Follow AdultFYI on Twitter @Adultfyi1
wwww.articles.philly.com – 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 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 – said 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 they could do nothing because assaults that occurred before 1996 fall outside 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, received the 2011 J.G. Taylor Spink Award, named for a publisher of the Sporting News and presented at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. That put him in the company of such celebrated writers as Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, and Red Smith, and Conlin is honored in the hall’s “Scribes and Mikemen” exhibit.