Former Speaker Hastert sued in new sexual abuse allegations

May 30 (UPI) -- Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert faces another sexual abuse allegation, weeks before his scheduled release from prison.

A lawsuit filed Friday in Kendall County, Ill., Circuit Court alleges that Hastert, while a gym teacher in Yorkville School District 115 in the 1970s, sodomized a male fourth-grader in a public restroom. If true, the plaintiff would be the sixth known victim of sexual abuse by Hastert.

Hastert is completing a 15-month prison sentence for financial crime committed while attempting to cover up past incidents of sexual abuse. At his 2016 sentencing hearing, he admitted he sexually abused teenage boys. He is scheduled to be released from the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn., on Aug. 16, and still faces a lawsuit by a plaintiff identified as "Individual A," who was abused decades ago by Hastert and received $1.7 million of an expected $3.5 million for his silence before the matter was discovered by the FBI. The issue of the payoff was a major factor in Hastert's indictment.

The latest accuser, thus far identified as "John Doe," says in his lawsuit that in 1973 or 1974, he stopped at a school building while bicycling to use a restroom, and was sodomized in a stall. Weeks later in gym class, the alleged victim identified his teacher, Hastert, who took the boy by the neck into a hallway, asked if he had told anyone of the assault, and threatened to put the boy's parents in jail if he told anyone about the alleged assault. Hastert said his own father is a sheriff, the lawsuit states, which was untrue.

The lawsuit adds that the alleged victim attempted to report the incident in the mid-1980s but was threatened with prosecution for slandering Hastert by then-Kendall County State's District Attorney Dallas Ingmunson. It accuses Hastert of battery, false imprisonment, and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

The school district was named in Friday's lawsuit a "respondent in discovery," meaning it could become a defendant in the case if sufficient evidence against it is found.