Brown: I Was Sexually Abused as a Child
CBS News reports:
Sen. Scott Brown reveals he was sexually abused as a child several times by a camp counselor in a "60 Minutes" interview with Lesley Stahl. The Massachusetts Republican also talks to Stahl about physical abuse suffered at the hands of stepfathers, in one case saying he would like to have purchased the house where it occurred just so he could "burn it down.'
The interview will be broadcast this Sunday, Feb. 20 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Brown says even his mother doesn't know about the sexual abuse. "That's what happens when you're a victim. You're embarrassed. You're hurt," he tells Stahl. Brown spoke of being touched and forced to touch the counselor. "Fortunately, nothing was ever fully consummated, so to speak, but it was certainly, back then, very traumatic."
The counselor, he says, came for him more than once. "As predators do," says Brown. "He said 'If you tell anybody...I'll kill you. I will make sure that nobody believes you.'" Being physically abused at home and the victim of seven broken homes made Brown even more susceptible to such a predator. "When people find people like me at that young vulnerable age, who are basically lost, the thing that they have over you is, they make you believe that no one will believe you."
Brown, who came to national prominence by winning the Democratic seat held by Ted Kennedy in a watershed political moment, details these abuses and other childhood traumas in an upcoming book, Against All Odds.
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