IL--Victims praise judge for looking at recent Hastert wrongs
For immediate release: Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (314 566 9790, 314 645 5915 home,[email protected])
We’re glad a judge will consider Denny Hastert’s most recent wrongdoing – his attempt to frame a man he molested as a child – when he sentences the politician. This is the second worst crime Hastert committed, second only to his repeated child sex crimes.
Hastert told the FBI he was being extorted. He let agents listen in on a call with one of his victims, hoping that they would falsely conclude that Hastert, not the child sex abuse victim, was the one who was suffering and needed law enforcement’s help. Shame on him.
Had Hastert succeeded in his calculated deceit, a man who had been sexually violated as a child might have ended up in prison, falsely convicted of extorting money from a powerful politician.
So again, we’re grateful that the judge will look at this deliberate deception when pondering Hastert’s sentence.
No matter what the legal system does or doesn’t do, we urge every single person who saw, suspected or suffered child sex crimes or cover ups by Hastert to protect kids by calling police, get help by calling therapists, expose wrongdoers by calling law enforcement, get justice by calling attorneys, and be comforted by calling support groups like ours. This is how kids will be safer, adults will recover, criminals will be prosecuted, cover ups will be deterred and the truth will surface.
(SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. SNAP was founded in 1988 and has more than 20,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our website is SNAPnetwork.org)
Contact - David Clohessy (314-566-9790 cell, [email protected]), Barbara Dorris (314-503-0003 cell, [email protected]), Barbara Blaine (312-399-4747, [email protected])
Filing: Hastert lawyers question if groin rub amounted to sexual abuse.
Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune
The federal judge overseeing Dennis Hastert's hush money case said he intends to factor in at Hastert's upcoming sentencing that the former speaker lied to federal authorities about being extorted over false claims of sexual abuse decades ago.
"That's not conduct that's 40 years old. That's conduct that's a year old," U.S. District Court Judge Thomas M. Durkin said at a hearing in the case Wednesday. "Among the aggravating factors in this case, that's a big one."
In their filing last week asking for up to six months in prison for Hastert, prosecutors said he lied in a February 2015 proffer session that a former Yorkville High School student — identified only as Individual A — was extorting him for . . .
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