From his home on the island of Gozo, near Italy, Anthony Mercieca described a series of encounters that he said Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate. Among them: massaging Foley while the boy was naked, skinny-dipping together at a secluded lake in Lake Worth and being naked in the same room on overnight trips.
One night, when Mercieca says he was in a drug-induced stupor, there was an incident he says he can’t clearly remember that might have gone too far. "I have to confess, I was going through a nervous breakdown," he said. "I was taking pills — tranquilizers. I used to take them all the time. They affected my mind a little bit."
Seems to me like taking responsibility isn’t a strong suit for sexual predators. That aside, it’s a monotonous story. I was in a training program with an older man, married with a number of kids. He was a very kind religious guy who set up his practice as a Christian Psychiatrist after we finished. After a few years, he was all over the news as a pedophile, involved with NAMBA, the whole thing – seducing boys at protective "homes" where he consulted. He later said it started when he was seduced by an uncle, then he became the seducer at boarding school.
Such people become Priests, Boy Scout Leaders, Doctors, Teachers, and, it seems, Congressmen. Foley was careful to stay right above the age of consent, either as a mechanism to stay ‘legal,’ or as a rationalization that he wasn’t doing anything wrong. That kind of thinking is common – complex mental systems that justify the behavior. But they break down quickly. As soon as it became apparent to Mark Foley that his emails were about to be exposed, he resigned, saying:
The political part of this story is not about Mark Foley. It’s about how he was able to blatantly prey on the House Pages, under the noses of the House leadership, with plenty of reports that would have set off red lights for almost anyone. The charge here is simple. The powers that be in the House of Representatives, the Speaker, the Chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee, and the Majority Leader, were informed and didn’t act. If that is true, they are not fit to serve.
Partisan, smartisan. It’s simple, if that is true, they are not fit to serve – period. Nor was Mark Foley, and they seem to have been in a position to know that a long time ago…
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