http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/exclusive-alleged-dennis-hastert-sex-abuse-victim-named/story?id=31530828
Exclusive: Alleged Dennis Hastert Sex Abuse Victim Named by Family
Exclusive: Alleged Dennis Hastert Sex Abuse Victim Named by Family
Jolene said that Steve told her the abuse lasted throughout
Steve’s four years of high school as he served as team student manager. “Mr.
Hastert had plenty of opportunities to be alone with Steve, because he was there
before the meets,” she said. “He was there after everything because he did the
laundry, the uniforms. So he was there by himself with him,” she
added.
Her brother also spent time with Hastert as a member of an
Explorers troop, which Hastert ran. Photos taken by her brother show Hastert
with a group of boys on a diving trip to the Bahamas.
Reinboldt’s sister says she has no doubts about the veracity of
what her brother told her 36 years ago.
“[Steve] just told me the basics. I believed him 100 percent. But
he never went into any details -– where it happened, or what the sexual
experiences were like, anything like that,” Jolene said.
Jolene said she believes the abuse ended when Steve moved
away after his high school graduation in 1971. Reinboldt died of AIDS in 1995. She believes Hastert’s alleged
actions irrevocably changed Steve's life for the worse.
“He took his belief in himself and his kind of right to be a
normal person,” Jolene said. “Here was the mentor, the man who was, you know,
basically his friend and stepped into that parental role, who was the one who
was abusing him… He damaged Steve I think more than any of us will ever
know.”
Her anger boiled over when she said Hastert was so “brash” as to
show up at Steve’s funeral viewing.
“I was just there just trying to bite my tongue thinking that
blood was coming out because I was just… So after he had gone through the line I
followed him out into the parking lot of the funeral home,” Jolene said. “I
said, ‘I want to know why you did what you did to my brother.’ And he just stood
there and stared at me. He didn’t say, ‘What are you talking about?’ you know,
[or], ‘What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He just stood there and
stared at me.
“Then I just continued to say, ‘I want you to know your secret
didn’t die in there with my brother. And I want you to remember that I’m out
here and that I know.’ And again, he just stood there and he did not say a
word.”
Hastert got in his car and drove away. Jolene said Hastert’s
non-response “said everything.”
In the two decades after Steve’s death, Jolene said that
she tried to expose Hastert, even writing to ABC News and another news
organization as well as some advocacy groups in 2006 after another congressman,
Rep. Mark Foley, was discovered having sexually explicit message
exchanges with an underage male
page.
At the time ABC News could not corroborate Jolene's allegation and
Hastert denied the claim.
So for years, Jolene watched helplessly as Hastert basked in fame
and power, seated to the left of the president for years in the early 2000s for
the nationally-televised State of the Union address.
“I would just watch for a while and then I would just have to get
up and leave the room and just, you know, either cry or scream,” Jolene said. “I
can’t believe the audacity of that man and how he thinks he will get away with
it.”
She said she struggled with the decision to try and put it all
behind her.
“I finally got to a point where I needed – I just had to lay it
down,” she said. “And right before this last Christmas, I had – I have a couple
of bins and things, boxes that have a lot of his [Steve’s] stuff in it – and I
just remember sitting on the floor, packing it all up and just saying, ‘Steve, I
did the best I could. And I know you’re okay.’”
Then just two weeks ago, Jolene said she got a message from the
FBI. They wanted to talk about Hastert.
“That’s when I just kind of lost it and said, 'Oh my God, I can’t
believe – I never thought I was going to get this phone call… I thought it was
over,'” she said.
A few days after that Jolene and her husband watched on television
as it was reported Hastert had been indicted on charges of bank fraud relating
to large payments to someone that Hastert undertook to conceal “prior
misconduct.”
“There are no words to describe what it felt like, to, you, know,
it’s just like Stevie had done it. It’s gonna happen, we got him,” she recalls
thinking when the news broke.
Sources knowledgeable of the case told ABC News Hastert was paying
a man -- still unidentified except as “Individual A” -- hundreds of thousands of
dollars to hide that Hastert had engaged in sexual misconduct with him while
Hastert was the high school wrestling coach.
Jolene never asked for money from Hastert, but his sister believes
that “Individual A” is familiar with what happened with her brother. She does
not know who Individual A is, but she said she’s thankful that Hastert’s alleged
misconduct is coming to light.
“I feel vindicated and that Steve’s vindicated, that Mr. Hastert
can’t pull this wool over everybody’s eyes,” she said. “Finally the truth comes
out.”
Jolene said she wanted to speak publicly on behalf of her family
about her brother’s ordeal because she believes there may be other victims and
she wanted them to know they’re not alone, “that when they were kids, at that
point in their life when they were going through this, it wasn't talked about
like it is now.”
“But now there’s people that are going to believe them,” Jolene
said. “I just think it’s really important that these kids get a chance to work
through this because I think it’s going to give them a lot of relief... Please,
come forward.”
After the interview with Jolene aired on “Good Morning
America,” a Yorkville man who said he was a former high school wrestler and
friend of Steve’s told The Chicago Sun-Times he doubted the allegations about Hastert and
Steve. “Personally, unless Denny [Hastert] came to me and said, ‘I did something
bad,’ I truly couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it,’” 61-year-old Mike
Thanepohn told the paper.
A friend of Steve’s, who did not want to be
identified, told NBC News today that, like Jolene, Steve also told him in
1974 that he had his first sexual encounter with Hastert when Steve was a
student.
Hastert, now 73, is scheduled to make his first court appearance
regarding the fraud charges next week. Hastert and his representatives have
repeatedly declined to comment on the allegations, including to ABC News for
this report.
The FBI declined to comment for this report.
ABC News' Megan Chuchmach,
Whitney Lloyd, Randy Kreider and Cho Park contributed to this report. John
Capell is a freelance journalist based in the Northwest and frequent contributor
to ABC News.
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