PRESS CONFERENCE: 11:15 am, Mon. March 26, Connecticut State Legislative Office Building, Room 1-A, Capitol Avenue, Hartford
(with Conn. State Rep. Mike Lawlor, co-chair Judiciary Comm.)
Also, reps. of SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests), Voice of the Faithful, and victim lawyers

New Priest-Abuse Memoir
Points To Wider Scandal
Involving CT State Police

HARTFORD, CT (March 26, 2007) – A just-published memoir by a man who at age fourteen was assaulted by a Hartford, CT-area Catholic priest and State Police chaplain describes how Father Stephen C. Foley used his official status to lure boys from across the state into sometimes violent sexual “initiations” for a phony firehouse club.

     In the process of researching “The Hopeville Fire Department” by abuse survivor Tony Lembo, co-writer Foster Winans interviewed a former State Police detective who confirmed that she spent a year investigating complaints against Chaplain Foley in the early 1990s. Unable to find victims willing to testify in open court, the investigator urged her superiors to go public with what she had uncovered, but was told to shut down her investigation and remain silent.

     It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that lawsuits began to be filed against Foley by multiple victims. Lembo filed his in 2002 and agreed to a settlement with the Hartford Diocese in 2005. Winans said, “We have heard credible reports that the State Police maintained an extensive file on its Chaplain Foley, but that the file was destroyed when the lawsuits against him began to be filed.”

     Foley, who has reportedly been stripped of his Roman collar but not defrocked, is believed to be still living in St. Thomas’ Seminary, in Bloomfield, CT. Depositions filed in other cases show there were complaints about Foley’s sexual advances toward young boys as early as 1967, the year he was ordained.

     Lembo—now 44 and a resident of Epsom, New Hampshire—was raised in Waterbury and Wolcott, and tells how he was recruited in 1976 into the “The Hopeville Fire Department,” which was no more than a garage in Waterbury where Foley and two non-clergy partners kept a retired fire truck and equipment they drove in parades. Invited to spend a Saturday night with the three in the Bronx, New York, after a visit to fabled Engine Co. 82, Lembo and a friend were forcibly stripped and restrained while Foley assaulted them.

     Lembo, an ex-Marine and now a tire technician at major NASCAR races, writes that in 1979 he was led to believe by a friend connected with the Waterbury Fire Department that Foley had been reported and punished. But in 2001 Lembo discovered that Foley had never been brought to justice and was enjoying the shelter and protection of the Hartford Diocese.

     “Stephen C. Foley and his cronies stole my ability to trust, wounded my sense of self-worth, damaged my relationship with my family, and left me with a lifetime of sorrow,” Lembo writes. “I decided to use some of my settlement to write and publish this book to show how these kinds of crimes get committed, the lasting damage they do to victims, and the way the institutions they represented protected and defended the perpetrators.”

info@TonyLembo.com
Contact: Randy Lobasso (215) 774-1290 (randy.lobasso@gmail.com)
Media: Foster Winans (215) 500-1989 (rfwinans@verizon.net)