As a longtime music journalist who needed extra income in 2006, I turned toward another passion — sports.
Since then, I’ve covered high school football, basketball, volleyball, tennis and soccer – as well as music — for area print and online outlets. Yet most of my sports writing has involved stories about youth athletes of high school age or younger.
Since many of my subjects are between the ages of 7 and 14, I try to notify their parents to get permission for an interview before conducting it. And many of those parents still prefer to be present during an in-person interview, or involved in a conference call if it’s a phone interview.
And we all know why, especially after stories that have surfaced during the past six months about alleged sexual abuse, involving both boys and girls, by former coaches (Jerry Sandusky while in the Penn State University football program; Bernie Fine while with the Syracuse University basketball program, and South African International Tennis Hall-of-Famer Bob Hewitt).
Sports has thrown out a welcome mat for sexual predators for too long, considering that all of these allegations go back for decades. And like most of us, I’m appalled by them. But unlike most of us, at least hopefully, I have special reason to be.
I suffered sexual abuse at age 13, and like most kids that age who go through it, I stayed quiet for a long time because of the humiliation. I didn’t tell anyone about it for 15 years, and most people who know me have never had an avenue to know about it until now. I’m finally opening up because I feel like these sports stories are the tip of the iceberg, and that any of us with first-hand knowledge to share might be able to keep some kids from the same fate in the future.
In my case, the abuser was my mother’s second husband (someone I could never refer to as a stepfather, and who’s been dead since 1982). I never told my mother (who died in 2005), for a variety of reasons, or my father (who died in 1989), because he would have shot him. He owned several handguns, and the only reason I don’t say that he would’ve killed him is that I can’t actually attest to his marksmanship.
My parents had divorced when I was 7, and my brother was 3. My mother was a sweet woman who lacked common sense, and having been born in the 1930s, she thought it was more important to be married than happy. She was hitched to the aforementioned Missouri-born redneck shortly after her divorce, and I’ve referred to his home state ever since as Misery.
We had to relocate often, since he would eventually get caught stealing money from any employer who hired him. I remember moving from South Florida to St. Louis for a year at age 10 before returning, and know that I attended more than eight different public schools between grades one and eight.
Other forms of abuse preceded, and continued on after, the sexual assault, which happened only once (I wouldn’t have allowed it to happen again, one way or another, and thankfully never had to). Neither my subservient mother nor my preschool little brother posed the thought-provoking threat to my abuser that I did, so I took a lot of verbal jabs and was spanked often, whether by hand or belt.
The intellectual abuse never stopped. If any of the kids on the other side of the family did something that required a scapegoat, I’d get the blame and subsequent punishment. His family especially loathed me, and when his mother told me, “You’ll never amount to nothin’” one day, I purposely corrected her grammar. I took my lumps for it, but sometimes that was worth it.
Yet, in retrospect, all of this probably branded me as someone who needed to be “broken,” and may have led to the aforementioned incident.
It happened on a typical weekday afternoon. I was playing outside after school when he arrived home from work unannounced, but with one of his nieces in tow. Within 10 minutes, I was called inside.
Knowing I was heterosexual, he’d brought along his niece to use as bait. She was in her early 20s and newly married, but his family was obviously familiar with keeping secrets. He called me in, and as I opened the bedroom door, she was lying naked on the bed and my curiosity overwhelmed my better judgment (even as I asked her if her husband knew where she was).
The closet inbreeding bisexual’s ruse had worked. Thankfully there was no sodomy involved, but let’s just say that I participated in several oral activities that remain very foreign to me, and were meant to cause confusion and shame. Which they did. And it wasn’t exactly a banner way to lose one’s virginity during intercourse with a member of the opposite sex, either.
He didn’t force himself on me, but had successfully tricked me. When we got in the car in the late afternoon and went to pick up my mother from work, it was as if it had never happened. I sat there in the car on the way home feeling guilt, embarrassment and an urge to blurt it all out to her.
But I never did, just as he’d suspected I wouldn’t. It was a power play, and I’m sure he felt subsequently empowered over me, at least for the next year.
During that time I ran away from home, only to be found and brought back. I even plotted to kill him, as much to rid my family of his domineering presence as for what he’d done to me. But when they decided to move to Georgia as I was set to enter high school, I knew I had an opportunity to get away. I stayed in South Florida to live with my father.
Power and trickery often play into the sexual abuse of pre-high school kids as much as sex does. The allegations against Hewitt, documented on a December 2011 airing of the HBO series Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, involved him tricking pre-teen and teenage girls into thinking that sex was part of their tennis training from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Sandusky’s case has been the most publicized, largely because it caused Penn State University to fire its legendary football coach, Joe Paterno (who died at age 85 two-and-a-half months later after undergoing treatments for lung cancer). Sandusky is the former Penn State assistant coach who’s been charged by a grand jury with 52 criminal counts of sexual assaults and abuse of 10 boys dating back to the 1990s.
