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Portland Press Herald [Portland ME]
July 31, 2025
By John Terhune
Neal Gumpel said the abuse he suffered more than 50 years ago shaped his adult life.
Neal Gumpel has spent most of his life looking for a sliver of validation that the damage was real.
The violent sexual assault he said he suffered at the hands of a Jesuit priest and professor at Maine Maritime Academy in Castine when he was 16 years old threw his life onto a dark track. He became suicidal. He spent years addicted to alcohol and drugs, which he says helped destroy his first marriage and strain his relationship with his three children. He went years without speaking to his parents, who he said refused to believe what happened to him that night in 1974. Many of his siblings still insist he’s lying.
A settlement agreement announced Thursday between the New York Province of the Society of Jesus and Gumpel does not undo the sins of the Rev. Roy Drake, he said, nor does it seem likely to repair the family ties that were shredded in their aftermath. It also does not require the church to admit fault.
But after so many years of suffering, followed by a decade of fruitless legal battles, the deal is at least something tangible.
“I won,” Gumpel, 66, said at a news conference. “I have the paper to prove it.”
The “low six figures” agreement won’t make Gumpel rich, especially considering how much time his legal team has put into the case since he first reached out in 2013 to renowned Boston attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who has represented hundreds of abuse victims. Garabedian, portrayed by Stanley Tucci in the Oscar-winning 2015 film “Spotlight,” said that legal technicalities, including Maine’s statute of limitations on childhood sexual assault claims, were “major obstacles” for Gumpel’s case.
Michael Berardino, an attorney who represents the U.S.A. Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus, declined to discuss the case or settlement, saying it’s his policy not to speak publicly about lawsuits involving his clients.
Drake was transferred to different posts at least 18 times over his 44-year career as a priest, a pattern Garabedian described as “a red flag that there was something wrong.” Another man reached a six-figure settlement with the church years ago after he alleged that Drake had abused him when he was 13.
Despite the allegations, Drake spent some of the last years of his life at Murray-Weigel Hall, the Fordham Prep residence for Jesuit faculty members, before being transferred to a treatment center for troubled priests in 2006, according to a New York Times report.
“The question remains: Where were the supervisors? Why didn’t they do anything to protect innocent children?” Garabedian asked Thursday. “Victims can get past the abuse, but they can’t get past the fact that the supervisors allowed the abuse to occur.”
An investigation by the Maine Sunday Telegram in 2016 found that Maine Maritime Academy likely didn’t know anything about Drake’s background when they hired him in 1973 to teach chemistry. Although he was a Jesuit priest — an order of the Catholic Church whose members focus on education and evangelization — there is no evidence that he celebrated Mass or led any religious services while in Castine. The church has said he was on a “leave of absence,” and little else is known about Drake’s time in Maine.
Gumpel spent much of Thursday’s news conference recounting the night of his assault and the broken years that followed. He was 16 years old in June 1974 when he and a friend drove eight hours north from his hometown of Port Chester, New York, to visit his older brother, then a student at Maine Maritime. Because limited housing was available in Castine, the pair were set to stay in Drake’s apartment near the campus.
Several students gathered in Drake’s home on the night of Gumpel’s visit to drink and smoke marijuana. They trickled out one by one until the only people remaining were Drake, Gumpel and his friend, who was intoxicated and needed to be put to bed.
Drake began to get aggressive with Gumpel. He put on a pornographic film, then started asking the teenager about his sex life.
“He was saying stuff like, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t know what to do,’” Gumpel recounted to a Press Herald reporter in 2016. “But he was getting angry about it. Then he started punching me. It was playful at first but forceful, you know. I started to get really nervous.”
Drake left the room to check on the other teen, Gumpel said. Gumpel followed and caught him molesting the boy. He remembers panicking and leaving the apartment before deciding to go back for his friend.
That’s when Drake attacked. The larger man slammed the teen against a counter, sodomized him, and choked him until he passed out, according to Gumpel.
“He was lifting me off the ground. I was fighting him with everything I had, but he was as strong as an ox,” Gumpel remembered. “He was saying things like no one could stop him and he didn’t care who knew.”
Gumpel says his mother, a devout Catholic, did not want to hear about the abuse and told him never to mention it again. Only at the end of her life did she acknowledge what happened to him, something he said he needed from her.
The assault was not the only reason that Gumpel is now largely cut off from his family, he says. But he believes it’s the biggest factor.
He has spent years publicly calling for justice for himself and fellow victims of abuse. He said he’s uncomfortable with the term “survivor,” because he feels that the person who drove up to Castine in 1974 did not truly survive the visit to Drake’s apartment.
“The church has a system. They have people in the court and the legal system. They have a machine of billions of dollars behind them,” he said. “When a Catholic walks into the church and they put $1 in the box or $50 in the box, I want all Catholics to know half that money is going to protect pedophiles.”