How Foley Skirted Rules To Pursue Relationships

Shortly before the end of his page year, Hart said, he somehow obtained the online name Foley used for instant messages, MAF54. "We talked on IM just a couple of times. . . . It would be pretty cool to write and say, 'Are you in Congress or are you in Florida?' " They wrote sporadically through Hart's freshman year of college. "He never crossed the line."

At times, Foley seemed to speak suggestively to boys before they left the program. A female former page remembers becoming uneasy one day in 2000 as she watched him talk "a little too much" on the House floor to a boy she knew. Right afterward, she asked what Foley had said. The boy, she recalled, told her Foley had admired the page's "very big hands" and boasted about his "glorious" home in Florida. The boy added: "Eighteen. Eighteen's that magic number." The girl was appalled at what seemed to her to be a come-on that the boy did not fully understand.

After their graduation a few months later, she said, another male page told her that he and Foley were exchanging e-mails and that the congressman had asked him to mail a picture of himself to Foley's Washington house.

The Republican page from 2002, who exchanged instant messages with Foley for two months, said the first one arrived just before the start of his senior year of high school. He found the message when he logged on to his family's computer after dinner one night. At first, he assumed it was a prank by another page pretending to be the congressman. "It was a friendly conversation that got strange," said the young man, now 21. In one, Foley asked whether his roommates had worn "no boxers or briefs to bed."

The young man said he did not immediately realize that the messages might be a solicitation. Catholic, conservative and from a small town, the former page said he had never known anyone who was gay. By early fall, Foley offered to write a college recommendation. By then, the young man said, "I just wanted the association with him not to be there."

Foley never asked to meet him, he said. "I think in my case, it was him just fantasizing," he said.

The self-described political junkie who received Foley's message about oral sex said his parents were standing next to him at graduation in 2002 when the congressman offered his address. Foley's online overtures "put the ball always in the page's court," he said. "I would have had to make the move."

Although he was only 17 at the time, he said, "if we actually would have met in person, I think he would have tried something. There's no doubt in my mind."

Selective Vigilance

The dormitory where the pages live, for the past few years a renovated convent three blocks southeast of the Capitol, has bulletproof glass in the entryway, a metal detector and two armed Capitol Police officers around the clock. Pages must sign out with at least one other page every time they leave the building.

The stringent rules are the legacy of a sex scandal in 1983, when two male members of Congress were censured for having sexual relations with pages, a girl and a boy, in 1980 and 1973.

The weekend new pages arrive, they gather Sunday afternoon on the House floor to learn their duties and the rules. "This is a different world of important adults, important people making important decisions," Donnald K. Anderson, a former House clerk and an emeritus member of the Page Board, said he always tells the teenagers that day. "If something or somebody is bothering you, don't suffer in silence."

There is to be no smoking, no drinking or drugs, no sex. Students who are one minute late on their lights-out curfew get demerits that lead to being grounded.