Abuse victims testify about violent years at Greenwich Boys & Girls Club
STAMFORD — Horseplay. Children stuffed into lockers. Older boys hitting younger ones. Wet towels snapping. Frequent verbal abuse.
These were regular occurrences four decades ago that eventually escalated into physical violence and sexual abuse, including larger boys grabbing smaller boys’ genitals, inside the locker room in the basement of the Greenwich Boys Club on Horseneck Lane, several men testified in court last week.
“I thought it was a rite of passage,” said a 50-year-old man identified by the pseudonym John White, who attended the Greenwich Boys Club as a child and claims he was sexually abused there starting when he was 8 years old.
White is one of seven men who have filed lawsuits against the now-Greenwich Boys & Girls Club claiming sexual abuse there at the hands of Andrew Atkinson between 1975 and 1984. All victims told similar stories during a three-day virtual pretrial hearing in front of Stamford Superior Court Judge John F. Kavanewsky.
“There was horseplay everywhere,” said a man identified as John Doe. “If you cried, you were a wimp.”
“I don’t recall anyone stepping in to stop it,” said a man identified as John Roe.
Three lawsuits filed in Connecticut and one filed in New York state under the Child Victims Act all name Atkinson as the perpetrator. A teen himself at the time, Atkinson was then a locker room supervisor and has denied abusing any children.
Atkinson is not named as a defendant in any of the lawsuits. Instead the lawsuits target the club, a local affiliate of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and claim that at least three adult employees of the club — including the director — knew about the abuse and ignored it.
Kavanewsky is expected to make a ruling Friday on whether there is probable cause to attach the defendant’s assets to the case before proceeding to trial in the three Connecticut lawsuits, now consolidated to conserve judicial time and resources.
Victims describe Atkinson as a large boy, taller than some adults. The suits claim the teen would use his supervisory position to bully, rape, sodomize and physically assault younger children in various locations at the club and off-site.
“There were rooms throughout the club he used to his advantage,” said Doe. He was abused for the longest stretch of time, from ages 6 to 14, according to his attorney.
Roe, who said he was first abused by Atkinson in the locker room around age 10, was late getting to swim class one day around 1980 and knew he was in trouble. When he got to the locker room, “(Atkinson) told me to get in a corner and he fondled me and then told me to scram and get to class,” Roe said.
Also testifying was Jeffrey Starcher, director of organizational development for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, who referred to the youth organization as “my life’s work.” He became
The Boys & Girls Club of Greenwich in Greenwich.
a full-time employee at the Greenwich club in 1982, and his father, Jim, was the club’s director in the 1970s and the 1980s.
Jeffrey Starcher testified that while he signed a memo acknowledging that Atkinson had been relieved of his duties in March 1985, he was not aware of why and never spoke to his father about it. Jim Starcher died in 2004.
“I absolutely had no idea of any kind of sexual misconduct,” Starcher said. “If I had known that, we would have dealt with that.”
In his time at the Greenwich club — as a member, volunteer and later as a full-time staff member — he sometimes saw “light horseplay” and “hijinks,” Starcher said, but “there was never anything that would result in injury.”
Staff always intervened to maintain a safe environment, Starcher said, because “kids should be safe at the Boys & Girls Club.”
Some of the testimony called into question whether Starcher and others did enough to protect children at the club.
Using the pseudonym John Clark, one victim testified Starcher was driving club members to a game when Clark was hazed — hit and slapped hard — by other club members in the back seat. Starcher did nothing to stop it, Clark said.
Attorney Philip Russell asked Clark how he could be sure Starcher knew what was happening.
“I remember him looking in the rearview mirror,” Clark said.
Physical abuse turned to sexual abuse by Atkinson, about 16 to 20 times between 1981 and 1982, he said. After he was sodomized in the locker room one day, Clark also got into a fight with Atkinson in the lobby at the club, which drew the attention of club staff.
“I snapped. I was sick and tired of him assaulting me,”
Clark said. “He hit me in the head, arm … my chest. It definitely hurt. He was a big guy.”
