MASSACHUSETTS
Cape Cod Times
By Haven Orecchio-Egresitz
BOSTON — Eight men who say they were sexually abused by a Cape Cod priest in the 1970s and 1980s have reached an $880,000 settlement with the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts religious order and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fall River.
The men, who were between 10 and 20 years old at the time, say they were abused by the Rev. James Nickel while he was a priest at Holy Trinity Church in West Harwich and Our Lady of the Annunciation Chapel in Dennis Port.
Three of the men, including the son of former Boston Red Sox player Jimmy Piersall, spoke of the settlement and told stories of years of abuse at a press conference in Boston on Monday.
“It screwed up my life for a long time,” one of the victims, Christopher Hopkins, said at the press conference. “I look back and he was a sick person and my anger isn’t with him, it’s with the hierarchy.”
Nickel died in 2008. He was executive director of Damien Ministries, an HIV/AIDS organization in Washington, D.C., at the time of his death.
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