Faith & Reflection: Voices from the Black Church and Beyond
- Keith Townsend was abused ages eight to 13 by Ronald Paquin, who used drugs and alcohol, leading Townsend to addiction and incarceration.
- Townsend's report led to a 2017 Maine indictment, 2018 guilty verdict, and a 2019 sentence returning Paquin to prison.
- The film Spotlight and attorney Mitchell Garabedian helped raise awareness, giving survivors a sense they were not alone and not at fault.
A survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a defrocked Boston Catholic priest who was portrayed admitting to molesting minors in the Oscar-winning Hollywood film Spotlight says he hopes the clergyman’s recent death in prison helps victims of his crimes and their families “keep pressing forward every single day”.
“We live with a big burden in our hearts and on our backs,” Keith Townsend said on Wednesday while reflecting on the criminal charges which he successfully pursued against Ronald Paquin, who was imprisoned in 2019 and died in custody at age 83 on 11 September. “And my hope is that people can find closure and move on.”
Those remarks by Townsend, 52, during a telephone interview were a notable reaction to the death of one of the key figures in the clergy sexual abuse and cover-up scandal with the Catholic archdiocese of Boston that – among other consequences – prompted the resignation of the institution’s archbishop, Bernard Law, at the end of 2002, as well as policy reforms across the US church.
That same year, Paquin had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing an altar server from 1989 to 1992 while working at St John the Baptist church in the Boston suburb of Haverhill, Massachusetts. He was stripped of his clerical status and imprisoned in Massachusetts for that abuse, which was first publicly exposed in a Pulitzer-winning series of investigative articles by the Boston Globe newspaper’s Spotlight team.
Paquin was freed in 2015. And learning of that release motivated Townsend – once a St John altar server, too – to come forward and report being abused himself by Paquin while on camping trips to Kennebunkport, Maine, between 1985 and 1989.
As Townsend put it, he was between the ages of eight and 13 when Paquin molested him. Townsend recalled Paquin plying him with drugs and alcohol during the abuse, eventually leading him to battles with substance abuse addiction and incarceration.
A Maine grand jury indicted Paquin in 2017 on new charges of gross sexual misconduct in connection with Townsend and another individual. Paquin faced a jury trial in November 2018 which culminated in a guilty verdict against him with regards to Townsend, though he was acquitted of having abused the other individual.
Maine judge Wayne Douglas sentenced Paquin in May 2019 to 16 more years in prison. Paquin was in the Mountain View correctional facility in Charleston, Maine, when he died, the state’s department of correction said in a news release.
Speaking five days later, Townsend said he first got word of Paquin’s death from his wife, who saw it circulating on the news and social media. He said he understood the many reactions which he subsequently heard or read that took delight in news of Paquin’s death.
But Townsend, now a New Hampshire resident, also said he used the occasion to think about the work he did on himself which culminated in his “shaking off” the drug and alcohol addiction which had a grip on him in the wake of Paquin’s abuse. He said he contemplated the family he had built after overcoming “one of the biggest obstacles that could be thrown” at a person.
“I get those who think the attitude should be, ‘Fuck him. Fuck what he did to me,’” Townsend said. “But look where I am today.”
Townsend said he sought Paquin’s re-imprisonment with the aim of “protecting children … not [from] a man [but] a monster”.
“Massachusetts just kind of let him go,” Townsend said. “So I had to dig deep … [because] I didn’t want anybody else to possibly have to go through [his] abuse. Maine thankfully had the balls to take this case, aggressively prosecute it and get a good outcome.”
Townsend said he had not yet been able to see Spotlight, which dramatizes the Globe’s uncovering of the clergy sexual abuse scandal that roiled the city’s archdiocese. And therefore Townsend had not viewed the famous scene in the film in which Rachel McAdams, playing reporter Sacha Pfeiffer, confronts an actor portraying Paquin on his home’s front doorstep about allegations of molesting boys at St John the Baptist.
“Sure, I fooled around – but I never felt gratified myself,” the actor playing Paquin, Richard O’Rourke, says in response as the journalist scribbles notes in a paper pad while wearing an astonished facial expression.
“Right, um, but you admit to molesting boys at St John the Baptist?” McAdams’ Pfeiffer then asks O’Rourke’s Paquin. The latter’s reply: “Yes, yes. But, as I said, I never got any pleasure from it.”
Another person closely familiar with Spotlight offered an opinion of that scene’s legacy on Wednesday.
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian – who is portrayed in the 2015 movie by Stanley Tucci and has represented numerous victims of sexual abuse by Paquin and other clerics – said that part of Spotlight provided a powerful cue to survivors of clergy molesters that they were not alone.
“It gave a sense of, ‘Aha, I’m not the only one,’” in one of Hollywood’s most critically acclaimed films, Garabedian said. ‘“It wasn’t my fault, and I shouldn’t feel guilty.’”
Townsend said ultimately he is grateful for anything that raised awareness about Paquin’s atrocities before his push to bring him to justice.
“When I lay my head down tonight, I know it saved lives,” getting Paquin imprisoned for his remaining years, Townsend added. “And that’s what matters to me.”
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