New documents filed by Sandusky’s attorneys in early May suggest that there may now be even as many as 17 to 18 accusers in the child sexual abuse case that’s set to go to trial Tuesday. The boys were recruited through The Second Mile, Sandusky’s charity for at-risk boys.
At-risk, indeed. Mike McQueary, a former Penn State quarterback and assistant coach (who’s since been placed on paid administrative leave, and who said he was filing a “whistleblower” suit against Penn State on May 8) allegedly saw Sandusky raping a boy in the showers at the school’s football facility in either 2001 or 2002. One of Sandusky’s attorneys, Karl Rominger, had the gall to suggest that he was teaching kids about hygiene.
Another of Sandusky’s lawyers, Joseph Amendola, asked what greater motivation there could be for the alleged victims than money. This was on Dec. 13, the day that Sandusky waived his preliminary hearing and proceeded directly to trial — rather than appear that day before his accusers, who must have endured a gut-wrenching ordeal in the days, weeks and months leading up to that courtroom appearance. Media reports then surfaced that Amendola had, at age 48, impregnated a Pennsylvania girl who was 16 (the age of consent in that state), and later married the teenager.
Penn State is now a house of cards. The school’s vice president and athletic director were both fired, and charged with perjury and failing to properly report suspected child abuse. Both men, as well as Sandusky, will attempt to fight their cases by attacking McQueary’s credibility.
In its Nov. 28, 2011, issue, Sports Illustrated detailed a series of pawns who’ve replaced the departed executives and are heading up internal investigations at the university. It all adds up to corporate inbreeding and cover-ups in Pennsylvania that might make certain natives of St. Louis, Misery, blush.
Even more troubling, on some levels, is the case of Fine, the former Syracuse assistant basketball coach. In a mid-November 2011 installment of its Outside the Lines program, ESPN aired a story about 39-year-old former Syracuse ball boy Bobby Davis, who alleged that Fine had taken him on out-of-town game trips to molest him starting when he was 12. Davis’ 45-year-old stepbrother, Mike Lang, then corroborated the story by saying that Fine had molested him as well.
Davis, who now has his own children, broke down during the segment at the thought of someone committing the same acts against his kids, and it was pretty obvious that this wasn’t all an act. But then the my-word-against-yours case turned stranger than fiction. On Nov. 27 of last year, ESPN aired a telephone conversation that Davis had recorded — secretly yet legally — with Laurie Fine, who acknowledged her husband’s penchant for child molestation. Syracuse Chancellor Nancy Cantor fired Fine after the recorded phone conversation went public.
Yet losing his job — one that background checks should have prevented him from getting in the first place — will be Fine’s only punishment. Early last December, Onondaga County (New York) District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick said that these allegations “would have resulted in the arrest of Bernie Fine,” and that Laurie Fine would be investigated “if only for child endangerment,” if the statute of limitations hadn’t expired on the charges.
On May 16, six months after ESPN first aired these alleged molestation charges, Laurie Fine announced that she planned to file a defamation lawsuit against the network. It charges ESPN with “spitefully destroying Laurie Fine’s reputation in an attempt to capitalize financially in the wake of the Penn State sex abuse scandal.”
If ever there was a charge that shouldn’t have a statute of limitations, it’s the sexual abuse of a child. An abused kid’s initial reaction — to remain silent and not draw attention to such an embarrassing situation — plays right into the hands of pedophiles. And the laws allow for that.
As to Amendola’s claim that money is a motivator in the Sandusky case, he’s either lying or couldn’t be more ignorant on the subject. The child’s initial motivation is to try to get his or her dignity back and feel normal again, and once they find that it’s not possible, the next thought is often revenge. Most kids are too naive to be motivated by something so salacious as currency.
Thankfully, there have been repercussions in 2012. In February, a House panel in Tallahassee unanimously approved a measure to punish Florida schools for failing to report child molestation with a $1 million fine per incident. Clearly inspired by the Penn State scandal, Florida voted to strengthen its existing law, which only required people to report such abuse if the suspect was believed to be the child’s caretaker.
In March, NBC News reported that State College psychologist Alycia Chambers had labeled Sandusky a “likely pedophile” in 1998. She’d just interviewed and counseled an 11-year-old boy after the coach had been accused of inappropriate contact with him in the showers on the Penn State campus. Yet no police investigation followed.
Incredibly, Sandusky’s 2001 autobiography was titled Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story. Yet the irony may come back to bite him. The authors of new book that hit stores on April 17, Bill Moushey and Bob Dvorchak, contend that their research for Game Over: Jerry Sandusky, Penn State and the Culture of Silence may have revealed photos of Sandusky with some of the aforementioned boys in his autobiography.
