Posted on 12/20/2011 11:45:55 AM PST by raccoonradio
The Philadelphia Inquirer's top investigative reporter, Nancy Phillips, has written a story containing what we're told are allegations of child molestation against sportswriter Bill Conlin, a longtime columnist at the rival Daily News. Conlin resigned just moments ago, according to a source at the Daily News.
Conlin, who turns 78 this May, won the Ford C. Frick J.G. Taylor Spink Award last May. The story supposedly will drop soon (the newspapers are published under a joint-operating agreement by the same company, sharing some resources and a website but otherwise competing for a number of the same readers). Conlin has hired an attorney to defend himself against the piece. We'll have more details on this. For now, we can tell you that Conlin is at his condo in Largo, Fla.
Back to the subject at hand, if these charges are true, he should fry. As others on this thread have speculated, I wonder if there's any connection with the Penn State scandal?
Penn State was young boys this is young girls so I doubt it and the time frame is different
Did their charity serve girls as well as boys? They may have had a supply of each. Sick and evil.
Child molesters in the media? Who’da thunk it?
Wonder how the reporter got the information
It was not a police report and if 40 years ago the Statute of Limitations probably comes into play
Wonder if the women contacted the reporter and if so why
$$$$$
I could care less these degenerates have destroyed Americas youth!
OK, the story has now officially “dropped”, appeared on philly.com
Four say Philly Daily News writer Bill Conlin sexually abused them as children
By Nancy Phillips
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Three women and a man say they were molested as children by Bill Conlin, a Hall of Fame baseball writer and Philadelphia Daily News columnist.
In vivid accounts, the four say Conlin groped and fondled them, and touched their genitals, in assaults in the 1970s, when they were from ages 7 to 12.
“This is a tragedy,” said Kelley Blanchet, a niece of Conlin’s who said he molested her when she was a child. “People have kept his secret. It’s not just the victims, it’s the victims’ families. There were so many people who knew about this and did nothing.”
Conlin retired Tuesday from the Daily News, where he had worked for more than four decades.
Through his lawyer, George Bochetto, Conlin declined to comment.
“Mr. Conlin is obviously floored by these accusations, which supposedly happened 40 years ago,” Bochetto said. “He has engaged me to do everything possible to bring the facts forward to vindicate his name.”
Blanchet, now a prosecutor in Atlantic City, and the others said they were speaking out now because the alleged sexual assaults and cover-up at Pennsylvania State University brought back painful memories, and reminded them of the secrecy that shrouded their own assaults.
They also said they wanted to bring attention to the shortcomings of the statute of limitations on sex crimes, which bars prosecution in their cases because their parents did not call police when the abuse occurred years ago. In several cases, the parents corroborated the accounts, and one - Conlin’s brother-in-law - described how the writer broke down in tears and insisted he had only touched the girl’s leg.
Prosecutors in Gloucester County who took videotaped statements from the four last year say there is nothing they can do because assaults that occurred before 1996 fall under the statute of limitations.
“We would love to see justice in this case,” Detective Stacie Lick of the Prosecutor’s Office wrote in an e-mail to one of the women last month. “So many people have been victimized by this man, but our hands are tied by the law, which does not let us prosecute.”
Conlin, 77, was the recipient of the 2011 J.G. Taylor Spink Award, named for a publisher of the Sporting News and presented at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. That put him in the company of such celebrated writers as Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyan, and Red Smith, and Conlin is honored in the hall’s “Scribes and Mikemen” exhibit.
“I can’t even begin to express the shock, sadness, and outrage I feel by what Bill Conlin is alleged to have done,” said Daily News editor Larry Platt, who immediately accepted Conlin’s offer to retire.
Conlin joined the Daily News in 1965 and was its Phillies beat writer from 1966 until 1987, when he became a columnist. He gained a national profile as a commentator on the ESPN program The Sports Reporters. He is the author of two baseball-related books, the Rutledge Book of Baseball and Batting Cleanup, Bill Conlin.
In a recent column, “Tough Guys Are Talking About Sandusky,” Conlin questioned people who said they would have intervened had they seen Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant coach, abusing a child: “Everybody says he will do the right thing, get involved, put his own ass on the line before or after the fact. But the moment itself has a cruel way of suspending our fearless intentions.”
Blanchet and the others who say they were molested by Conlin told their parents about the abuse decades ago, but no one contacted law enforcement, settling for stern warnings to Conlin and a decision to shield the children from further contact with him.
“I’m really sorry that I didn’t do something more at the time,” said Barbara Healey, whose son and daughter told her that Conlin molested them in the 1970s. “Call the police is what I should have done.”
In Blanchet’s case, her father angrily confronted Conlin after his wife told him that Conlin had molested their daughter when she was about 7.
Blanchet’s parents were out of town for the day, and Conlin was visiting her family’s house in Margate, N.J. When her brother went outside to play football, Blanchet said, Conlin assaulted her.
“I was numb,” she said, recalling that he put his hand between her legs and touched her genitals, and penetrated her with his fingers, stopping only when her brother, Ted, walked in. Her brother, now deceased, told her mother, who told her father.
“I was going to kill him, I was so furious,” recalled Blanchet’s father, Harry Hasson, now 75. He said he called Conlin in the Daily News newsroom and summoned him to Margate.
“He swore to me that he just touched her leg. Then all of a sudden, he started crying,” Hasson recalled. “He said, ‘I swear to God, I just touched her leg.’”
Hasson said he did not learn the full extent of the assault until about two years ago, when his daughter spoke to him about it in a therapy session.
“For somebody to do that - the son of a bitch,” Hasson said, starting to choke up. “That’s probably the worst thing you can do to somebody. Back then, I would never even think that anyone could ever do what she said he did.”
see more at link
“...J.G. Taylor Spink Award...”
More appropriately called the “...Spank Award...”
Being from the Phila and then the suburbs I frequently read his column and saw him on TV
This unbelievable
Word has it, Conlin touched his nieces & nephews innappropriately. It was hushed up. Dealt with within the family. Kids barred from seeing Conlin.
Conlin’s wife died. One of the nieces, who was molested, shows up at the funeral & hears (for the first time) that Conlin has grandchildren. She & the others decided to out him.
The upside for Conlin is that maybe he can cash out his retirement before the paper files for bankruptcy and he loses that too.
As for the expiration of the statute of limitations, that’s not Conlin’s fault; put the blame on the parents and other relatives.
The religion of pieces is the biggest child molestation organization of them all. You need to read a little.
Cut their heads off!
Hmmm...he was on the Sports Reporters for years on espn. With little mikey lupica, in fact. For YEARS. One would think that lupica had to know all about this.
I wonder who else at espn knew?
When is the FCC going to investigate espn for their involvement in all these child sex abuse cases?
Can you show you work on that calculation, or did you see somewhere that this guy is accused of molesting infants?
I never said they were infants, because I don’t know the ages, but if it happened “40 years ago”, that means none of them could be 38 today. But, mathematically-speaking they would have to be anywhere from “39” yrs old now and up as of this moment. More likely, if they were, say 10 years old then, they would now be “50” years old now.
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