NEW YORK — Even today, two years after Mark Foley’s very public fall from grace, the former congressman can’t explain why he sent sexually explicit computer messages to male teens who had worked as Capitol Hill pages.
This week, the Florida Republican broke his silence.
“I’m trying to find my way back,” Foley told The Associated Press in his first public comments on the scandal since resigning from Congress on Sept. 29, 2006.
Foley insists he did nothing illegal and never had sexual contact with teens, just inappropriate Internet conversations.
Investigations by the FBI and Florida authorities ended without criminal charges.
And while he concedes his behavior was “extraordinarily stupid,” he remains somewhat unwilling to accept full public scorn.
These were 17-year-olds, just months from being men, he insists.
“There was never anywhere in those conversations where someone said, ‘Stop,’ or ‘I’m not enjoying this,’ or ‘This is inappropriate’ . . . but again, I’m the adult here, I’m the congressman,” Foley said. “The fact is I allowed it to happen. That’s where my responsibility lies.”
Foley had built a national reputation as an advocate for tougher penalties against child sexual predators. As co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, he helped craft a law to protect children on the Internet.
Still, he said, there was no hypocrisy. “The work I was doing was involving young children. . . . You know, you hear the term ‘pedophile.’ That is prepubescent,” Foley said, noting a “huge difference” from lurid chats with teens on the brink of adulthood.
“At the end of the day, they were instant messages that were extraordinarily inappropriate,” he added.
“I believed I owed my constituents an apology,” Foley said. “I embarrassed them and I embarrassed my family, and I wanted to have a chance in a public setting to lend my voice to what happened, not through an attorney, not through a spokesperson, but from myself.”
Shortly after his resignation, his attorney announced that Foley was gay and an alcoholic and had been molested by a priest as a teenage altar boy in Florida.
