ILLINOIS
Chicago Tribune
By Meredith Rodriguez
Chicago Tribune
A support group for clergy sex abuse victims presented a letter to Lisa Madigan’s office Monday asking the attorney general to set up a hotline for adults who have suffered sex abuse as children.
The group also sent letters Monday to the Illinois Association of School Administrators and several Boy Scout councils in the Chicagoland area, asking them to set up hotlines.
“We want victims to find information and resources and learn that they are not alone,” the group wrote in the letter to Madigan.
SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, referred to the recent federal charges against former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. According to his indictment, the former Illinois congressman agreed to pay $3.5 million in apparent hush money to a longtime acquaintance who once lived in Yorkville, where Hastert taught English and coached wrestling from 1965 to 1981. The payments were made to the acquaintance to “compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against individual A,” according to the indictment.
Details of the misconduct aren’t spelled out in Hastert court documents, but a day after the news broke, law enforcement sources said he was paying off a former male student to conceal sexual abuse from decades earlier and that a second person raised similar allegations that corroborated the account of the initial victim.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.