Stanley Rosenberg Seeks to Publicly Identify Bryon Hefner’s Sex Assault Accuser

By Brian Dowling
Boston Herald
July 6, 2018

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_politics/2018/07/stanley_rosenberg_seeks_to_publicly_identify_bryon_hefner_s_sex_assault

Credit: Nancy Lane

Ex-Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg and his estranged husband, Bryon Hefner, want to remove the “cloak of anonymity” shielding the John Doe who has sued them over his sexual assault claims, but a victim’s rights advocate is calling it an “intimidation tactic.”

In a filing made minutes before Suffolk Superior Court closed Tuesday ahead of the Fourth of July holiday, Rosenberg’s attorney argued the alleged victim’s request to remain known publicly as John Doe is not compelling enough to outweigh the court’s default of having parties in a lawsuit reveal their names.

Hefner’s attorney, Tracy Miner, yesterday joined in asking the court to release the name, saying in a filing that Doe had shared already his identity with two Boston Globe reporters and at least two others regarding the allegations.

The alleged victim — identified only as a former Beacon Hill legislative aide and a resident of Middlesex County — “fails to advance any grounds sufficient to justify permitting him to continue to level highly public, incendiary, and destructive allegations against Mr. Rosenberg from behind ‘a cloak of anonymity,’?” wrote Rosenberg’s attorney Michael Pineault.

The lawsuit, filed last month, alleged Hefner sexually abused the man twice in Rosenberg’s presence, and once at the couple’s North End condo. The man’s identity was immediately impounded by Judge Debra A. Squires-Lee, and a hearing date was scheduled for next Wednesday to air arguments over keeping the identity of the plaintiff impounded.

The claims in the civil lawsuit mirror those of one of the four men who’ve criminally accused Hefner of sexual abuse. Rosenberg, 68, retired in May after becoming embroiled in the accusations made against Hefner, 31.

Mitchell Garabedian, who is representing the alleged victim, confirmed that attorneys working for Rosenberg and Hefner already know his client’s identity.

Garabedian — an advocate for victims of priest sex abuse who won multimillion-dollar cases against the Catholic Church — declined to comment on the identity fight given the ongoing criminal case against Hefner, but he said he expects his client “will prevail based on the relevant facts and law.”

The push to reveal the identity of an alleged sexual abuse victim is seen by victim’s advocates as an “intimidation tactic.”

“The idea you can extort a person to give up their quest for justice is not novel,” said attorney and victim advocate Wendy Murphy. “It is used as an intimidation tactic all the time.”

There’s a “category of lawyers in the swamp who will stop at nothing to win and that means causing needless harm. It’s just an ugly reality the system sometimes indulges these tactics,” said Murphy, who teaches at New England Law.

Asked whether the push to reveal the plaintiff’s identity was meant to intimidate the alleged victim, Miner said: “That’s crazy.”

“He wants to be able to make extremely prejudicial sexual allegations against others, thereby subjecting them to unwanted negative publicity, without subjecting himself to the same scrutiny,” Miner said. “Nobody can challenge his credibility publicly because he is anonymous. Why shouldn’t both sides be John Doe and have equal protection, at a minimum?”