Sen. Scott Brown reveals he was sexually abused as a child several times by a camp counselor in a "60 Minutes" interview with Lesley Stahl. The Massachusetts Republican also talks to Stahl about physical abuse suffered at the hands of stepfathers, in one case saying he would like to have purchased the house where it occurred just so he could "burn it down.'
The interview will be broadcast this Sunday, Feb. 20 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Brown says even his mother doesn't know about the sexual abuse. "That's what happens when you're a victim. You're embarrassed. You're hurt," he tells Stahl. Brown spoke of being touched and forced to touch the counselor. "Fortunately, nothing was ever fully consummated, so to speak, but it was certainly, back then, very traumatic."
The counselor, he says, came for him more than once. "As predators do," says Brown. "He said 'If you tell anybody...I'll kill you. I will make sure that nobody believes you.'" Being physically abused at home and the victim of seven broken homes made Brown even more susceptible to such a predator. "When people find people like me at that young vulnerable age, who are basically lost, the thing that they have over you is, they make you believe that no one will believe you."
Brown, who came to national prominence by winning the Democratic seat held by Ted Kennedy in a watershed political moment, details these abuses and other childhood traumas in an upcoming book, Against All Odds. Some of the abuse detailed in the book will be revelations to his wife and mother. The senator says writing was an act of catharsis for him. He tells Stahl of another cathartic act he wished he could have done in Wakefield, Mass., when a house he lived in with an abusive stepfather came up for sale.
"I actually called the realtor and went in and took the tour and relived kind of where everything was...to make sure I wasn't ...dreaming. As I left, I said, 'Man, I wish I had the money. I'd just buy this thing and burn it down.'"
Such a childhood, he says, prepared him well for the bare-knuckle politics he is encountering in Washington. "When I'm getting the crap beat out of me outside, in the political spectrum," he tells Stahl, "I'm like, 'Psst. This is nothing. Bring it on. Let's go. Next!"
Isn't that the price of freedom? You earn it, usually the hard way with the challenges of childhood. Is it better to get it over sooner rather than later? Perhaps not at the time, but later as the wounds heal and the scars slowly fade away. It seems some situations are saved for certain ages or certain sexes, races and creeds so that in the end we really do share some things in common. As for being more susceptible? How does that saying go? "kick em when they're down". Odd how all these little sayings start to make sense long after the hour glass seems empty. Too bad no one explained it back at the time, but then where would the gain be in that? You can't have too many 'lucky' people, as then the game would need to change.