WASHINGTON
Seattle Weekly
For 30 years, the man of God molested students he was hired to teach and guide. Over and over he was accused, questioned, transferred, rehabilitated, and accused again. But he never truly paid for his sins.
By Rick Anderson Tue., May 6 2014
Edward Courtney’s cross-country, school-to-school, boy-to-boy journey lasted more than 30 years and scarred the lives of more victims than he could remember. But by the end of it, if it really ever ended, he still could not bring himself to say the words—sexual abuse—that brought him to a meeting with lawyers on an early-April morning in 2009, or to utter the phrase that numerous allegations have come to define as his true devotion—serial molester.
As former Brother Courtney sat in the law offices on Columbia Tower’s 47th floor on that spring day, the Seattle skyline filling the windows outside as he mulled over his answers, the best he could come up with was “wrestling.”
“The wrestling, I think, yes, that would be—I remember a couple of occasions of that,” he said in the office filled with attorneys and a court reporter recording Courtney’s deposition. Maybe there was some accidental rubbing-up-against, Courtney would say. And touching. All those years of encounters in classrooms, hallways, gyms, church, and homes—yes, there could have been “inappropriate touching,” he allowed.
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