ABSTRACT
In a 2006 sex scandal on Capitol Hill, when accused of having lewd conversations with underaged male pages over the Internet, US Representative Mark Foley (RFL) scrambled to offer plausible excuses. When his announcement that he was an alcoholic failed to garner enough sympathy, Foley added that as a teenager he had been sexually abused by a clergyman. His attorney, David Roth, observed to Fox News, “Mark sustained trauma as a young adolescent. . . . As so often is the case of victims of abuse, Mark kept his shame to himself for almost forty years” (FoxNews.com).
