Dennis Hastert and Do-it-yourself Justice.

Dennis Hastert and Do-it-yourself Justice

By Melanie Blow

Dennis Hastert’s name is back in the news again, as the Los Angeles Times has gotten documentation that at least four people have credibly accused him of sexually abusing them as children. His story is so typical, and now that more victims have come forward, his story becomes even more typical. As such, it’s worth repeating.

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In a month where stories of family and sexual violence by celebrities won’t fade from the headlines, we’re now learning about former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, someone third in line from the president of the United States, spent huge sums of money to silence someone he sexually abused as a child.

When I lobby for Statute of Limitation (SOL) reform, the unspoken question hanging in the air is always “why do you want to sue your abuser?” That’s a question worth talking about.

If your TV gets stolen, you’ll realize it shortly after it happens. Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) does not operate that way. A study released in 2013 showed it takes survivors an average of 21 years before they talk about their abuse. That’s a testament to how damaging it is, and how good abusers are at manipulating their victims to silence. So very long Statutes of Limitation (SOL’s) for the crime, or no SOL’s, are essential if we want to stop child sexual abuse. But what good does conviction in civil court do?

The most obvious answer is that successful civil suits make the plaintiffs richer.The ACE study proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that experiencing sexual abuse has lifetime consequences for victims. The CDC has actually calculated the direct costs associated with surviving child abuse to be about $200,000. One standard way to calculate payouts for pain and suffering is to take the actual damages and multiply it by a number between 1-5. Using this formula, a sum of $400,000-$1,200,000 per plaintiff makes sense. Punitive damages are generally capped at 100X the actual damages. So when you look at actual damages, plus pain and suffering, plus punitive damages, the really large settlements we occasionally hear about in cases like Penn State make sense.

The newest wrinkle in the Dennis Hastert case is that his alleged victim, Steve Reinboldt, has been named. Unfortunately, Steven passed away in 1995 from AIDS, taking details of his story with him. It’s interesting to note that HIV itself, as well as two things that cause it (over 50 sexual partners and IV drug use) are linked to ACE scores. So it seems likely that Steven wanted money for medical care, and demanded it from someone who set his life on a painful path full of destruction. And he since he couldn’t do it through the courts, he did it his own way.

There are very tangible, non-financial benefits to sueing a sexual abuser. Successful plaintiffs get legal documents saying “X sexually abused me”. This can be very validating. Suits against institutions reveal exactly how badly the institution behaved- this is very relevant to parents whose children are involved with those institutions. These documents can prevent a sexually abusive adult from gaining custody of a child through the foster care system. States can collect the names of sex offenders convicted through civil suits and assemble them into a database, similar to Megan’s law. This gives employers, CPS and anyone else interested in protecting children from harm another tool to do so.

In defending the usefulness of civil suits for survivors, I used to stop right there. This year, I talked with a CSA survivor who was sexually abused in different states, one of which doesn’t have a Statute of Limitations on child sexual abuse. The DA who would need to do the leg-work to bring her case to trial reluctant to do it. If he refuses to, she will have the chance to sue her abuse. As she put it “I want him to go to the police station once a week and write me a check for fifty cents. I don’t care about his fifty cents, but I want him to have to think about what he did to me once a week, because I think about it every day.”

This feeling of consequence, of justice, is what most people fighting for SOL reform want. One can only imagine this is what Steve Reinboldt wanted, too. While he got the financial portion. He may have gotten a sense of control by taking something from someone who took so much from him, and he may have used this power to protect other kids (“if I hear you’ve done this to someone else, I will tell the papers). This is still not an appropriate action. But it’s tragic that the laws, in Indiana and in so many other states, are so bad that blackmail is the closest approximation to justice for victims.

http://stopabusecampaign.com/dennis-hastert-and-do-it-yourself-justice-2/

Protect Kids, Not Their Rapists

Tell NY's Officials to Pass the Child Victims Act

Child Rapists In Maine.

Maine is rated third worst in the country for sex trafficking. TheBangor Daily News says Maine is an East Coast source to procure children. Those who know Maine’s history are not surprised.

Only a few years ago, when students at Baxter School for the Deaf tried to refuse sexual abuse by their director, Dr. Robert Kelly, he tied them naked to a tree and left, all night, in the Maine woods; to break them.

Dr. Robert Kelly was not prosecuted. The State of Maine protected Kelly and not Maine’s children. The Attorney General (AG) refused to prosecute any of the Baxter School rapists. Instead, Maine used tax-payer funds to pay Kelly’s pension through-out his retirement in Florida until he finally died, as reported by Rick Wormwood, in 2004.

Retired Biddeford Police Officer Stephen Dodd

Maine treated Robert Kelly the same way Maine is handling retired Biddeford Police Officer Stephen Dodd; a cop who anally raped children now living free in Florida on Maine tax-payer funds.

One survivor of Dodd’s abuse, Rick Alexander, spoke about his rape “behind my aunt’s house, handcuffed, getting sodomized by Stephen Dodd.”

