CINCINNATI (OH)
WCPO TV
Nov. 18, 2019
By Craig Cheatham, Paula Christian and Dan Monk
He was a young science teacher at the all-boys Purcell High School in 1978, when he said a sobbing student came to him and another teacher with a shocking story.
“Brother Frank Russell raped me,” the student said.
“At first it was disbelief,” the teacher said. “But then I thought ‘Oh my God, here it is again.’”
That teacher spoke for the first time to WCPO, requesting anonymity because of his own sexual abuse by a priest as a child. When he encountered abuse again, this time as a teacher, he said he reported it to the school right away. The Marianist Province denied seeing a report back then.
“He was in charge of detention at the high school … and we learned from this student that Brother Russell would take students, those who had misbehaved, to a local motel and have sex with them,” he said.
The teacher said Russell, who was a brother in the Marianist Catholic order and an assistant principal, never returned to Purcell, and the principal told him Russell went to Boston.
In its three-month I-Team investigation WCPO discovered the Catholic Church often moved priests and brothers to new parishes and schools after they are accused of abuse or inappropriate behavior, without sharing that information with the public.
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