RENO (NV)
Reno Gazette-Journal
Martha Bellisle
RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
Posted: 10/9/2005
After spending his life drunk to avoid the pain left by abuse, a man shares his childhood secret: A priest, claiming he was investigating concerns that the boy, then 12, might be gay, molested and raped him and demanded his silence.
Two women, now in their 50s, relate how another priest took them as girls to a drive-in theater, and, while sitting between them with a blanket across their laps, allegedly molested them.
Another local woman tells her story of a third Reno priest who she said repeatedly molested and raped her at the rectory, in his car and at a family cabin, leaving her emotionally devastated, addicted and suicidal, she recalls.
While the clergy sex-abuse scandal has raged in other parts of the country since the story broke in Boston in 2002 with news of multimillion-dollar settlements to hundreds of victims, the Diocese of Reno has seemingly remained an oasis in the crisis.
But recent interviews with six people who grew up in Reno and Carson City in religious families indicate that this community was not spared.