In spite of receiving full retirement and enjoying total impunity, Dodd complained “the Chief had not given him a retirement plaque and identification card.”

No prosecution, no oversight, no justice and full retirement. That is all too often how Maine deals with elite child rapists. When children are tied naked to pine trees as a “grooming” exercise for rape, when a young boy is handcuffed, his face pushed into the grass, while being raped by a police officer and no one is prosecuted, the devil is walking the halls of Maine’s Attorney General’s office.

Lawyers in the AG’s office use a “statute of limitations” excuse to justify their protection of child rapists and not children. There is wide recognition there can be no statute of limitations for crimes of child abuse. Indeed, Maine legislatures, in 1991, ended the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse. Then a federal judge, for the District of Maine, in an unbelievable judgment, ruled that “the Legislature clearly did not intend for this expanded statute of limitations to revive claims that were already ‘barred by the previous statute of limitations in force’ prior to the amendments.”

Judges in Maine often appear eager to protect child rapists and not children. From Baxter School, Cole Farms, to the Zumba prostitution scandal, to mydaughter Mila’s case in Judge Jeff Moskowitz’s court, to police who have been allowed to rape children for decades, Maine’s judges and lawyers systematically protect child rapists and not children.

6 January 1988 UPI Archives

Child rapists like the late John Kenoyer, former FBI Bureau Chief in Augusta, who raped a ten year old girl for over a year, former Assistant Attorney General James Cameron, recently arrested for trading in child rape and torture, aka child porn, and Maine’s State Police Chief Andrew Demers, guilty of raping his own four year old granddaughter, are considered “important people” and “productive members of the community.” Maine judges, police, and prosecutors protect them; prosecutors like District Attorney Stephanie Anderson who said “Colonel Demers was my hero.”

I stumbled upon the cover-up of child rape and torture at the Baxter School when I delved into the Freedom of Information Act files about child rape by Maine’s Catholic priests. For three years Jeannine Guttman, formerly Executive Editor of the Portland Press Herald, fought to get the State to release these records. When Maine did release, it was only records of deceased or Alzheimer’s priests.

Bangor Daily News 10 January 2001

If the Catholic Church documents weren’t painful enough, learning about the abuse at Pineland School, Élan School,in the Native American communities, Cole Farms, and allegations of child protection operating a child rape ring with professors were equally horrific.

Under Governor Paul LePage, Maine established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to create a public record of what child protective services did, and continues to do, to Native American children but there has been no justice, no prosecutions, no accountability. Senior child protection staffer, Cynthia Wellman’s allegations of a child trafficking ring have never even been investigated, let alone prosecuted.

Why not?

Robert Tristram Coffin was one of America’s great poets. Coffin spoke about sons and daughters of Maine, rock-bound coasts, and pine-trees. A place where one can still see the Milky Way at night; where old-fashion values are held sacred and folks are judged, not by their financial wealth, but the weight of their human souls.

That is the Maine I knew until my daughter was trafficked for sex abuse by Judge Moskowitz. I started researching Maine’s dark history of child sex abuse to understand how this could have been allowed to happen to my daughter. So-called “good Mainers,” who cultivate public images as “pillars of the community,” have been allowed to plunder, rape, and torture generations of children. Those, like Rod Hotham and James Levier, who raised their voices in pain and outrage have been silenced.

This was not the Maine Coffin loved. It is not the Maine I cherish.

Decades of shameful silence and impunity for child rape continues in Maine.Adult survivors like Matt Lauzon are now coming forward but children likeAyla Reynolds, Logan Marr, and my daughter Mila Malenko have been silenced. My daughter’s case, and that of many other children, is being treated exactly as the child rape by Biddeford police, at Baxter, within the Catholic Church, at Cole Farms, at Pineland, at Élan School, and within Native American communities and by child protection staff; cover-up, deny, protect the abuser not the children.

AG Janet Mills

This is not “historical” abuse. This is on-going abuse. Happening right now, every day, to children in Maine, while Maine’s AG Janet Mills protects the child rapists and not the children.

Maine has been recognized by theBangor Daily News as a source for the entire East Coast to procure children because there is a powerful state-system in place that allows this to happen.

There are known, and protected, supply-lines of children to abuse. Foster care, child protective services, day cares, family courts, disabled children, police officers who look the other way, Native American children; wherever vulnerable children are, that is where access to rape these children is maintained by the pedosadists in power in Maine.

Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King said “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

We must end the silence in Maine. No more cover-ups. No more children abused while Maine protects the abusers. FBI Director James Comey must conduct an in-depth investigation into the corruption of public officials in Maine around the issues of child trafficking, the trade in child rape and torture aka child porn, and child sex abuse.

The silence and impunity surrounding Maine’s child rape must end now.

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Dr. Lori Handrahan’s forthcoming book Child Porn Nation: America’s Hidden National Security Risk details America’s child sex abuse epidemic. Her Ph.D. is from The London School of Economics. She can be reached on Twitter @LoriHandrahan2