Former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has responded from prison to a lawsuit that claims he should be held to his end of a $3.5 million deal to keep silent a man he sexually abused. Lawyers representing Hastert assert that the hush money pact is no longer enforceable because the now-adult victim “did not keep his end of the deal when he disclosed the misconduct to authorities,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
The lawsuit was filed in April, shortly before Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison for breaking federal banking laws in order to conceal payments to the man, who was a 14-year-old high school wrestler when the abuse occurred. (Hastert coached wrestling at a high school in Yorkville, Ill. a Chicago suburb, in the 1970s.) Though the statute of limitations on the sexual abuse cases — three other former wrestlers have accused Hastert of sexual abuse — had long expired, Hastert admitted in court to sexually abusing the plaintiff in the current lawsuit. The judge in that case called Hastert a “serial child molester.”
Hastert stopped payments to the former wrestler, who is now a married man with a family, when the FBI began its investigation. The plaintiff wants Hastert to pay the remaining $1.8 million he is still owed, plus interest, describing the payout as a settlement for “an unofficial personal injury claim.” According to the lawsuit, Hastert’s victim spent years suffering from panic attacks that led to “periods of unemployment, career changes, bouts of depression, hospitalization and long-term psychiatric treatment.”
Hastert was Speaker of the House from 1999 to 2007. As Jimmy Kimmel joked at the time of his conviction, the former Speaker was “the guy who led the impeachment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal — presumably because it was consensual sex with an adult woman.”
(via Chicago Tribune)