By Judy Wiff
River Falls Journal
January 4, 2008
http://www.riverfallsjournal.com/articles/index.cfm?id=85538§ion=homepage&freebie_ check&CFID=81094751&CFTOKEN=27580626&jsessionid=8830c34cd246576e5f5d
She was five or six the first time she remembers her brother sexually assaulting her.
She remembers the smell of oil and mildew in the machine shed "on top of the hill" at their home near Minocqua. She was wearing red plaid pants, a blue shirt with white buttons and navy blue deck shoes.
Her brother, who would have been 17 or 18, took her into the shed, closed the door and told her to remove her clothing. It hurt, but he told her it's "supposed to feel that way." His hands were cold.
He said, "Don't tell, Mom."
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| Sue Wilson, 43, didnt officially report childhood sexual abuse until early last year. She says she has struggled for years to put the abuse behind her, while her brother, who was an adult during most of the abuse, walks free. |
She didn't tell that time, nor the next, nor the next, nor the next, nor the next.
Last February Jim Brostowitz, of Hazelhurst, admitted on tape to molesting his little sister. When interviewed by Oneida County investigators, he admitted assaulting both her and another sister starting when the girls were about five.
In a written statement to police he admits "experimenting sexually" with his little sisters and assaulting Sue twice when she was 16 and he was 28.
He was held in the Oneida County Jail for two days and released when the district attorney informed investigators that, even though Brostowitz had confessed, he couldn't be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had passed. His wife picked him up at jail, and he went home.
That's not enough, says Sue Wilson, Beldenville. It's not enough for the damage he did to her. She is pinning her hopes on a new bill introduced in the Wisconsin Legislature that would extend the time for victims of childhood sexual assault to file civil lawsuits against their abusers.
While she told her fianc, John Wilson, just before their marriage and her mother a short time later, Sue didn't report the abuse to authorities until 10 months ago. She is now 43. Her brother is 55.
'In the back of your mind'
"I never thought about it at that time," said Wilson of her life in the decades after the abuse. "You just put it in the back of your mind and you forget about it."
Events — such as seeing a man with his daughter in the mall — and some odors occasionally triggered flashbacks. But for most the most part, Wilson put the abuse out of her mind.
She has no idea why, but suddenly in late 2006 she couldn't forget anymore.
Wilson, an avid outdoorswoman, began thinking of suicide. She thought of hanging herself from her tree stand. She considered ramming her Jeep into a clump of trees on the road near her house.
"I didn't have a direct plan, but I was conscious of what I was doing," said Wilson. She was fighting the urge to give up.
"Every night when I came in from hunting, I thought, 'I won.'"
"I didn't see it coming. I didn't recognize it," she says now. "It pretty much took me over."
Then one day she left her home, her family and her life.
She said the only thing she could think about was putting her whole life behind her and starting new.
"And I left — for a day," she said with a tight little laugh.
She drove and drove and drove.
"I was just running, wanting to leave it all behind," said Wilson. A friend called repeatedly on her cell phone, asking Wilson to calm down and come home. When she did, she and John, a River Falls police investigator, talked for hours.
"The next morning he asked me if my bags were packed," said Wilson. Her husband told her he was taking her to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "He said he had made an appointment for me."
A diagnosis
As they checked in at the front desk, her husband slipped the nurse a note. Wilson isn't sure what it said, but she remembers the woman's reaction.
"She pipes up and says, 'You need to go through the emergency room,'" said Wilson.
Before she knew it, she found herself wearing a paper gown in an empty room.
"I was stuck in a room with nothing that I could use to hurt myself."
Then she was taken to the third floor, the psychiatric ward. She was there for five days.
"The doctors wouldn't leave until they got everything, step by step," said Wilson. "They wouldn't let me not talk about it." She talked to doctors, nurses and other patients in group therapy sessions.
"They explained what was happening," said Wilson. Doctors told her that her post traumatic stress disorder wasn't unusual for someone who had lived through the kind of abuse she had endured.
They told her people can live normally for years, then break. Talking with others who'd survived similar abuse also helped.
She came back home the week before Christmas, a time that had always been stressful for her.
"Christmas was the last time I remember Jim abusing me," she said.