“In essence,” the authors wrote in a statement, “Jerry Sandusky’s own book had provided the investigator with a road map back to himself.”
Trial judge John Cleland has already said that he may throw out several defense subpoenas filed by Amendola, who has asked for a trial delay.
All of these coaches were role models to children who went dangerously out of bounds, and they certainly weren’t the first. Boxer Sugar Ray Leonard went public about his own sexual abuse by a former Olympic coach after 30 years of silence. Generations preceding the 55-year-old champion’s were certainly even less likely to speak up on the subject.
One of the lessons I learned through my ordeal is that all adults are role models to kids who, after all, are preparing to become adults themselves. Even the bad ones can teach us what lessons not to repeat in adulthood. If you’re wronged as a child by an adult, yet you abuse children once you’re older, then you not only didn’t learn anything from the ordeal — you chose never to grow up in the first place.
My father was the role model who taught me the most about what to do, and what not to. On the surface, he was my polar opposite; a hard-drinking, tattooed auto mechanic who served in the United States Army and married four times (with longevity ranges from 10 years to a few months). Yet he’d also contracted polio as a teenager, which forced disfiguring surgery to remove muscles from both his left arm and leg. In less than a year afterward, the polio vaccine was discovered.
It impacted him, to be certain, and was likely his main crutch for the drinking problems that led to his death (the official cause was pneumonia) in Costa Rica at age 59. Yet he’d allowed me to invade his then-bachelor lifestyle and live with him through high school and into college, all after nurturing my love for sports as he shared custody of my brother and I during our formative years. And when I needed eye surgery at age 17, he not only paid for it, but was the one who sat in my hospital room for two days and held the bucket every time I got nauseous with my eyes swollen shut. Now that’s a role model.
My mother’s parents, and her brother and sister-in-law, all loved my father. They all remarked at how I changed after moving in with him; how a quiet, guarded kid (who’d learned that not getting noticed usually resulted in not being punished or abused) became more extroverted and trusting. They just didn’t know the deep, dark secrets as to why.
I started playing music and joined the newspaper staff in high school during those years, and also became an actor, participating in school plays. I’d found myself, and figured out how to be happier despite my dad’s alcoholism. He attended AA meetings, and I made motivational tapes for him. We talked about it, and he knew that he was the only one who could break the cycle. He tried, but never achieved it.
As for my mother, I never blamed her for any of my ordeals with her second husband. That union was her choice, albeit a poor one that was worsened by her lifelong allegiance to him. Part of the reason I never told her about the sexual abuse was that I figured she wouldn’t believe it, or wouldn’t admit it even if she did.
I still remember the call from her to tell me he had died from a heart attack. My brother and I were roommates locally at the time, and she wanted to be in Florida to be closer to us, so we flew out to where she was living in California and drove back cross-country with her.
In 1997, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which later metastasized into her bones. Her last eight years were filled with ups and downs, but to her credit, she looked cancer in the eye; never flinched, and never lost her sense of humor. My brother and I did everything in our power to grant her the wish that she be able to stay in her house until she died. Except for hospital and Hospice stays during her last week, we succeeded. I decided not to talk to her about any abuse near the end, partly because it would’ve been difficult for me if she didn’t believe me, but mostly because I didn’t think she needed any more pain.
That’s the same reason I’ve never told the aunt and uncle referenced above, even though they were practically more like parents to me than my parents. I spent many summers with them, and my three cousins, in New Jersey, both before and after after moving in with my dad. They countered my unstable life with their stability and helped make me into what I am today, and I’m forever grateful for having had them as role models.
But they’re in their early 80s now, and I don’t think any relief I might gain by telling them about it could offset the pain it would cause them. If they read this, then it’s no longer under wraps, and I can only hope to convince them of how much they inadvertently helped me get through, and that I’m unbroken and OK.
So who exactly am I today? I’ll let others be the judge, but I’ve been a musician and writer ever since high school (switching majors from drama to journalism in college). I’ve been happily married for six years to a wonderful woman who’s also a musician; I drink in moderation, and don’t use drugs.
I also never had any therapy, but I admit that approach isn’t for everyone in my situation. I’ve just always felt that true strength comes from within, but that’s a trait I had plenty of time to develop in silence as a child while trying not to get noticed. I have a temper, but can chalk that up to my dad (who I once saw tear the lid off of washing machine at a laundromat, cursing at it all the way, as if it could be insulted). I’m still a bit quiet and guarded, although those seem to be natural tendencies for most straight males.
My wife is one of less than 10 people I’ve ever told about the abuse, and a breast cancer survivor herself, so she’s been a great help during our shared tales of the different forms that being a survivor can take.
