's independent review board, and when they did not ask for more information, he considered the matter closed. Izzo recommended Cote be allowed to serve in ministry in Rhode Island.
But Dennis Roberts, the former state attorney general and head of that review board, told NPR he didn't get the whole story from the Dominicans.
"They didn't exactly lie to us, but they didn't tell us the whole truth," Roberts said.
Roberts' board gave the green light for Cote to begin ministry in Providence. He said after looking at materials NPR gathered for this story, he was floored by all that the Dominicans had omitted — files from Cote's seminary days, complaints from Ohio and Peru, the attempts to unload Cote on different dioceses.
Roberts said that his review board had access to all local priests' files. But with religious orders like the Dominicans, Roberts said, "we don't have the full package. And therefore in dealing with an issue like Father Cote's, we really do have to rely on the good faith and forthcoming nature of the disclosures made to us by the order. And here that was not very good."
In the deposition, Anderson handed Izzo Exhibit 100, a letter dated July 26, 2005. It's from Catherine Wolf, a teacher in Somerset, Ohio. Wolf wrote that she had just learned that Cote had repeatedly molested a student in the late 1980s. "I believe that Father A.J. is a danger to children," she wrote, "and should not be allowed to associate with them in any capacity."
Under the Dominicans' own policies, they were supposed to report all credible allegations to the police. Anderson asked if Izzo did so.
"Did I supply this letter to the police?" Izzo asked? "No, I did not."
When asked why not, Izzo said he didn't recall. "We just didn't submit it to the police," he said.
Izzo said he did not consider that allegation credible because it did not come from the alleged victim. He didn't inform Cote's parish in Rhode Island, nor did he alert the review board.
Dennis Roberts said he wishes Izzo had.
"What we would have done at that point," Roberts said, "taking that new information, is tell the father provincial [that] Father Cote was no longer welcome here at that point, [that] the man has to be removed from ministry."
Cote was just about to attend a church youth retreat in November 2005 when Rains filed a civil suit against Cote and the Dominicans in Washington, D.C. The Dominicans pulled Cote from active ministry.
Four months ago, the Dominicans agreed to settle with Rains for $1.2 million. Based on evidence revealed in the lawsuit, prosecutors in Maryland have reopened a criminal investigation.
2006: Massachusetts
In May 2006 — smack in the middle of the Rains litigation — a woman filed a complaint with the police in Massachusetts.
She claimed that Father Cote had abused her two boys while babysitting. The Dominicans offered their sympathy, but they did not mention this new allegation in their sworn testimony in the Rains suit.
The boys at the time were 4 and 6.
Last year, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse cases should start ticking when the victim realizes he or she was hurt, rather than a set time after the incident. As a result, dozens of long-stalled priest sexual abuse cases are moving ahead in the state.
Other state courts and legislatures have also moved back deadlines and statutes of limitations for filing sexual abuse suits. Father Donald McGuire was convicted last year of sexually abusing two teenaged boys in the 1960s. Jesuit leaders insist they had no knowledge of any other abuses by McGuire, but documents reveal they were alerted by concerned parents many times over the past 38 years. ©2007 WNYC Radio. Two days after attending a Radius 10 party celebrating the platinum success of his second album, Doin' Somethin' Right, country singer Billy Currington was diagnosed with acute laryngitis and canceled all immediate obligations.
What came next was a quiet unlike anything he had ever known.
With no work to fill his usually hectic schedule, the 33-year-old spiraled into a painful examination of his past. For nearly a dozen years of his childhood, Currington says, he was the victim of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of four adults, most of whom were men. Currington now believes the childhood trauma has left him with anger issues and a hatred of men that have affected personal and professional relationships throughout his adult life. Dealing with the fallout is prompting his exit from country music for the rest of 2007, despite recently celebrating his second No. 1 single, "Good Directions."
"For so long, I didn't know what was going on inside of me, but I knew it was affecting my life in negative ways," Currington said during an exclusive interview I conducted for People magazine with the agreement that the story also would appear in The Tennessean.
June 26 — five days after his million-selling-album party — Currington checked into a 30-day trauma recovery program at Arizona's Sierra Tucson.
"It was pretty much the breakdown, the realization that I was powerless over a trauma and at that point, it felt like my life was completely unmanageable," he says. "I felt the bottom, so to speak."
He'll focus on healing
Last week he began finishing the last recording sessions for his third album. That will be his last career duty before putting the music industry on hold, even parting ways with his band, to focus on healing.
Although his girlfriend — "the truest love I've ever known" — was instrumental in helping him find Sierra Tucson, he says she couldn't understand all that he'd been through, and they broke up. On Aug. 26, he flies to Hawaii to work with two therapists specializing in childhood trauma.
"All of this started happening and I felt like it was the time in my life that nothing else mattered — where my career goes, girlfriends, whatever," he says. "What matters the most is me."
Currington had no plans to speak publicly about this private matter, but rumors spread that he was addicted to drugs or alcohol, and he wants to set the record straight.
"I feel like I am being used at the moment, and all I can say is, 'God, please use me.' If someone else in this world needs to heal from this, then let them be healed.
"Secrets hold a lot of power, and when they are revealed… they hold no more power."
Singer/songwriter Scotty Emerick, his good friend, says he's proud of Currington.
"I think his health, happiness and well-being should come first in his life," Emerick says. "I think this will really help him in the long run. I will support any decisions he makes."
He calls abuse frequent
Currington, who grew up in a trailer with his mother, brother and sister in Rincon, Ga., had three stepfathers by the time he turned 14. The first, Laurie "Larry" Currington — whom the singer thought was his biological father until he discovered the truth as a teen — was, Currington says, an abusive alcoholic for whom the singer later wrote his Top 10 hit "Walk a Little Straighter," and "Living with the Devil." The stepfather died when Currington was 25.
"This man had no sense of heart at all," he says.
Currington's stepsister, Ann Roose, 48, disputes all of the claims against his father.
"None of it ever happened," says Roose, who says she never lived in the house with them. Her brother Chuck Currington echoes her views. (They are from their father's first marriage; Currington is from his third. Chuck Currington says he lived with the family briefly when he was about 14.)
Billy Currington's grandmother Evelyn Helmly, his mother's mother, backs his version: "Billy was abused. Larry was a drunk; he was mean."
