The latest alleged victim of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert tried to report a decades-old assault to Kendall County authorities last year, according to a police report obtained by NBC5 Investigates.
That man, identified in a recent lawsuit as “Richard Doe,” said he was assaulted by Hastert in a public restroom in the summer of what he believes was either 1973 or 1974. At the time, he says he was in the fourth grade.
The police report states that last May the man walked into the Kendall County Sheriff’s Office to report the decades-old assault, which he stated he had tried to report to the Kendall County State’s Attorney approximately a dozen years earlier.
The allegations in the heavily redacted police report roughly parallel statements made in a civil lawsuit that he filed against Hastert last week. In that lawsuit and in his visit to the sheriff’s office, he alleged that he had been riding his bicycle along Game Farm Road and had stopped to use a restroom on the site of what is now Yorkville High School.
“He heard a male voice mutter something to him outside the stall door,” the report states. “The stall door opened and he observed a large looking man come in. (He) believed the man had been exposed at the time.”
The report proceeds to detail a violent sexual assault in the restroom stall.
“He had seen the male’s face through the crack of the stall,” the narrative states. “However when (he) came out of the bathroom, the male was gone.”
The report says the man believed he had told his mother about the assault, and that she may have told a cousin who was a state trooper. Investigators said they had been unable to reach that individual.
The man told sheriff’s investigators that Hastert appeared at his grade school about a month after the attack, spoke to his gym teacher, then pulled him from class and threatened him to stay quiet.
“(He) stated that he saw Hastert again at the end of sixth grade, and again believed him to be the same person who had sexually assaulted him.”
Local
In that police report the now-grown man stated that the gym teacher who Hastert spoke to that day in the seventies was Hastert’s wife, who he married in 1973.
“The allegations are more violent than what we’ve heard in the past,” said the man’s civil attorney Kristi Browne. “These victims of a public figure like this, they relieve it every time it’s in the news.”
The police report notes the man’s allegation that he took the case to the Kendall County State’s Attorney’s Office when he was approximately 20 or 21 years old, speaking directly with State’s Attorney Dallas Ingemunson.
“[He] stated that Ingemensun threatened to charge (him) with slander,” the report said, quoting the man as saying that he felt Ingemunson had “intimidated him into silence.”
Ingemunson told NBC 5 Tuesday afternoon he had no recollection of the man, and that the alleged conversation never took place.
“I’ve never met him,” Ingemunson said. “He’s never been in my office.”
The former State’s Attorney said he had confirmed that a former assistant in the office, Jean Fletcher, did recall meeting the man, but “I never knew what it was.”
He said at the time of the alleged conversation, he and Hastert were not even friends.
“I knew Mr. Hastert in his capacity as coach,” he said. “We didn’t become friends until the mid-eighties when he ran for congress.”
In the police account, Hastert’s new accuser said he had not reported the alleged attack in the years since because of the “embarrassment and stigma” of the incident.
“[Doe] stated he had been living with this bottled up inside of him over the years,” the police report continued. “[He] stated that the incident had been re-awakened approximately six months to a year ago when he began seeing Hastert on the news.”
“Nothing is going to bring me satisfaction,” the report quotes him as telling investigators. “If I could be whole again, Hastert’s [EXPLETIVE] blood would be dripping down my hands, but I’m not going to be whole again, so for me there’s no justice.”
