Son gives emotional sex-abuse testimony
Both adoptive parents draw prison terms
Denis Flynn walked out of the courthouse Friday and into a new life.
It was the last time the 24year-old would have to face his adoptive parents, two highlevel marketing executives who pleaded guilty in August to abusing Denis throughout his childhood after they brought him home.
A judge sentenced his adoptive father, 73-year-old Ralph Flynn, to 24 years in prison for three counts of lewd acts with a child.
Carolyn Flynn, Denis Flynn’s 44-year-old adoptive mother, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for two counts of rape. The court also granted a 10-year protective order, barring them from contacting their adoptive son in any way. Both will also be required to register as sex offenders.
No one can say whether or when the anxiety attacks will go away for good, if the waves of depression that overcome him will ever fade for good.
But when Denis Flynn goes to sleep tonight, he knows he can rest easy. He’ll wake up no longer feeling like the one on trial, burdened with the duty to prove the abuse he lived through for 10 years at the hands of his adoptive parents was real.
“I feel relief, like a lion bursting out of my chest,” Flynn said after facing his abusers for what could be the final time as he gave emotional testimony in a San Jose courthouse Friday.
Ralph and Carolyn Flynn took a plea deal that reduced the 44 felony counts they originally faced. The plea also spared Denis Flynn from having to face them in a jury trial that would have forced him to relive the memories of abuse.
But he chose to do just that at Friday’s sentencing hearing, his voice breaking repeatedly and tears falling as he spoke of the horror of growing up in the dreamlike Los Gatos home he was adopted into at age 9, with its five bedrooms and a RollsRoyce in the garage.
“There is so much that happened to me, and I have a very hard time peeling back the layers and sharing it,” he said.
The Flynns adopted Denis after he was orphaned in a northern Russian town. After just months, Ralph Flynn began sexually abusing him. Six years later, Carolyn Flynn joined in.
The abuse pushed Denis Flynn down a spiral of depression and anxiety that lasts to this day, he said in his court testimony. Several times while living with his adoptive parents, he tried to commit suicide.
“If not this, then I would have to keep facing Ralph day after day, multiple times a day, asking for a sexual favor despite me saying no a lot,” he said. “I was led to feel inhuman and hollow, which part of me did they love, if any at all?”
In between conversations with his attorney, Ralph Flynn leaned back, hands folded in his lap. He slipped glances and a few longer gazes at his adoptive son sitting in the gallery before Denis Flynn began to testify, but more often, Ralph looked forward calmly.
As Denis Flynn spoke, Ralph Flynn turned to face him and never broke his gaze, letting little emotion slip through.
Silence fell over the courtroom as Ralph Flynn told the judge he’d like to make a statement after Denis Flynn’s testimony, a move that surprised deputy district attorney Oanh Tran, who requested that he be put under oath.
Before any words came out, Ralph Flynn slumped forward and dropped his head into his hands. He leaned back, shaking, before clearing his throat to try again.
“I love Denis, I love my family,” he said, punctuated by sobs. “I never intended to hurt anyone. I am deeply sorry.”
Neither Carolyn nor Ralph Flynn visibly reacted when the judge delivered their sentences.
“Ralph has contended that he never meant to hurt anyone,” Tran said. “But I think that’s a warped way of thinking about it.”
In addition to the prison sentence, the Flynns were ordered to pay $504,080 in restitution for medical expenses and the emotional damage the abuse inflicted.
“Justice was served,” Tran said. “At 73, 24 years for Ralph is basically a life sentence, and I’m glad we won on the (emotional damages) as well.”
Outside the courtroom, Denis Flynn walked into the embrace of 10 people who had come to support him. They were the neighbors and friends whom he first told of his abuse, the ones he called the horses that led the carriage that propelled him to go forward.
He said he regrets nothing about speaking up. He wants other victims to be able to look at him and see how far he has come. He’s found a voice, he said, a strength that he did not have for 10 years.
He’ll go home to his girlfriend and their three cats, finally in a stable place after bouncing from one friend’s couch to another after he was forced out of the Flynns’ home. He’ll make other people’s lives better in his two jobs as a massage therapist, where he said he can use touch, something that once haunted him, to heal others.
“Right now, it’s already a different life for me,” he said on the steps of the courthouse.