Currington says his stepfather abused him "just whenever he felt like it, that I needed a good beating." When he was about 5, Currington says, he was forced to sit in his stepfather's lap and shave his face with an electric razor. "I accidentally hit his moustache, and that was a nightmare after that. I got chucked across the room and cussed at, hit, whatever."
Because their window air conditioner rarely worked, Currington frequently had to fan his stepfather with a paper bag until the man fell asleep. "I remember with every fan I would hate him more and more," he says.
His mother and stepfather divorced when Currington was 7, but he continued to see his stepfather on weekends. When Currington was 10, he and his siblings spent July 4 with their first stepfather, who, Currington says, was downing whiskey and relieving himself in the bushes during the fireworks show. "That's when I thought the words, 'Walk a little straighter, Daddy.' Time went on and I wrote the song."
Currington refused his stepfather's demand that the boy cross a busy street to buy him a soda. "That was the first time I was ever knocked out completely cold," Currington says. "I think I was knocked out for five or 10 minutes. I woke up and saw the police hauling my dad to the car. He never got put in jail that night though; he got let go on the spot after we left."
Trauma leads to anger
By grade school, Currington started getting into fights. "When you are taught to hate, you carry that with you. You don't know any better." The abuse was never discussed at home or school. "It was just, 'Forget about it and move on.'"
In high school, he was introverted and laid back, except for the times that Little Billy would raise his ugly head.
"I call myself 98 percent laid back, but there's that 2 percent of Little Billy, my inner child that's hurt, sad and furious because he was never taken care of. When he comes out, he comes out very quickly and it goes away very quickly.
"And in those instances, that rage can destroy relationships, whether it's with a girlfriend or a business partner or a fan. It doesn't take long to screw it all up."
After each verbal outburst, he would say, "I know what I did was wrong and it will never happen again." But it did.
By his early 20s, he realized he had a problem, and spent the next decade reading self-help books, which didn't help.
He says there wasn't one event or fight that triggered his treatment, but just the undeniable realization that he needed more help than books offered. "I didn't know I was going to need more help than I actually thought I did at the time."
30 days changed his life
When he arrived at Sierra Tucson, counselors took his computer, phone, health food and guitar. He was immersed in classes and homework. Like the others, he drew a time line of his life that was placed on the wall for all to see. "My unit therapist pulled me aside one day and said, 'Billy, I really have to tell you, man, that your life, your time line, is probably about the worst I've seen. I can't believe you're not in jail at the moment."
While Currington eventually settled into treatment, he packed his bags twice to leave. The second time, a counselor intervened. "He taught me a word in my bedroom that day I never knew: still. 'You have to learn to be still, Billy,'" Currington says. "I don't know what it was, but his way of dealing with me was like no way that a man had ever dealt with me before. It was in a gentle, respectful way that I understood."
Near the end of his stay, he heard something for the first time in his life: a grown man saying, "I love you."
Currington called his grandmother Helmly, with whom he had always felt safe, and told her everything. "She said, 'I'm going to tell you like my Mama told me, "Just put it under a rug and move on. Bury it, tell it goodbye and move on." '
"I said, 'I'm here to tell you today that's not the way to deal with what is going on in my life at this moment.' You could have heard a pin drop. She didn't know what to say. She said, 'Really?' And I said, 'Yeah, it's not.' "
Currington walks taller
The relief of dealing with the lifelong burden is apparent in his appearance and demeanor: He stands taller and is more animated in conversation.
"Billy was always somebody who has to be moving and going and making stuff happen," says Brian Wright, vice president of A&R (artists and repertoire) at Universal Music Group Nashville. "Now he's more relaxed, calm and thoughtful in the way he's talking about this. Usually we talked about music and sports and writing, but now it's just more about life. "
Currington owns the fact that all of these horrible things happened to him.
"But when you add them all up, it really isn't my fault, and I did the best I could. I was powerless over angry men who were bigger and stronger than me," he says.
"I grew up to hate them and I grew up to be defensive and I took on ways that they taught me. Now, I sit here at what I feel is my first stage of manhood. I am here proud, I am here confident and I am ready to take on whatever it is out there that will help me get to the core of the problem and fix it and move on with my life in the healthiest possible way." The comedy actor Chris Langham broke down in the witness box today at Maidstone Crown Court and claimed that he was sexually abused as a child.
Mr Langham, who is accused of downloading child pornography and sexually abusing an underage girl, wept as he denied being a paedophile.
His voice quivered as he recalled being raped by a man while on a sailing trip away from his parents on Lake Ontario in Canada, where he grew up.
Asked by Judge Philip Statman to elaborate, Mr Langham said: "I was eight. My parents had moved to Canada when I was five. I was quite a frightened child. I got beaten up all the time because I spoke with an English accent.
“We stayed in a tent and this guy – I don’t remember his name – I remember he had red hair... The thing I can’t get out of my head is lying in bed with him with his arm around me and him telling me I had done well and me having two thoughts in my head. I had done well because he liked me. My second thought was a deep, deep shame that I would do that to be liked.
“A slut, for a kind word, is what I am. I have always despised myself for my approval-seeking.”
Mr. Langham accused the police of trawling for allegations to throw at him.
Referring to his arrest by police for looking at child porn on the internet, he said: "They had me on a plate because I said I did it, but they weren’t happy. They wanted to convict me on the basis I had an abnormal interest in children, that I’m a paedophile, and I’m not."
At this point the Bafta award-winning actor's voice became very shaky. He continued: "That part of the crime is a life sentence and that is the part of the crime I did not do.
"I have to stand up and tell you the truth but I will not stand here and admit a crime I didn’t commit.
"I’d like to make it clear I am not taking the crime I committed lightly. I did it in an arrogant way, I know who I am. I know who I am. And I did a very arrogant thing to not think that the law applied to me."
His defence counsel, David Whitehouse, QC, asked him: "The prosecution say you are a paedophile because you paid for child pornography sites in 1997, 1999 and 2002."
Mr Langham replied that he had never seen any child pornography on the site he had paid for. He said: "I never saw anything that gave me any concerns." He also said: "I’ve looked at pornography sites for years. I look at a lot of porn, I’m afraid it doesn’t make me look good but I’ve done it for years."
He continued: "My sense of my own sexuality is that I’m rather depressingly normal for a man of my age."
In about January 2005, he said he came across an indecent film of a child while searching for adult pornography. He said: "I opened it and it was not particularly vicious, but it was still a child. I closed it and I was very shaken by it.
"I talked to my wife about it. I’m one of the children in the photographs. That’s the problem I have with it. I don’t know how to react to it."
