NEW YORK — While many Americans are riveted by the Penn State sex-abuse trial, it has been particularly wrenching — and sometimes heartening — for those who were themselves victims of abuse in their youth.
Unlike the witnesses testifying against Jerry Sandusky, most of them never got the chance to confront their abusers in court, so the trial has been cathartic as well as troubling.
“It’s vicarious justice — the closest many survivors will ever get to a courtroom where the perpetrator is held accountable,” said Claudia Vercellotti of Toledo, Ohio, who says she was molested for years in her adolescence by a Roman Catholic youth minister.
Vercellotti, a 42-year-old hospital employee, has immersed herself in news reports of the trial, mesmerized by the past week’s often-graphic testimony from eight young men who said Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach, had abused them.
“It takes raw courage to get up there and face their abuser,” she said. “They are liberating other victims of sex crimes who have not been able to speak up. There are people across this country saying, ‘Me too. Me too.’ “
Vercellotti and others who were interviewed clearly think Sandusky is guilty. But to them, the testimony in a Bellefonte, Pa., courtroom is not just about allegations that one man assaulted boys over a 15-year span. It also shines a spotlight on all abuse, including their own. And painful as it is, some say this can only be a good thing.
“Once you accept the notion that child sex abuse is stunningly widespread, then every instance in which it emerges into the public consciousness is essentially good — painful but good,” said David Clohessy, the St. Louis-based executive director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “Kids are safer, and victims move further toward recovery.”
Clohessy, who says he was abused by a priest while in his teens, expressed admiration for the witnesses testifying against Sandusky and standing up to cross-examination.
“It’s one thing to deal with horrific pain privately … and perhaps toughest of all to deal with it in a public, adversarial setting,” he said. “They’ve moved from a therapist’s couch to what’s essentially a battleground.”
Not all abuse survivors are following every twist and turn of the trial. Deborah Donovan Rice of Stop It Now, an abuse-prevention organization based in Northampton, Mass., said she reads the headlines and skims the articles but purposefully avoids the graphic details.
“It’s self-protection,” said Rice, who says she was abused as a girl by a child-care worker. “I’ve lived that story. Going into the details would pull me into a zone of being awash in emotions. It would be disempowering.”
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Judge allows testimony on disorder • BELLEFONTE, pa. — Jerry Sandusky won a court ruling Friday that will let him have an expert testify about a psychiatric condition that his attorney says helps explain letters he wrote to his accusers and other actions being construed as him grooming victims.
Judge John Cleland granted a motion that sought to put evidence of “histrionic personality disorder” before jurors in Sandusky’s child sexual-abuse case.
Cleland’s order also said the former Penn State assistant football coach must make himself available for prosecutors so they can prepare rebuttal psychiatric testimony.
The American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual calls histrionic personality disorder “a pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking” and “often characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior” and rapidly shifting emotions. The Associated Press
