How Foley Skirted Rules To Pursue Relationships

Most students follow the rules. Pages who violate any of the major rules are ordered to leave.

In 2001-02, nearly a dozen pages were sent home, including four who had written a song with homophobic lyrics that mocked a gay staff member of the page dormitory.

"You were on the next plane home," said Matthew J. Frattali, who worked as a tutor in the page school for two years until he, too, was ordered to leave for having falsely recorded that a group of students was in study hall when he actually had let them go out to celebrate a birthday.

However, Frattali and former pages said the rules were looser when members of Congress were involved.

And the program's staff, even if they had known of a problem involving Foley or any other member, could not have simply invoked their zero-tolerance policy.

"One is sort of a page transgression," Frattali said. "One is a member transgression. You can't put a member on a plane and send him home."

Since the 1983 page scandal, the program has put an emphasis on discouraging interaction between female pages and male lawmakers and staff, without similar sensitivities about male lawmakers and male pages.

One female page remembers that she was chastised several years ago -- and a Republican House leadership aide was threatened with firing -- after she met with the aide after work one day in his office, with the door open, to talk about the Bible.

It struck her as unfair. She was one of many girls who watched enviously as Foley surrounded himself with male pages on the House floor.

On June 10, 2000, the last night in Washington for the page class that year, Foley parked his BMW at the edge of the park across from the old page dorm, since torn down.

A few pages noticed him, Michael Buck remembers, and ran to see him. "He was outside in his convertible, hanging out and telling us goodbye."

Research editor Alice Crites, staff researcher Madonna Lebling and staff writer James V. Grimaldi contributed to this report.