His lawyer has told the court that his client downloaded some images while researching a character in Help, the BBC comedy drama about a psychotherapist and his patients which Mr Langham co-wrote.
Later, laughter was heard in court as the jury was shown an episode of Help.
Mr Langham explained that Help introduced a character called Pedro in order to explore the stance society should take against paedophiles. He and his barrister read out dialogue from draft scripts.
The actor said that he had looked at the child pornography to help him to understand the character and his world. "I know about the world of being at the receiving end of a paedophile but I don’t know about paedophilia, the networks, the slang, what does the room look like," he told the court.
He claimed that when he accessed the indecent pictures he had only been able to bear to watch a few seconds at a time. "My heart started beating, my mouth went dry and I started feeling sick. I tried to think what was the connection that made me go there."
He went on: "I have no sexual interest in children, I have children myself. I find them (the images) very upsetting. To me it was like putting my face in a chainsaw. I had to get out.
"I did it on four occasions and had I not been arrested, I probably would have done it again."
His lawyer asked him why he returned to view the images, Mr Langham replied: "Because it’s an issue in my life. It was horrible."
Earlier this week Paul Whitehouse, the Fast Show star who was his writing partner on Help, told the court that he and Mr Langham had not discussed researching child pornography for the show.
The prosecution has also told the court that Mr Langham, a married father-of-two, groomed and then sexually abused a 14-year-old girl.
Before the hearing resumed today, the jurors were directed to find Mr Langham not guilty of four offences of indecent assault. It is understood that, after lengthy legal submissions yesterday by Mr Langham's defence team and by prosecutors, the charges had been found legally to be time-expired under the terms of a House of Lords ruling.
Legal experts said that it was not unusual for the charge sheet against a defendant to be altered mid-trial once the full extent of the prosecution case had been heard.
Mr Langham, 58, of Golford, near Cranbrook, Kent, denies 15 counts relating to child pornography, six of indecent assault and two of serious sexual assault on an underage girl.
The trial continues.
The theater starts out cold and — unusual for a New York black box in July — keeps getting colder as “What Happened When,” a dark two-hander by Daniel Talbott, progresses. If the show were any longer, falling icicles would become a hazard for the audience at Here Arts Center’s underground space. That the show isn’t any longer is unfortunate. Its 45 minutes are full of half-sentences and fragmentary memories, but the premise and the actors are strong enough that you wish Mr. Talbott had taken things further, spent less time being cryptic and more time fleshing out his portraits.
Jacob Fishel and Jimmy Davis play two unnamed brothers reminiscing about an ugly past. But this is no ordinary conversation: Mr. Fishel’s character, who appears to be the older of the two, is dead. In fact, a lot of people associated with this family seem to be dead, and as the two men trade remembrances there are hints of sinister explanations. Sex and sexual abuse are prominent.
The production, by Rising Phoenix Repertory (of which Mr. Talbott is artistic director), goes for ghost-story creepiness and achieves it. Mr. Fishel even injects a little pathos as the departed brother who still wants to be protective of his sibling.
That the two actors succeed so well is especially impressive because, under Brian Roff’s direction, neither ever changes position: Mr. Fishel is rooted to a chair and Mr. Davis to a bed. They create a captivating dynamic. If only the play didn’t leave you feeling that you did not get enough of a good thing.
Through Monday [July 16, 2007] at Here Arts Center, 145 Avenue of the Americas, South Village; (212) 352-3101. A hearing to decide who won the last Tour de France has suddenly lurched from numbing details about laboratory testing methods into testimony about sexual abuse, blackmail and what some may construe as a near confession. Greg LeMond, a winner of the Tour three times, provided the spark that turned the hearing's uneventful opening three days into high drama. In the world of blogging, it is being described as circus. At the expense of revealing his long-held secret that he was sexually molested for months as a youth, LeMond has offered damaging testimony against Floyd Landis, accused his business manager of trying to blackmail him about the molestation and has stoked the public feud among the three Americans who have finished first in the Tour de France.
The three - LeMond in 1986, 1989 and 1990, Landis last year and Lance Armstrong from 1999 through 2005 - have a history of exchanging mockery and suspicions, of threatening business ruin and lawsuits. On Friday, though, none had any comment on LeMond's testimony against Landis or his manager at an arbitration hearing into doping charges. Armstrong was unavailable, LeMond did not respond to phone calls and Landis is officially barred from public comment during the hearing. The business manager, Will Geoghegan, who was immediately fired by Landis in the courtroom after LeMond described a phone call threatening to make public his sexual molestation, was also unavailable.
Usually the catalyst in the quarrels among the riders is Armstrong, now 35, who retired after his seventh consecutive victory in the world's greatest bicycle race and became a fulltime campaigner against cancer. Before then, he tried to humiliate Landis, most famously in the Tour de Georgia in 2005, for presumed disloyalty in leaving Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service team to become the leader of Phonak. LeMond was a more frequent target, especially after he hinted that Armstrong's first victory in the Tour was either a major feat for a cancer survivor or a major fraud. (Read doping.)
Landis, 31, had testy words in rebuttal to Armstrong and has sniped at LeMond ever since Landis failed a doping test in the last Tour and thought LeMond was not supporting him, as Armstrong in fact has been. Now a 45-year-old bicycle manufacturer and businessman, LeMond squared the circle Thursday with his charges about Landis and his entourage. After an opening three days of uneventful testimony, the hearing into whether Landis used illegal drugs in the Tour burst into high drama with LeMond's account of his sexual abuse, his recollection of what seemed to be an incriminating phone call from Landis and his charge that Landis's business manager tried to blackmail him.
LeMond appeared at the arbitration hearing in Malibu, California, as a witness for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which is seeking to strip Landis of his first place in the Tour and ban him from the sport for two years. First LeMond discussed a phone call Landis made to him last summer shortly after news of his positive A urine sample in the race was leaked to the media. LeMond said that he was "inundated with requests" for comment and that he was "expressing disappointment."
On Aug. 6, LeMond said, while he was at a charity event in Massachusetts, he got a call from Landis that lasted 36 minutes. LeMond said he urged Landis to confess if his backup B sample also proved to be positive. "I made it very clear that I did not judge that he did or didn't because his B sample was not positive at that time," LeMond testified. "I said, I don't know if you did or didn't, but if you did, you can be the one to change the sport . . . salvage the sport. I would encourage you to come clean." In addition to helping the sport, he continued, he told Landis that a confession would "more importantly, help himself." "At this point, he said, 'I don't see anything that . . . . What good would it do? If I did, it would destroy a lot of my friends and hurt a lot of people,' " LeMond testified.