Atkinson was given a brief “time out” after the fight, which one of the Starchers stopped, but continued to be the only supervisor in the locker room most evenings, two witnesses testified.
In 1982 or 1983, the mother of a swimmer at the club met with a club official to discuss locker room concerns, she testified. Atkinson was “intimidating to the younger boys,” said Susan Steck, adding that she was unsure whether any changes were made after her meeting.
Jeffrey Starcher said he recalled such a meeting, but that he was not Atkinson’s supervisor at that time and did not remember further details about any incident involving Atkinson.
Carmine Reiente, a custodian at the Greenwich club at the time who was also asked to sign the memo about Atkinson leaving, said he never saw any abuse and had no idea what instigated the “Atkinson incident.”
Another six men have spoken out about the abuse they suffered at the club, but their claims could not be pursued due to Connecticut’s statute of limitations, Russell has said.
In recent statements, the club has said it remains committed to protecting children and serving the needs of the community. It also said it respects those who have come forward with abuse allegations.
Two former directors said no one brought abuse allegations to their attention in the 1980s. The victims, who were children at the time, testified that they did not tell board members.
“I didn’t know I was being abused,” said Roe, adding that he was suffering from a mix of confusion, shame and anger. “(The abuse) affected me in ways like I said that I’m still figuring out today.”
All of the men who say they were abused report varying degrees of substance abuse, depression and anxiety.
“I started drinking around 12 years old just to forget about things,” said White. “It’s just followed me throughout my life.”
Most of the men have also faced criminal charges; some have served prison time. A man with the pseudonym John Smith offered tearful testimony from inside the Department of Correction, where he is serving a 13year prison sentence for 21 separate felony cases. At one point, Smith said he got a gun and intended to kill Atkinson.
Smith, who said he was abused twice in the band room of the club and twice in a bathroom at Island Beach, has struggled with substance abuse most of his life. Around 1990 he got clean, got a job and then ran into Atkinson on the train platform.
“He acted like nothing ever happened,” Smith said.
Smith invited him to stop by the restaurant where he was working the next day, and planned to shoot him when he showed up, he said. However, Smith relapsed and never made it to work that day.
“It definitely hasn’t been a good life,” Smith said. If he had never met Atkinson, “(Maybe) life would have turned out differently.”
Dr. David Mantell, who conducted forensic interviews with three victims, testified that while the frequency and severity of abuse varied, there are “many different reactions to being sexually abused.”
The lawsuits against the Greenwich Boys & Girls Club, the first of which was filed in
2017, spurred a lengthy Hearst Connecticut Media investigation into sexual abuse tied to Boys & Girls Club affiliates across the country. The investigation, which resulted in the first known national database cataloging the alleged abuse, has so far found
351 victims in 35 states.
A report prepared for the plaintiffs by social worker and sexual abuse expert Kathleen Coulborn Faller that reviewed club policies and procedures as well as depositions of key players in Greenwich case criticized the local organization for its lack of written policies or manuals and what appeared to be a failure to train or otherwise communicate such policies to staff and volunteers. Despite some records of training sessions, former staff at the club could not recollect receiving any, Faller testified.
The Boys & Girls Clubs of America instituted mandatory background checks in 2005 and has enhanced its policies to prevent abuse over the years. An independent third-party review last year noted that the organization “meets or exceeds” current background check best practices but that local affiliates do not uniformly respond to reports of sexual misconduct.
After the report, the organization took additional steps to enhance safety measures at local clubs and strengthened its reference check requirement to clarify that all clubs must receive rehire eligibility information for all prospective staff and volunteers who previously worked at other clubs. Local clubs are also in the process of implementing several recommendations from the thirdparty review “to strengthen our culture of safety and increase the physical and emotional safety of our members,” the organization said in a statement this week.
“Our commitment to young people, their safety, and wellbeing is unyielding,” the Boys & Girls Clubs of America said in the statement. “We must ensure that every child is heard, and that it is clear that there is no place in our organization for those that would want to harm them. Boys & Girls Clubs of America will never stop doing whatever it takes to protect kids in our care.”