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  Another Alleged Victim of Sexual Abuse at Camp Good News in Mass.

NECN
November 17, 2011

http://www.necn.com/11/17/11/Another-alleged-victim-of-sexual-abuse-a/landing_newengland.html?blockID=596160&feedID=4206

[with video]

Another alleged victim of sex abuse at a Cape Cod summer camp has come forward. He joins a growing chorus of alleged victims at Camp Good News who say they were abused decades ago when they were children.

"I was terrified," said the man who is going by the name Robert Roe.

Fourty years later and he's still terrified. Roe was a camper at Camp Good News from 1968 through 1970. He said when he was eight years old, a counselor, Ernest Milnes, sexually abused him repeatedly, so much so his injured his genitals.

"A couple days later I was sore and swollen...I was treated by the camp nurse."

Roe said he told the nurse what had happened and she reacted with disbelief. Roe said she must have told Milnes what he said because the counselor came after him.

"Picked me up by my feet and banged my head, also punched me square in the face so I had black eyes," said Roe.

He said the camp sent him to the hospital for X-rays, but didn't tell his parents the truth about the incident.

Letters he saved from his parents show how the camp downplayed it.

In a letter dated August 19, 1970 his mother wrote, "The nurse at your camp called me tonight and told me you had an accident. She said everything is all right, and there was nothing to worry about."

"When I was out of there and felt I was safe I told my father about it," said Roe. "He actually called them and they told him out right, 'He (Roe) was sexually abused and that they had fired him (Milnes).'

But a photo from 1974 shows Milnes at the camp once again.

Roe said it all came back to him when Senator Scott Brown revealed he had been molested at a summer camp on the Cape. Brown did attend Camp Good News.

Roe said when he heard one of the owners, Dr Steven Brooks say there weren't any other victims, he got angry.

"I was like, you gotta be kidding me," said Roe. "I literally had a cold feeling in my stomach. I called him, I spoke to him and I told him, 'What are you talking about? I said to him, ' What are you talking about, you just totally invalidated me-- I don't exist.'"

That is why he's filed a suit against the camp.

"The whole thing was about a cover-up, hide it and in doing that they enabled this individual to do it to others beyond me."

Roe's lawyer Carmen Durso said Milnes convicted of abuse in Maryland and spent time in jail, and has since died.

NECN left messages with the camp and Dr Brooks. No one returned our calls.

 
 

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