Anderson Cooper will speak with openly gay fellow CNN newsman Thomas Roberts this Monday, March 12th at 10:30 in an AC360 piece entitled “Sins of the Father” in which Roberts will discuss the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a priest between 1987 and 1989 when he was a student at Calvert Hall College High School, a Catholic school for boys.
Roberts, who came out of the closet publicly last year at a National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association conference in Miami, expressed disappointment in December about a judge’s decision to give Roman Catholic priest Jerome F. Toohey Jr., a more lenient sentence. Here are a few excerpts from the show:
Roberts on the abuse:
“It’s probably the worst place you can be in your life. Because there’s so much shame that goes along with this. There’s secrecy. There’s shame. There’s self-hatred, self-doubt. Uh, every mixed up emotion you can have that you don’t feel you can talk to anybody. It was the most twisted and turned-around environment that I could have ever have been in and coming from a place of struggle as a child and into a young boy. It was a prison. I mean it was like backing me into a corner with nowhere to go. I was robbed here. Of my self-respect, of my own image. You know part of my soul even. This place paralyzed me thinking I would die with this secret. I would die with this secret.”
Roberts on the judicial system:
“I don’t know how to define justice in this. What’s justice? I mean, what . . . do I get early release from this? No. You don’t get early release from knowing what happened to you. Do you get early release from the shame and the secrets and the lies and the cover-up and all of that? You just don’t. You just have to deal with the fact that that was your life. You did it, you had to put up with it to survive, and it’ll be your story for the rest of your life. No early release from this story.”
No word on whether or not Anderson will ask him the question no doubt many would like to hear: how has coming out of the closet affected your news anchor career?
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(screencap source)