He then said he told Landis how destructive it was to keep a trauma secret. Specifically, he continued, he described his pain in keeping it secret that he was sexually abused by a friend of his father's when he was 10 or 11 years old and living with his family in Nevada. "It nearly destroyed me by keeping the secret," LeMond said. He said he told Landis that very few people knew that about him. One who did is Frankie Andreu, 40, a former rider who finished all nine Tours de France he entered. "I've known this a long time," Andreu said Friday by phone from Arkansas, where he was directing his Rock and Republic team. "Greg and I are old friends and he's talked to me about this."
Andreu added that LeMond had also told him months ago about the call from Landis in August. The B, or second, urine sample after Landis's comeback victory on the 17th of 21 daily stages in the Tour did prove positive for an illegal ratio of testosterone to its natural precursor epitestosterone. Other tests at a French laboratory have since reportedly confirmed the presence of synthetic testosterone. Landis has steadfastly denied doping. If he loses his case before the three-member arbitration panel, he can appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, the final authority. Discussing the phone call from Landis, LeMond then testified that he received a call Wednesday night before the hearing from Landis's manager, who threatened to reveal the secret of sexual abuse if LeMond showed up to testify.
"He said, 'I'll be there tomorrow and we can talk about how we used to' " perform a sexual act, LeMond said of the phone call. "I thought this was intimidation to keep me from coming here." He said he traced the call to the cell phone of Geoghegan, the manager, and filed a police report, which was presented as evidence. Malibu sheriff's officials said only that the case was under investigation. After this testimony, Geoghegan walked up to LeMond, apologized and admitted he made the call, LeMond said.
While they were still in the hearing room, a Landis attorney, Maurice Suh, then announced that Geoghegan had just been fired. On Friday, a spokesman for Landis, Michael Henson, who heads the Floyd Fairness Fund defense committee, said: "I want to stress that Mr. Geoghegan was immediately fired by Floyd - this was done in the courtroom - and that Mr. Geoghegan never received any payment, financial or otherwise, from the Floyd Fairness Fund. He will not receive any severance from the Floyd Fairness Fund." Off the witness stand at the Pepperdine law school, LeMond denounced Geoghegan's phone call.
"It was a real threat, it was real creepy, and I think it shows the extent of who it is," he said. "I think there's another side of Floyd that the public hasn't seen." In the hearing, a lawyer for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, Matt Barnett, cited an Internet message board posting that LeMond said was the work of Landis. It said, in part, if LeMond "ever opens his mouth again and the word Floyd comes out, I will tell you all some things that you will wish you didn't know and unfortunately I will have entered the race to the bottom which is now in progress."
Barnett asked LeMond: "He confirmed he personally had posted it?" LeMond replied, "Yes." "What did you understand was the subject matter Mr. Landis was referring to?" the lawyer asked. LeMond answered: "He was referring to the conversation on Aug. 6, about my personal story to him about why he should come clean." Landis, who had worn a yellow tie - the color of the Tour leader's jersey - for the first three days of the hearing showed up Thursday in a black one to symbolize his feelings toward LeMond. In another setback for his defense, the cross-examination of LeMond, designed to explore his motives and impeach his credibility, was called off because he refused to answer questions about Armstrong. "I just have to say, again, this is completely unfair," said another Landis attorney, Howard Jacobs. CHEVY Chase has made us laugh since his first routines on "Saturday Night Live" in 1975, but behind the clownish façade are horrific memories of a childhood of beatings and psychological torture by a mentally ill mom and twisted stepdad. "I lived in fear all the time - deathly fear," Chase says in a new authorized biography, "I'm Chevy Chase . . . And You're Not," by Rena Fruchter, out next month from Virgin Books. It reveals that Chase's concert-pianist mother, Cathalene, was a "very unhappy woman" who suffered from depression and panic attacks that could set her off at a moment's notice. They had her locking young Chevy in a closet for hours at a time and waking him up in the middle of the night to slap him "continually and hard, across the face," Chase tells the author. "I don't remember what it was for, or what I had done."
One of her other brutal punishments was to whip Chase over a period of days. "She would say to me, 'Ten lashes on the backs of your legs every day for a week at 5 p.m.' How can you hold on to that kind of anger against your kid?" Chase relates to Fruchter. "I knew I was a 'bad boy,' but I didn't know that everybody wasn't punished the same way I was."
Chase's younger half-brother, John, tells the author: "My mother, at her worst, was like an unleashed animal. It was at her hands, in her feral states, that Chevy suffered the darkest of his secret torments."
Chase was also traumatized by his mom's second husband, John Cederquist, who heaped on him "emotional and physical abuse that sometimes bordered on torture," Fruchter writes.
The comic, who starred in such flicks as "Caddyshack" and "National Lampoon's Vacation," is 63 now, and his tormentors are dead. But, he tells Fruchter, "I always turn to it in my mind . . . I'll never forgive them. At their graves I didn't. It was too hard for me. You would think a grown man could shake it off, as the coffin was being lowered, to say, 'I forgive you.' I don't forgive." New York 1 newsman Dominic Carter tells in memoir how his mother sexually abused him when he was a boy.
Dominic Carter, a high-profile journalist who once interviewed Nelson Mandela and now commands attention as the host of "Inside City Hall" on NewYork1, has spent his life hiding a painful childhood secret.
One night, when Carter was about 7, his mentally ill mother, Laverne, ordered him to climb into her bed. Then, in a voice no louder than a whisper, she told him to take off his clothes.
She sexually assaulted him.
In a memoir titled "No Momma's Boy: How I Let Go of My Past and Embraced the Future," Carter candidly recounts the sexual and physical abuse of his childhood and chronicles his journey from Bronx housing projects to the upper echelons of New York journalism.
After his mother died in January 2001, Carter, who had been shielded by family members from the details of her mental illness, decided to do what reporters do - report. He delved into her past and found the medical records that would unlock the secrets of his mother's life and ultimately help him heal his own.
From the scrawled penmanship of psychiatrists and social workers, Carter learned that his mother had been diagnosed as a chronic paranoid schizophrenic, that her first sexual experiences occurred at an early age with two uncles, and that she got electroshock therapy as a teen.
