UNITED STATES
Huffington Post

Kim Bellware
Reporter, The Huffington Post

For nearly 40 years, Scott Cross hid from everybody what he called his “darkest secret.” And in a federal courtroom, the 53-year-old revealed it to the world.

“Coach Hastert sexually abused me in 1979, my senior year in high school,” Cross said at former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s Wednesday sentencing hearing on bank fraud charges.

Hastert reluctantly admitted to abusing multiple students back when he was a high school wrestling coach — a fact federal investigators inadvertently learned while probing him on banking violations he committed while paying hush money to one of his victims.

But a standard loophole in the justice system meant that Hastert would technically go unpunished for his admitted sexual abuse, while his victims would get nothing.

Like Cross — and hundreds of victims from the Catholic church’s priest sex abuse scandal — many…