CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 16 (UPI) -- A 20-year-old college student testified Wednesday that he was molested 10 years ago by a Roman Catholic priest who since has been accused of sexually abusing more than 130 children over nearly four decades while serving in Boston-area parishes.
The witness, whose identity was ordered withheld by the judge, was the first person to testify at the trial of former priest John J. Geoghan, 66, who is charged with one count of indecent assault and battery on a person under 14.
The student said that as a 10-year-old boy in 1992, he spent a lot of time swimming at the pool at the Boys and Girls Club in Waltham. He said one day he was practicing diving in the deep end of the pool when a man he knew as Father Geoghan approached and offered to help him.
"As I dived into the pool Father Geoghan grabbed my butt," the young man testified. He said he then swam to the other side of the pool and told his mother.
In her opening statement, Lynn Rooney, assistant Middlesex County district attorney, laid out the prosecution's case against Geoghan, saying the boy went for a family swim and while diving in the deep end of the pool, he felt a hand slide into his bathing suit, "turned and looked straight into the face of John Geoghan."
Geoghan's court-appointed defense attorney, Geoffrey Packard, said in his opening that all Geoghan was trying to do was to help the boy out of the pool by giving him a boost, and there was nothing sexual about it.
"As he (the boy) was getting out of the pool, and had one leg up to prop himself," Packard said, "John Geoghan put his hand on his butt and started pushing him up."
Packard also accused the boy and his mother of seeking a criminal conviction to improve their chances of winning more money from the archdiocese in their "pain and suffering" civil suit.
If convicted by the jury of 10 men and five women, Geoghan could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. Before deliberations, three of the jurors will be set aside as alternates. The jurors are not being allowed to know of the multitude of civil suits against Geoghan.
This is the first of three criminal trials for Geoghan, who was removed as a priest by the Archdiocese of Boston in 1998. A second trial is scheduled for Feb. 20 in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, where he faces charges of repeatedly raping a 7-year-old boy in the early 1980s. If convicted in that case, he could be sentenced to life.
A third trial on charges he molested a 10-year-old Weymouth boy in the mid-1990s has yet to be scheduled.
Geoghan still faces more than 80 civil suits stemming from allegations he molested more than 130 children over the past three decades or more. The archdiocese has already settled some 50 civil suits against him for more than $10 million.
The allegations against Geoghan prompted Cardinal Bernard Law to apologize to all the victims, and establish a church policy of "zero tolerance" for such behavior.