He discovered from the records that she beat him and nearly strangled him when he was an infant. One record showed she harbored thoughts of pushing Carter out a window. She heard a voice tell her, "Do it."
In his book, which Carter plans to self-publish next month, he recounts many of the troubles of his childhood - a father he never knew, a grandfather who once took him to a drug den - but he also tells of the unconditional love and support he received from his grandmother and his aunt, two women who always treated him like a prince.
Carter's aunt, Inez Carter, told the Daily News she was apprehensive about his making the family's secrets public.
"But the more I thought about it, you can't hide the truth," she said.
Steve Paulus, senior vice president at NY1, described Carter's decision to go public as "courageous."
Carter, 42, who is married with two children, said he plans to try to help others cope with the horrible memories of child sexual abuse. He called writing his memoir therapeutic.
"It's been helpful to the degree that it's given me courage to stand up and say, 'Dominic, you did nothing wrong. You don't have to hide anymore. It's okay. You don't have to spend the rest of your life as a prisoner within your own mind having this dark secret,'" he said.
"I feel free," he said. "For the first time in my life, I feel free." The Who rocker Pete Townshend has revealed he was sexually abused as a child.
In a new excerpt from his upcoming autobiography, Who He?, which the guitarist has posted on his blog PeteTownshendWhoHe.Blogspot.com, Townshend recalls he was forced to shower naked before two men when he was 10 years old - as part of a Sea Scouts initiation.
He also implies that further sexual abuse followed, writing only that: "What followed needs no description."
Townshend goes on to reveal the experience has affected him ever since.
In an earlier excerpt, the rocker revealed he was physically abused by his mentally-ill grandmother at the age of six.
In January 2003, Townshend was arrested on suspicion of possessing child pornography, while researching his memoirs. He was cleared of the charges four months later.
Who He? is set to hit book stores in 2008. © Thomas Crosbie Media - Thomas Crosbie Holdings, Ireland, 2007. Editor's note: Thomas Roberts has been a Headline News anchor since 2001. In this story, he discusses being sexually abused by a Catholic priest as a teenager.
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- I became a victim of sexual abuse at the age of 14; the abuse lasted three years. It took me nearly 20 years to gather the strength to help put my abuser behind bars. Now, a year after "justice" was done, I am ready to tell my story publicly in ways I never have before.
My abuser was Father Jeff Toohey, a trusted man of God. He was the equivalent of a religious celebrity in my private all-boys Catholic school in Baltimore, Maryland. Father Jeff was every boy's friend and mentor. I considered him my mentor as well.
When my parents divorced, I was sent to Father Jeff to help me cope with all the changes. Divorce in the mid-1980s still seemed so foreign. Plus, I was just a kid, and I didn't know much about divorce. I just knew it sucked.
All I had at that time in my life was my family and school. Those were my constants. But as my family fell apart, so did my life at school. After the abuse began, high school became a prison of shame and lies.
I felt trapped. My parents would be horrified to know their failure at marriage put their son at risk to be sexually abused and that the man abusing me was the high school chaplain and beloved priest. (Watch Roberts' mom say the priest will 'burn in hell' )
The school would never believe me, I thought, and I feared I would be expelled if I revealed the abuse. I was 14, with no voice, except the one in my head saying, "You can never tell the truth about what is happening."
Roughly a month after the abuse started, I attempted to commit suicide. I took a bottle of my mother's pills. I lined them up one-by-one on my maple dresser. I took them all and lay on my bed hoping to just fade away and die.
My sister, Patsy, came home and found me. It was the day before her 18th birthday. She saved my life that day just by merely coming to my room to say, "Hi." She saw the pill bottle and went to get ipecac, which made me throw up.
My parents were terribly upset by my actions. Father Jeff was told I tried to kill myself. All agreed I just needed more counseling. Father Jeff's exact words were, "You have so much to live for." I felt so cornered, and I had nowhere to go and no one to run to. I just became numb to the abuse.
"This too shall pass" is one of my favorite religious sayings. The abuse did pass, but it left me so insecure about who I was.
When I was in college, another boy, Michael Goles, came forward and reported his abuse at the hands of Father Jeff. I knew I could help Michael if I, too, revealed Father Jeff's abuse, but out of a feeling of self-preservation, I remained quiet. Michael wasn't believed, and his case was thrown out of court.
Nearly 20 years after the abuse started, I became strong enough to go back and confront what had happened to me. I was strong enough to tell my family the truth. I was strong enough to report it to the archdiocese. And I was strong enough to call Michael Goles and tell him, "I am sorry," and that I believe him because it happened to me, too.
Together, we were strong enough to see our abuser finally admit his crimes. Father Jeff was charged with 10 criminal counts of child sexual abuse in relation to my case. He asked for a plea and admitted his guilt in court. He was sentenced to five years in jail but only served 10 months. He was released early to serve eight months in home detention.
This story is so layered. For a long time, I couldn't talk about it without crying. But a year ago, CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper and CNN Senior Producer Charlie Moore approached me about telling and following my story. I was scared. I was scared of being so honest and televising this journey.
What would people think? Would I ruin my career? But I came to the conclusion that I will not be scared anymore. I will not be scared of telling the truth because it might be uncomfortable for people to hear.
If this story compels even one person to seek help for being sexually abused, then it is all worth it. All it takes is telling one person. From there, strength grows and you can tell a second person and so on. Then you can finally have control of your life back. It was while he was being educated by the Christian Brothers that he was persuaded by proselytising films of missionaries wearing straw hats in Africa to enter a seminary in England at the age of 12 to prepare for the priesthood. He has admitted he was beaten by the Christian Brothers and later sexually abused by his Latin teacher in the seminary. "I wanted to please him," he told The Bulletin during an interview on the set of Jindabyne. The price was a "tremendous" loss of confidence and a lack of self-esteem. In many ways, he says, acting is about "finding approval at a mass level ... about trying to make up for the love and approval you didn't get as a child". Predictably, perhaps, his ecclesiastical career ended abruptly when he was kicked out of the seminary after five years, for smoking in the graveyard and possibly for lack of conviction after furtive forays into the swinging London of the '60s.
"I can't tell you what it was like to go from the cloistered silence of the seminary to being surrounded by girls in mini skirts."
But it was some time before he found his true calling. He studied archaeology at University College in Dublin, then drifted, working as a short-order cook, a plumber's apprentice, a morgue attendant and in a factory that made teddy bears. BULLIED: Cruise. "It was a great lesson in my life - how he'd lull you in, make you feel safe and then, bang. "For me it was like, 'There's something wrong with this guy. Don't trust him. Be careful around him'. There's that anxiety."
