Leslie Stahl will have a long interview with Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) on 60 Minutes this weekend, but they just released a preview in which Brown admits for the first time that he was sexually abused as a child.
Brown says that he was abused sexually by a camp counselor when he was 12, and never told anyone.
Fortunately, nothing was ever fully consummated, so to speak, but it was certainly, back then, very traumatic. … He said, ‘If you tell anybody, I’ll kill ya. I will make sure that no one believes you.’ And that’s the thing, when people find people like me at that young, vulnerable age that are basically lost, the thing that they have over you is they make you believe that no one will believe you.
Brown also told Stahl that he never reported it, and that his mother will read about it for the first time when his memoir comes out next week. His wife only found out about the abuse when she read his memoir.
In the book and the interview, Brown apparently also recounts physical and psychological abuse “at the hands of his mother’s many husbands,” in Stahl’s words.
The Rape Abuse And Incest National Network estimates that 1 in 33 American men are victims of sexual assault, and that 15 percent of all sexual assault victims are under the age of 12. Almost all underage victims of sexual assault — 93 percent — know their attackers.
Watch the video below:
