Abuse survivors push to change New York statute of limitations

KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter

February 22, 2018

By Peter Feuerherd

After three metro area dioceses offered programs to compensate victims of church sex abuse, Brian Toale was one of those who applied.

Toale, on his personal website at https://briantoale.com/, describes a horrific series of events in the early 1970s when, he wrote, as a student at Chaminade High School in Mineola, Long Island, New York, he was systematically groomed and abused by the Marianist school’s radio club moderator. According to Toale, the alleged abuser, a layman now deceased for 27 years, took Polaroids of the abuse and threatened to expose the then-16-year-old if he told anyone.

Now 64, Toale has endured decades of therapy and struggles with alcohol, which he has addressed via Alcoholics Anonymous.

“My survival strategy was if I didn’t tell anyone, no one would know. On the day I graduated, I could then just live my life. But my life fell apart,” he told NCR during a recent interview over coffee at a Manhattan diner. In a story all too common for sex abuse survivors, Toale describes a painful divorce, dropping out of college, and substance abuse issues that plagued his life and from which it took him decades of therapy and emotional support to emerge.

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.