When Tom was 12 his mother left, taking him and his siblings. He said: "My mother was the one who rose to the occasion. "She held three jobs. She said, 'We are going to get through this'." It was 10 years before Tom, now 43, saw his dad again when he was dying of cancer in hospital.
He told Parade magazine: "He would only meet me on the basis that I didn't ask him anything about the past. "When I saw him in pain I thought, 'Wow, what a lonely life'. He was in his late 40s. It was sad." Actor Terrence Howard was terrorized by thugs as a five-year-old in his Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood and had to relive those feelings of fear while filming hit movie Crash. The actor became a target of vicious, sometimes sexually-oriented attacks because of his lighter black skin and fine features.
He says, "It just makes you not trust the world. I would carry a screwdriver and have bricks and bottles placed strategically along my route home." The actor maintains he had to revisit those feelings of vulnerability to give an authentic performance in Crash when his wife is being groped by a rogue cop played by Matt Dillon. He explains, "That was probably the hardest role I've ever played in my life. To actually become afraid. I didn't want to go back there (to his childhood memories). But I knew that feeling of praying, 'Somebody please come help me.'" Rocker Ozzy Osbourne suffered two years of sexual abuse as a child but was too afraid to report the horrific attacks. The former Black Sabbath frontman, 54, was just 11 when he was tormented by two boys who lay in wait for him as he walked home from school in Birmingham, England in the 1950s. And Ozzy - who was too scarred by the abuse that he decided not to include it in new family biography Ordinary People - admits that the memory of his trauma still impacts on his life. He says, "Two boys used to wait for me to come home after school. Then they would f**k around with me. They didn't f**k me but they messed around with me. They would force me to drop my pants and all that s**t. They felt me and touched me and...it was terrible. They first time it happened was in front of my sister June and that affected me even more. Everything when you are a kid affects you in later life.
I was afraid to tell my father or mother and it completely f**ked me up. Dirty little secrets fester and that is one of the first things I said to my kids. When I was a kid, people did not talk about these things like they do now. You didn't have chat shows talking about child molestation. I worked it out with a therapist but if you have a traumatic experience when you are young it does f**k you up. My wife Sharon knows all about it and it was only with her that I could finally relax and be myself."Copyright © 1990-2007 Internet Movie Database, Inc. ...Santana built this place in 1983, about when he began smoking marijuana after 10 years of abstinence. In 1991 he was arrested for misdemeanor possession, and his wife Deborah insisted that he give it up for good.
Four years later she demanded something else: "He needed to make some changes in his life on a grand scale in order to be with me and in order to be the father that our children needed," Deborah Santana explains.
"I was very angry at one point - and I didn't know that I was so angry," Carlos Santana recalls. His wife told him around 1994, 1995 and 1996, "It concerns me that you're always angry," and that he acted this way around the children. She urged him to seek a therapist.
Carlos Santana reluctantly agreed. "On the seventh time, (the therapist) interrupted me in the middle of the session," he recalls of the breakthrough session. "She goes, 'What makes you think or believe that the world wakes up to screw you every morning?' And that was it," he says. "It made me realize that I was thinking wrong, like a victim. I mean the issues of, being child molested, were surfacing," says Carlos Santana. He reports he felt angry because as a child he had been molested by a man, from 1957 to 1959.
For almost 40 years Carlos Santana had kept this secret. He never talked about it publicly. Even his wife didn't know the whole story. "It's a very, as children say, icky part of your life," he now says.
Telling his story is changing him. "I'm free," he says. "By the grace of the holiest of holiest, I am free from feeling guilt, shame, judgment, condemnation, fear."
"Because of that is the CD," notes Carlos Santana of his turning point. "This is the reward of myself facing my so-called demon." The work it produced has reclaimed him for another generation.
But to Carlos Santana, the big story isn't the comeback, rather it's where he's come from. And that is what gives his success meaning, he says. "I know what it's like to - to live in a neighborhood with no running water, no electricity, no toilet," he says. "When I go to Hong Kong, Tijuana or India whatever - whatever it is, it smells the same."
"People who identified with me from - from those places who are - not so well-to-do on this planet, they claim - you know I represent them to a certain extent," he says. "That is my reward: to be connected with just people." © MMII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. The anguished persona of Chester Bennington, a former drug addict and victim of abuse, has helped turn Linkin Park into an unstoppable, five million-selling rap-rock juggernaut. This is how he did it... Bennington appeared to be a normal, happy kid. The son of a policeman and a nurse, he did well at school, enjoyed theater and thought The A-Team ruled. One day when he was 11, he came home from school, “and Mom wasn’t there anymore — she left. I took the divorce pretty badly — started sleeping in class, getting high. I just wanted to get away...I was going through the molesting part of my life then, too.”
For someone who has made no secret of being abused as a child, it seems unusual that Bennington sometimes wears a T-shirt bearing the logo of Hustler magazine’s unsavory comic-strip deviant Chester the Molester.
“That’s just a name people have always called me,” he says. “When somebody meets me and I go, ‘Hi, I’m Chester,’ they go, ‘Chester the Molester!’ ”
What exactly happened to you when you were younger?
“I’m over it. I mean, what exactly happened is a lot...Just...certain situations...”
Bennington stares at the floor. “I don’t know...I don’t really want to talk about it.”
A few uncomfortable moments later, Bennington shakes off the silence with a smile. “It’s all good. It sucks when those things happen, but going through them made me who I am today. And I’m a pretty decent person, I think.”© 2007 Dennis Digital, Inc. All rights reserved. BLENDER® is a registered trademark owned by Alpha Media Group Inc. BLENDER.COM is a trademark owned by Alpha Media Group Inc. (Axl Rose speaks candidly about his abuse in the 1992 Rolling Stone Interview excerpted below. ~ Marie & Marlene) ...It's the evening before a sold-out show in late January, and Rose is in an extremely good mood. Catching the singer in this frame of mind at the scheduled time for an interview can seem like a blessing from above if you've ever been around him in the other mood. When Rose is feeling pressured or angry, talking to him is a lot like dodging bullets. He tends to rant, barely stopping for breath, and even the most innocent of comments can set him on edge. It is a distinctly uncomfortable feeling to be in a room alone with Axl Rose and see storm clouds suddenly gather on his face because of something you've just said. It is a feeling of wanting to get out, fast.
