Foley Waited until Program’s End to Email PagesRep. Mark Foley (R-FL) waited until pages had left the House Page Program before striking up correspondence with them, according to a former page who was in the program from 2001 to 2002. Matthew Loraditch, who now heads up the alumni association for former congressional pages, said that three of his fellow pages were contacted by Foley only after they’d gone home for the summer.
That made any recourse for his friends much less clear. While in the program, pages had been advised that if they felt they were being sexually harrassed, “you should go talk to someone you feel comfortable with,” Loraditch said. Since his friends were at home and they didn’t feel threatened by Foley’s emails, Loraditch said, they didn’t report them.
This seems to have been a pattern for Foley. The 2005 emails from Foley to a page that ABC News revealed on Thursday were also sent just after the close of the page program. In that case, however, the former page alerted a congressional staffer about the emails.
Loraditch’s friends began receiving messages in July, 2002, he said. “The first few were kind of normal,” he said, similar to the emails reported on Thursday. The program had ended in the first week of June, and Foley had given his email address to a number of pages then.
Eventually, he said, the messages became more sexual. Loraditch couldn’t remember specifics, since he hadn’t seen the messages since 2002, but said, “I remember them being quite sexual and explicit.” He said that his friends, who’d shared the emails with him then, did not wish to speak about their experience, but did say that he’d spoken to two of them about their correspondence with Foley since Thursday.
Loraditch said that his three friends were the only other pages he had direct knowledge of who’d been contacted by Foley, “but in a situation like this,” he said, “where there’s three, there’s more.”