In February she made an appointment to talk to an investigator in the Oneida County Sheriff's Department.
The investigation
Det. Sgt. Teresa Smoczyk interviewed her, and they arranged for Wilson to call her brother, first by one cell phone and later using another brother's cell phone, to tape Jim's statements.
Wilson has copies of those tapes. Since she hadn't talked to her brother for over a decade, Jim Brostowitz sounds a little surprised to hear from her.
She tells him she's having nightmares and flashbacks about the things he did to her and needs to talk about why he did it.
Though he says he doesn't remember some of the details the same way she does, Brostowitz admits to the abuse.
"I don't know if it was curiosity at the time or overactive hormones, but I know it wasn't right," he says.
As for the later incidents at his home where Sue had come to babysit, Brostowitz says he was young and his wife "wasn't real receptive to sex at the time."
He says he doesn't remember the details of one incident she remembers.
Wilson, prompted by the investigator, asks if he has ever had intercourse with his sisters.
"No," he replies, "That I would remember."
But while he doesn't remember some of the details Wilson remembers, he says he also molested another sister when she was also about five.
"(She) and I, we goofed around a little bit," he says.
He also tells Wilson he's sorry: "I can't apologize enough for putting you through this."
Following those taped conversations, Smoczyk and another investigator interviewed Brostowitz at the Minocqua, Hazelhurst, Lake Tomahawk Middle School where he worked in the maintenance department.
According to the investigators' report, Brostowitz was surprised they wanted to speak with him, "that this was stuff that happened when he was a kid between himself and his sister."
According to the report, he described the assaults in detail, even telling about an incident Wilson doesn't remember.
When an investigator asked if Brostowitz had ever had sex with his sister, the report says he said no because she was his sister and "You don't do that."
Also, according to the investigators' report, "(He) said that he hates pedophiles and he thinks they should be shot."
In a handwritten statement to investigators, Brostowitz admits molesting another sister when she was ages five to nine and Wilson at age five and when she was a teenager.
No charges
After Brostowitz signed his statement, he was arrested and taken to jail Feb. 12. He was released Feb. 14 after DA Patrick O'Melia called to say he had checked with the Wisconsin attorney general's office, but Brostowitz wouldn't be charged because the statute of limitations had passed.
Investigators at first believed they could prosecute Brostowitz on two counts of first-degree sexual assault, two counts of second-degree sexual assault and four counts of incest because Wilson reported the abuse before she turned 45. But because the events occurred before 1989, a new state law does not apply.
"They had to let him go because of that loophole," said Wilson.
What was her reaction?
"I was disappointed, angry," she said. "More disappointed than anything."
Oneida County Sheriff Jeffrey Hoffman wrote letters to Gov. Jim Doyle and state and federal lawmakers, urging them to plug this hole in the law.
"I know that over the years, the statutes involving child sexual assault have been changed to give the victims time to acknowledge their abuse and report it," wrote Hoffman. "It appears that these changes have left out several generations of victims.
"It took a lot for this victim to come forward, and we had to tell her that though her brother confessed to these crimes, the extension of the statute of limitation does not apply to her because these events occurred before 1989."
He concludes, "We have come so far in how we deal with victims of sexual abuse that I was shocked that there was such a hole in our laws.
"We can only hope that the suspect in this case has not victimized or does not victimize any of the children at the school where he has worked for over 20 years."
Wilson agrees with all that. Her brother quit his job at the school and now works at an industrial plant.
"I'd like to see him in prison," she said. "I would know that he would remember every day why he's there. I don't know how else I could make him never forget what he did."
At this point, the law doesn't even allow her to file a civil lawsuit against him.
A new bill in the Wisconsin Legislature would let her and others like her file civil suits against their abusers.
Wilson said if that law is passed, she will sue.
"I'm not looking for a sum of money," Wilson said. Instead, she would like Brostowitz to be ordered to make payments, monthly payments, to an abuse shelter.
That way, she said, he would be reminded regularly of what he did to his sisters.
"I've had to live with it for how many years," she said, "and he just walks free with his head up."
Wilson works in the River Falls Journal's Classifieds Call Center.
Contact Judy Wiff at regional@rivertowns.net or 426-1049.
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