I suppose you can excuse the ignorance of those who keep asking why Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s teenage accusers waited so long to speak up about his alleged sexual misconduct. But you can’t in Boston, ground zero of the Catholic sex abuse scandal. We know better. Not telling for decades is typical — not rare, not suspicious, not disqualifying.
A priest her family trusted abused Kristen Merrill, 53, as a teenager. She did not tell police, friends, her parents, or grandmother, a devout Catholic who cooked at the North Andover rectory and said her rosary daily. “She would have slapped me in the face,” Merrill said. She did not tell either of her two husbands or anyone at all for 30 years. After enduring eating disorders and incidences of cutting herself, she told her therapist, in private.
A priest abused David O’Regan, 68, a 6-foot, 4-inch bear of a man, when he was a fifth-grader at Catholic summer camp. For four decades he said nothing. He raised six children, took in dozens of foster children, worked for the Post Office, taught religious education, and led a prayer group at his parish near Boston.
But in 2002, when priests’ crimes hit the news, he understood: The hierarchy knew all about deviant priests, and did nothing. After nightmares, rages, and an emotional unraveling, O’Regan told his wife. But he told her while driving 70 miles per hour on the Mass. Pike. That way he could look straight ahead, not into her eyes.
In 2005 a Newton firefighter’s trial testimony sent Paul Shanley, Boston’s most notorious priest abuser, to prison for a dozen years. Shanley was a famed, charismatic “street priest” who grew his hair long and scoured Boston’s Combat Zone for runaway teens to “rescue.”
He was accused of raping dozens of the teens as well as young boys. The Newton firefighter was 6 when Shanley first raped him, taking him on Sunday mornings from catechism at St. Jean l’Evangeliste Church. This went on for three years. Nobody noticed a thing. At 27, he spoke to a lawyer.
“I am so sick of people asking why victims take so long to come forward,” said Christine Hickey, now 62, who waited 25 years to tell people that priest James Porter raped her when she was 11.
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“Don’t they read anything?” she said. “Or learn anything?”
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who has represented hundreds of abuse survivors, says he regularly gets calls from octogenarians 50 years after their assault. “I just spoke to an 84-year-old who said his family members would be hurt by the news. But he said they’re all dead now, so he can come forward.”
Why years of silence? The reasons, lawyers and survivors say, are shame, guilt, blame, trauma. Fear you’ll be disbelieved, humiliated, attacked, called a vicious liar out to ruin somebody’s life — claims made against Kavanaugh’s accusers last week.
Even when the accused does turn out to be a predator, his defenders may deny it, says Carmen Durso, an attorney who has represented hundreds of survivors. Why? Because that person’s guilt casts doubt on defenders’ judgment. Because it means they were duped and manipulated by the friend, colleague, brother, husband, or son they thought they knew, who’d seemed like such a wonderful guy. But in secret, behind locked doors, he was a monster.
Kristen Merrill understands such denial well. The priest who slipped his hands down her blouse in a rectory kitchen was beloved around town, leader of the Catholic Youth Organization, a regular at the fire station. When she first went public, “People I hadn’t talked to since high school called and said it wasn’t him. ‘You’re lying about Father Paul. How can you do this to him?’ People in high places in town, policemen, they’d say to me, ‘You’re just doing it for the money.’ ”
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When Father Paul J. Finegan was defrocked after admitting to abusing her and another girl, as well as abusing several boys, did anyone call back to say, “I’m sorry?”
“No,” she said. “No one.”
Margery Eagan is cohost of WGBH’s “Boston Public Radio.” Her column appears regularly in the Globe.