BishopAccountability.org

Punishing road to redemption for St. George's School sex-abuse victim

By Karen Lee Ziner
Providence Journal
September 17, 2016

http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20160917/punishing-road-to-redemption-for-st-georges-school-sex-abuse-victim

The investigator's report hit Anne Scott "like a freight train."

It brought her back nearly 40 years to a locked room at St. George's School where athletic trainer "Doc Gibbs" raped and sexually molested her time and again until her mind nearly fractured. She was 15, a sophomore at the elite Episcopal boarding school in Middletown. The abuse lasted a year and a half.

In subsequent years, Scott cycled through one psychiatric hospitalization after another. She starved herself. She binged and vomited. She dwindled to 98 pounds on a 5-foot-8 frame. She buried memories of the abuse by Al Gibbs, who molested her while she lay on a table, being "treated" for field hockey injuries. She shut down, cocooned with her parents, unable to work. It took decades to find her footing — and her voice.

A driving force last winter behind exposing the rampant sexual abuse at St. George's in the 1970s and '80s, and in pushing for an independent investigation that uncovered "a private hell" that had trapped 61 abuse victims, Scott expected the report — released Sept. 1 — would detail the horrors she'd endured.

But she was stunned when she read previously sealed documents from her 1988 federal "Jane Doe" lawsuit against St. George's, which sought $10 million for failing to protect her from Gibbs.




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