But Rose can be a disarming -- and formidable -- conversationalist if you catch him at the right time. When he is relaxed, he seems to delight in the challenge an interview presents, and it is all but impossible to rattle him. Tell him that much of the public views him as spoiled, and he'll surprise you by agreeing. Inform him that a character in Stephen King's latest novel describes him as an asshole, and he'll ask, ever hopeful, "Was it a good character or a bad character?" The thornier the issue, the more conviction Rose displays in offering his opinion.
During this conversation, Rose covered some especially rocky terrain. He talked about rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin's resignation from Guns n' Roses late last year. He addressed his tardiness to shows, his ongoing war with the media, his reputation as a misogynist, a homophobe, a bigot. Rose also talked in detail for the first time about childhood traumas that likely played a large part in shaping his volatile nature. He spoke about some highly disturbing memories involving his biological father that were dredged up in regression therapy and also leveled serious charges at his stepfather. (Rose's natural father could not be found for comment on the issues raised in this story; his relatives believe him to be dead. Rose's brother, his sister and a family friend corroborated the allegations concerning his stepfather. Rose's mother and stepfather declined comment.)
In talking about his early years, Rose grew soft-spoken and contemplative, displaying the rarely seen vulnerability that once prompted Sinead O'Connor to remark that Rose made you want to "bring him home and give him a bowl of soup." Perhaps more than anything else, it is this surprising air of fragility, coupled with the hair-trigger temper that has all but become Rose's personal trademark, that makes him such a compelling figure.
...Do you want to talk about your childhood in a little more detail? Sure.
What's your earliest memory? My earliest conscious memory was of a feeling that I'd been here before and that I had a toy gun in my hand. I knew it was a toy gun, and I didn't know how I knew. That was my first memory. But I've done regression therapy all the way back, just about to the point of conception. I kind of know what was going on then.
Can you talk about what you've learned? Just that ... my mom's pregnancy wasn't a welcome thing. My mom got a lot of problems out of it, and I was aware of those problems. That would tend to make you real fucking insecure about how the world felt about your ass. My real father was a pretty fucked-up individual. I didn't care too much for him when I was born. I didn't like the way he treated my mother. I didn't like the way he treated me before I was born. So when I came out, I was just wishing the motherfucker was dead.
Talking about being conscious of things that happened before you were born might throw a few people. I don't really care, because that's regression therapy, and if they've got a problem with it, they can go fuck themselves. It's major, and it's legit, and it all fits together in my life. Everything is stored in your mind. And part of you is aware from very early on and is storing information and reacting. Every time I realize I have a problem with something, and I can finally admit it to myself, then we go, "Okay, now what were the earliest stages?" and we start going back through it.
What have you figured out? I blacked out most of my childhood. I used to have severe nightmares when I was a child. We had bunk beds, and I'd roll out and put my teeth right through my bottom lip -- I'd be having some violent nightmare in my bed. I had these for years.
Do you remember what the nightmares were about? No, I only remember one dream. I dreamt I was a horse. You ever see those movies of wild mustangs running and how heavy that looks? I dreamt about that. I dreamt I was caught and then put in the movies. And in some really stupid movies. And it was totally against my will, and I could not handle it, and I freaked. I didn't understand the dream. Back then, I was like "I was a horse, they tried to put me in the movies!" You know, all I could think of at the time was Mr. Ed or Francis. But I always remembered that dream, and now I understand it real well. I didn't know what my nightmares were about. My parents had always said something really tragic and dark and ugly happened. They wouldn't say what happened--they always just freaked out whenever anything was mentioned about my real father. I wasn't told I had a real father until I was seventeen. My real father was my stepdad, as far as I knew. But I found some insurance papers, and then I found my mom's diploma, with the last name Rose. So I was never born Bill Bailey. I was born William Rose. I am W. Rose because William was an asshole.
Your mother married your biological father when she was in high school? Yeah. My mom's eyes actually turn black whenever it's brought up how terrible this person was. And what I found out in therapy is, my mother and him weren't getting along. And he kidnapped me, because someone wasn't watching me. I remember a needle. I remember getting a shot. And I remember being sexually abused by this man and watching something horrible happen to my mother when she came to ge me. I don't know all the details. But I've had the physical reactions of that happening to me. I've had problems in my legs and stuff from muscles being damaged then. And I buried it and was a man somehow, 'cause the only way to deal with it was bury the shit. I buried it then to survive -- I never accepted it. I got a lot of violent, abusive thoughts toward women out of watching my mom with this man. I was two years old, very impressionable, and saw this. I figured that's how you treat a woman. And I basically put thoughts together about how sex is power and sex leaves you powerless, and picked up a lot of distorted views that I've had to live my life with. No matter what I was trying to be, there was this other thing telling me how it was, because of what I'd seen. Homophobic? I think I've got a problem, if my dad fucked me in the ass when I was two. I think I've got a problem about it.
Yeah, I would imagine so. What happened later? After I was two, my mom remarried, and I was really upset by that. I thought I was the man in her life or something, because she got away from this man and now she was with me. You know, you're a baby.
She was yours. Yeah. And then she married someone else, and that bothered me. And this person basically tried to control me and discipline me because of the problems he'd had in his childhood. And then my mom had a daughter. And my stepfather molested her for about twenty years. And beat us. Beat me consistently. I thought these things were normal. I didn't know my sister was molested until last year. We've been working on putting our lives together ever since and supporting each other. Now my sister works with me. She's very happy, and it's so nice to see her happy and that we get along. My dad tried to keep us at odds. And he was very successful at some points in our lives.
Where is your real father? His brother called me right around the Stones shows, and I had my brother talk to him. I didn't talk to him, 'cause I needed to keep that separation. I haven't heard from him since. But I confronted my mom, and she finally talked to me a bit about it, and they told me that he was dead. It looks pretty much to be true that he is. He was pretty much headed for that anyway. A very unsavory character. I've had a problem with not wanting to be him. I had to be macho. I couldn't allow myself to be a real man, because men were evil, and I didn't want to be like my father. Around the Stones shows, some paper in L.A. wrote this piece about how "The truth will come out about Axl's anger," and they were making it look like I was trying to hide something. I wasn't trying to hide it. I didn't know what had happened to me. I wouldn't allow myself to know. I wouldn't have been able to handle it.
