Ex-Priest’s Accuser Weeps in Court

After a second day of intense and graphic questioning by a defense lawyer, the man who has accused defrocked priest Paul Shanley of raping him as a child broke down on the witness stand Thursday and begged the judge not to force him to continue testifying.

“I can’t do this again,” the man said, his shoulders slumped and his head down as Shanley’s attorney asked about the nature of the alleged abuse. “I can’t start over again.”

At one point, the accuser sobbed loudly as he clasped his hands behind his head and pressed his forehead against the rail of the witness stand.

Frank Mondano, Shanley’s attorney, has tried to undermine the accuser’s credibility, grilling him about his troubled childhood, his abuse of alcohol and steroids, his gambling habit -- and his motivation for coming forward with what he says are repressed memories of the alleged abuse.

Mondano has said the man made up his story to cash in on the multimillion-dollar settlements paid to victims of abuse by priests in Boston’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese.

The accuser, now a 27-year-old firefighter, says Shanley raped and molested him at a parish outside Boston beginning when he was 6. He said he didn’t remember the abuse until 2002, when he heard a friend’s account of being abused as a boy by Shanley.

The man is the last remaining accuser in the case against the 74-year-old Shanley, one of the central figures in the Boston clergy sex abuse scandal. His case became one of the most notorious because personnel records showed that church officials knew Shanley publicly advocated sex between men and boys, yet continued to transfer him from parish to parish.

By the end of Thursday, doubts were being raised about the accuser returning for a third day of questioning by Mondano.

Afterward, Mondano told reporters that if the accuser did not show up, he believed he had grounds for a mistrial.