She had two children from her previous marriage, so as fate would have it, I became a stepfather. Her daughter was 17 when I met her; her son 11. They’re now 26 and 21, and I’ve used every opportunity to treat them in exactly the opposite way I was treated as a stepchild. They’re both visual artists; strong-willed and strong-minded independent thinkers, music and animal lovers, and great people. As one of my newest family’s biggest fans, I hope I’ve helped in that regard.
As for my brother, we haven’t talked much about what happened, although I’m sure we will now. I didn’t want to broach the subject with him when he was a child because I didn’t want the knowledge of my abuse to cause him harm. Since I knew that I could handle it, I tried to act in a way that would protect him from ever having to experience it. But he was only 10 when they moved to Georgia and I stayed behind, and he was still with them as a teenager when they lived in California.
Did it happen to him? I’ll soon find out, I’m sure. I hope not and don’t think so, but I won’t be shocked if I’m wrong, only deeply saddened. I’ve brought it up on a couple of occasions, but he’s seemed puzzled, hasn’t asked questions, and has since seemed to bury those talks in his subconscious. Maybe that means something that I haven’t wanted to face. But I’m now prepared to talk about it with most family members. They’re the ones who know me well enough to know that I haven’t been damaged by it, at least much.
Whatever my brother faced, he stared it down after some growing pains. After moving away at around the same age as I did, he returned to Florida and attended the same high school I did before dropping out. He later became a carnival worker and survived some wild acts, but he also got his GED and became one of the most book-smart people I know. He’s caring, dependable, punctual and reliable, all the traits of a great friend. He’s been married for 19 years to the sister-in-law that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for more than 21. Neither of us, for whatever reasons, ever fathered any children.
Questionable sexual liaisons between adults occur all the time, having brought down the careers of politicians from Gary Hart to John Edwards to Herman Cain. But sexual offenders against children should have a special circle reserved for them in hell (regardless of the opinions and inactions of the Catholic Church). They’ve done something to someone who was either less likely to be able to fight it, or could more easily be tricked into thinking they didn’t want to. These abusers have falsely empowered themselves by overpowering someone vulnerable. And they might very well have permanently wounded someone on several different levels while they were in their formative years, and not even cared.
But having suffered through such abuse, I realized very soon thereafter that the act damn sure said a great deal more about my abuser than it did about me. I also realized that it didn’t have to define me, while at the same time finding balance by realizing that it indeed eventually helped to define me. How? By strengthening me. If you’ve been through something like that, then you can use it to develop a mental toughness that helps you find perspective during lesser crises.
Yet if you find yourself thinking you’re owed something because of what you’ve been through, you’re on the wrong path. Just because you’ve been through something that most people thankfully don’t have to endure doesn’t make you entitled to anything. There are lots of people around the world who have to go through worse, including kids who suffer through the ultimate abuse.
Six-year-old Makayla Sitton was shot to death in her bed by Paul Michael Merhige on Thanksgiving Day in 2009, and 10-year-old Nubia Barahona was found dead in a plastic bag filled with pesticides in her adopted father’s pickup truck on Valentine’s Day of 2011. Her twin brother Victor was found badly burned with chemicals in the same truck, yet he survived. And these are just two recent local cases, with zero chance of anything ever approaching actual justice for any of their abusers.
Hopefully, Victor will find the inner strength, will and resolve not to become more of a victim of his own personal living hell. He at least has that option, unlike the two little girls, who became brutal murder victims. Remember, those of you who’ve been through sexual abuse, your abusers can’t make you a victim. You survived the abuse, so only you can do that. They want you to feel victimized, but if you can develop a strong mental resolve, you can deny them of that.
They may have been able to control what your body did temporarily, but only you control your mind permanently. It’s easier said than done, but it can be done.
Children are the essence of humanity. They speak the truth by nature, and lack the experience to be either politically correct or politically incorrect. They are us without the ego, cynicism, workload, finances and jadedness. And they often have great instincts. I’ve found that when you interview a child with the same respect as you would an adult and ease them out of any initial nervousness, they pick up on it, appreciate it, and often respond with a better interview than their grown-up counterparts.
Crimes against children are committed by only the worst of the worst, who should be punished accordingly. For too long, kids have been looked at more as parental property than human beings by society. But the tide against child sex abusers appears to be turning in the present because of people telling the stories of what they’ve been through.
This isn’t an act of bravery on my part. My abuser is dead. But thanks to the people who are standing up against their living, breathing abusers worldwide, the lenient laws against sexual child abuse – and against those who knowingly cover it up by not reporting it to authorities — will change sooner rather than later.
For everyone except sexual predators, and especially for those of us who’ve been through it, that’s cause for a sigh of relief.