Scott Brown Played down Claims of Victim, by Peter Gelzinis, Boston Herald, February 18, 2011

Scott Brown Played down Claims of Victim

By Peter Gelzinis
Boston Herald
February 18, 2011

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view/20110218scott_brown_played_down_claims_of_victim/srvc=home&position=4

AT ODDS: Although U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, above, has opened up about his own sexual abuse, he still endorsed former rep and Wareham police officer Jeff Perry, inset, in his heated 10th Congressional District race against Democrat Bill Keating.

It wasn’t Scott Brown, insurgent U.S. senator and GOP poster boy, who repeatedly urged the voters of the 10th Congressional District last fall to disregard the anguished claims of a sexual abuse victim named Lisa Allen.

It was Scott Brown, who we now discover was sexually assaulted as a child.

Even as Lisa Allen came forward to accuse former state rep and Wareham police officer Jeff Perry of doing nothing while a fellow cop sexually assaulted her eight years ago, Brown didn’t just ignore her, he pooh-poohed the story.

“Voters don’t want to hear about this (the sexual abuse of Allen),” Brown told a Hyannis crowd in June after they ponied up $1,200 a head to attend a fund-raiser he hosted for Perry. “They want to get back to the issues,” Scott insisted.

As it turned out, voters did want to hear about it.

Perry lost.

Last summer and fall, as a ghost writer chronicled the story of Brown’s tough childhood — with its description of a sexual attack by a camp counselor on the Cape — our junior senator seldom missed an opportunity to throw an endorsing arm around Jeff Perry.

That was then.

Now, Brown steps forward to tell us of his own victimization at the hands of a hippie counselor at a Christian camp when he was 10 years old.

What do you think of the latest revelations from Sen. Brown? Join in the Friday Throwdown today, 12-1.

Actually, Scott doesn’t tell us. He told Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes.” In the clip handed to the local news outlets, a rather stone-faced Brown says to Stahl: “As predators do . . . he said, ‘If you tell anybody . . . I will kill you. I will make sure that nobody believes you.’ ”

Interesting choice of words for a guy who blasted the media last year for not letting go of a squalid piece of Jeff Perry’s past, or Lisa Allen’s torment. “Shame on them,” Scott Brown railed, “for dredging these things up.”

If the media infuriated him, Brown trained his full rage on Perry’s opponent, Bill Keating. Brown kept saying it was “dirty politics” for Keating to remind the voters of the young girl who might have escaped her attacker had Jeff Perry chosen to act.

In a year when Scott Brown’s rise has become the stuff of legend, when many profiles have already been written, it’s curious that he waits until the eve of his national book tour to come forward and officially take his place among the community of sexual abuse victims.

For Scott Brown to step forward and share this painful piece of his past took a certain courage.

It’s just too bad he didn’t step up for Lisa Allen.