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Last week, former Republican House speaker J. Dennis Hastert was indicted for skirting banking laws in an alleged attempt to route $3.5 million to an unnamed person in an effort to bury “misconduct” in his past. News outlets widely reported that the “misconduct” in question was sexual in nature, but they didn’t identify any victims. The indictment said that the payoffs were intended “to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A.”
A victim this morning has been identified by ABC News, though it’s not “Individual A.”
Montana resident Jolene Burdge told the network that her late brother, Steve Reinboldt, had been sexually abused by Hastert at the Yorkville, Ill., high school where Hastert worked as a teacher and wrestling coach. Reinboldt graduated from the high school in 1971 and died of AIDS in 1995: “I asked him, when was your first same-sex experience? He looked at me and said, ‘It was with Dennis Hastert,’” Burdge told ABC News. “I was stunned.” The abuse, according to Burdge, persisted throughout Reinboldt’s high school years.
The ABC News piece says Hastert, in Reinboldt’s 1970 yearbook, calls the student his “great, right hand man.” He served as the student equipment manager for the Yorkville High School wrestling squad. Burdge told ABC News’s Brian Ross: “He took his belief in himself and his kind of right to be a normal person. Here was the mentor, the man who was, you know, basically his friend and stepped into that parental role, who was the one who was abusing him. … He damaged Steve I think more than any of us will ever know.”
The Associated Press has also reported the story, though it noted that the wire service “could not independently verify her allegations.”
ABC News has known of Burdge’s allegations since 2006. “She contacted us and other members of the news media about nine years ago off the record,” said Ross said this morning on “Good Morning America.” That made it an impossible story to air: Not only was Burdge off the record, but Reinboldt was dead, and Hastert denied the charges, as ABC News reported this morning. No story, in other words.
The whole dynamic changed in recent weeks, as the FBI interviewed Burdge about the 73-year-old Hastert as part of its investigation. “She said she watched Hastert rise to prominence as speaker of the House just made her angrier and angrier and now she finally decided to go public with the allegations,” Ross said on “Good Morning America.”
Burdge told ABC News, “There are no words to describe what it felt like,” when the indictment surfaced, “to, you know, it’s just like Stevie, we’ve done it. It’s gonna happen, we got him.”
