BALTIMORE (MD)
Baltimore Sun
Dan Rodricks
I COUNT at least three epiphanies - sudden and stunning realities he had ignored, denied or just missed for nearly three decades - that Bob Russell experienced as he moved firmly into middle age and finally faced the old demon named Brett.
The first came in June 2001, when Russell, now a force in the Baltimore chapter of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), heard a news report of a schoolteacher who had received a heavy jail sentence for sexually abusing a student, in either Maryland or Pennsylvania. Russell does not recall why this case, among the ugly many that stream in and out of public consciousness, made him decide to unlock his own secret.
But it did.
"That," Russell says, "was when I decided, 'OK, enough. What happened to [me] has happened to others, and it has got to stop. Enough. It was not [my] fault. Stop running from it. It is not [my] shame. It is the shame of the Roman Catholic Church.'"
For years, Russell had kept his secret "locked in a steel box with chains around it."
He never told anyone - not his parents, not classmates, not the woman who became his wife - what had happened in 1973, when he was a 15-year-old sophomore at Calvert Hall College, the all-boys Catholic high school in Towson.
Twice, Russell says, a priest named Laurence Brett molested him.