A Plea From the Past: ‘Call Me’

BACKGROUND: Since Rhode Island businessman Frank Fitzpatrick’s dogged tracking of his former parish priest, Father James Porter, was reported in View (June 7) and elsewhere, more than 60 men and women have joined in legal actions in at least three states charging that Porter molested them as children.

After treatment at a Roman Catholic Church-run facility for sexual offenders in New Mexico, Porter left the priesthood about 20 years ago. He now lives in Minnesota, where he is married and the father of four children. Wednesday, in New Bedford, Mass., Porter pleaded not guilty to molestation charges. Similar charges have been brought in lawsuits in Minnesota and New Mexico.

UPDATE: Fitzpatrick has drafted a long and impassioned letter “to the boy who was with me”--a witness, Fitzpatrick believes, to his alleged rape by Porter nearly 30 years ago: “Call me. Meet with me. Or write to me,” he writes. “No, I don’t remember your name. But I do remember your face. You had dark hair, a thin face and you were about my own age”--10 or 12 years old. The man, like Fitzpatrick, would now be in his mid-40s.

“Maybe you think there is a stigma attached to having been a victim of childhood sexual abuse,” Fitzpatrick says in his letter. “You are not alone. Many other survivors and I have felt the same way.”