How do you deal with knowing now? It's not about going, "Well, I can handle it, I'm a man." And it's not about going, "Well, I forgive them now." You have to reexperience it and mourn what happened to you and grieve for yourself and nurture yourself and put yourself all back together. And it's a very strange, long chain. Because you find out your mother and father had their problems, and their mother and father had problems, and it goes back through the ages.
How do you stop the cycle? I don't know. It's finding some way to break the chain. I'm trying to fix myself and turn around and help others. You can't really save anyone. You can support them, but they have to save themselves. You know, you can live your life the way you have and just accept it, or you can try to change it. My life still has its extremes and ups and downs, but it is a lot better because of this work. I'm very interested in getting involved with child-abuse organizations. There's different methods of working with children, and I want to support the ones that I believe in.
Have you talked to anyone yet? I've gone to one child-abuse center. When I went, the woman said that there was a little boy who wasn't able to accept things that had happened to him and to deal with it, no matter how many children were around him who'd had the same problems. And apparently he saw something about me and childhood problems, and he said, "Well, Axl had problems, and he's doing okay." He started opening up, and he's doing all right. And that's more important to me than Guns n' Roses, more important to me than anything I've done so far. Because I can relate to that more than anything. I've had such hatred for my father, for women, for ...
Yourself? Yeah. Myself. And it's just made me crazy. I'm working on getting past those things, and the world doesn't seem to be too tolerant of me doing that in public. It's like "Oh, you got a problem? You go away and take care of it." All these relatives knew little pieces of this puzzle, and nobody helped me with shit. I'm angry about that. I can't sit and think about Uncle So-and-So and enjoy it much. And if you're talking with any of these people, they try to get you to just tolerate it and take things back to the way they were: "Let's not get it public." My family did everything they could, thinking they were doing what was right, to bury it all. My stepfather was just adamant that he was going to protect Mom and himself: "Your real father does not get brought up." And he was also trying to cover his own tracks for what he did.
Why are you talking about this publicly? One reason is for safety's sake. My stepfather is one of the most dangerous human beings I've ever met. It's very important that he's not in my life anymore or in my sister's. We may be able to forgive, but we can't allow it to happen again. There's a lot of reasons for me to talk about it publicly. Everybody wants to know "Why is Axl so fucked up?" and where those things are coming from. There's a really good chance that by going public I'm gonna get attacked. They'll think I'm jumping on a bandwagon. But then it's just gonna be obvious who's an asshole and who's not. There are probably people that are jumping on a bandwagon. But I think it's time. Things are changing, and things are coming out.
It's only been in the last few years that people have really been talking about what constitutes abuse. I'm not talking about molestation but emotional abuse. All parents are going to abuse their children in some way. You can't be perfect. But you can help your child heal, if he's able to talk to you. Then he can say, "You know, when I was five, I saw this." I wear a shirt onstage sometimes that says, TELL YOUR KIDS THE TRUTH. People don't really know what that's about. Up until early this year, I was denied what happened to me, who I was, where I came from. I was denied my own existence, and I've been fighting for it ever since. Not that myself is the greatest thing on earth. But you have a right to fight for yourself.
If you don't have a sense of your own identity, everything's going to seem like a losing battle. My growth was stopped at two years old. And when they talk about Axl Rose being a screaming two-year-old, they're right. There's a screaming two-year-old who's real pissed off and hides and won't show himself that often, even to me. Because I couldn't protect him. And the world didn't protect him. And women didn't protect him and basically thought he should be put out of existence. A lot of people out there think so now. It's a real strange thing to deal with on a consistent basis. I'm around a three-year-old baby now and then, and sometimes after a few days it's just too overwhelming for me. My head is spinning because of the changes it's putting me through. You mean Stephanie's son? Yeah. Stephanie (Seymour, Rose's girlfriend) has been very supportive in helping me deal with all this. People write all kinds of things about our relationship, but the most important thing in our relationship is that we maintain our friendship. The romance is a plus. We want to maintain our friendship and be really protective of how our relationship affects Dylan. Dylan gets priority over us, because he could be greatly damaged, and I don't want that to happen.
You were talking about Dylan last night. Oh, man, they jump off things and stuff. It scares me. It's like they could break at any time. It scares the shit out of me. I've been with Dylan and he'll be upset about something, and I'm trying to help him, and he gets mad at me, and I've been offended. I've thought, "The only way I can deal with this is 'Okay, he's just being a jerk right now.' " But it was pointed out to me that he's not being a jerk, he doesn't know. What he needs is love. I thought about it, and I was like "Yeah, because I was told that, too." About my music, which is pure expression and honest emotion and feeling. I mean, I'll be singing something and know "Man, they're not gonna like this" and "This isn't right." But it's how I feel. The way I've been attacked has been strange. The press has actually helped me get my head more together. You know, my stepfather helped me, too. I learned a lot of things. That doesn't mean he wasn't also being an asshole. It's not quite fair to bring a two-year-old into the realities of who's an asshole and who's not. There's a part of me that's still two and getting a little better every day.
That would explain a lot. One thing I want to say is, these aren't excuses. I'm not trying to get out of something. The bottom line is, each person is responsible for what they say and what they do. And I'm responsible for everything I've said and everything I've done, whether I want to be or not. So these aren't excuses. They're just facts, and they're things I'm dealing with. And if you've got a real problem with it, don't come to the show. If you gotta be home at fucking midnight, don't bother. Do yourself a favor. I'm not telling you to come -- I don't think that I'd want to. If you've got a problem with me trying to deal with my shit and doing the show the best I can, then just don't come, man. It's not a problem. Just stay the fuck away. Because you're getting something out of it, but I'm also there for myself. I've got a lot of work to do. A lot of work to do. I've done about seven years' worth of therapy in a year, but it takes a lot of energy. And Guns n' Roses takes a lot of energy. It's a weird pressure to try to deal with both at the same time. And I'm gonna do it the best I can when I can and how I can. And I'm the judge of that--not anybody in the crowd.
How do you think all of this will affect your songwriting? I really think that the next official Guns n' Roses record, or the next thing I do, at least, will take some dramatic turns that people didn't expect and show the growth. I don't want to be the twenty-three-year-old misfit that I was. I don't want to be that person.
Who do you want to be? I guess I like who I am now. I'd like to have a little more internal peace. I'm sure everybody would. (RS 627, April 2, 1992) (Above articles are © Copyright protected by their sources; emphases supplied by Marlene and Marie.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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