By Jill Vejnoska
Virginian Pilot [Virginia]
March 13, 2007
http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=121038&ran=197618&tref=po
The anchorman seemed uncharacteristically nervous.
Thomas Roberts' voice shook slightly as he addressed his audience. But he pressed on because in some ways it was the most important story he'd ever tell.
It's about him - and something no one else should have to endure.
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| Thomas Roberts THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT FILE PHOTO |
"Over the past two years, I just started to realize how interrupted my life really was," said Roberts, 34, an anchor for CNN's Headline News, testifying last March before the Maryland House Judiciary Committee. "In certain respects, I've spent two-thirds of my life completely emotionally frozen."
The clip of Roberts' testimony is part of "Sins of the Father," a special report that aired at 10 p.m. Monday on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360."
Hampton Roads viewers might recognize him as the newsman who worked at WAVY-TV in Portsmouth for a couple of years before leaving late in 2001 for the high-profile job at Headline News.
Monday night, Roberts discussed for the first time on television his harrowing account of being sexually abused by a Catholic priest starting at age 14 in Maryland.
Roberts kept secret this part of his life in the two years he worked at Channel 10 in Hampton Roads starting in December 1999. He was the NBC affiliate's 5 p.m. co-anchor as well as an investigative/consumer affairs reporter.
In that capacity, he reported on the abuses at a puppy mill on the Virginia/North Carolina border, which led to authorities closing the mill. It was work such as that that helped persuade readers of The Virginian-Pilot's Daily Break section to vote him the market's favorite male anchor in 2001.
In fact, the veteran newsman communicated his secret to no one for almost 20 years, even after feelings of "self-hatred" and emotional imprisonment led him to attempt suicide.
"I'll kill myself and I'll get out of it that way,' " Roberts remembers thinking on Nov. 1, 1987, as he wrote a note that began "Dear Everybody." He downed some of his mother's painkillers and lay down waiting for it to be over. " No one will have to know. I won't have to tell, " he said later.
Discovered in time by his older sister, Patsy, Roberts remained mum about the source of his anguish, even as he continued being abused by the Rev. Jerome F. Toohey Jr., known as "Father Jeff," for several more years. Toohey was the respected chaplain of Calvert Hall College High School, a prestigious Catholic school in Towson, Md.
Roberts' mother and father were divorcing, and Michelle Roberts had sought out Toohey as a mentor and male influence for her only son.
"Who better than the Catholic priest who's charming and wonderful," Michelle Roberts asks Cooper sadly. "I wanted Tom to be just like him."
Just as Bob Woodruff's recent ABC News special "To Iraq and Back" drew attention to the plight of severely injured soldiers, "Sins of the Father" put a recognizable, extremely human face on child sexual abuse. And like the Woodruff report, it expanded its focus to other victims, and what is or isn't being done to help them.
More than a decade earlier, another young man had accused Toohey of abusing him, but Michael Goles' claims had fallen on disbelieving ears. That all began to change in 2004 when Roberts broke his silence and sought professional counseling. Despite being "petrified" about how the revelation might affect his personal and professional life, he disclosed the abuse to his family, reported Toohey to the Baltimore Archdiocese and telephoned Goles.
"I felt that I owed him an apology," Roberts tells Cooper, starting to tear up.
Toohey eventually pleaded guilty to sexually abusing Roberts and was sentenced to five years in prison, all but 18 months of it suspended.
After just 10 months, Toohey was released to home detention, leading Roberts to reflect candidly on Monday night's program about the justice system, "Do I get early release from this? No? You had to put up with it to survive, and it'll be your story for the rest of your life. No early release from this story."
Staff writer Larry Bonko contributed to this article.
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