very sympathetic piece in the Palm Beach Post today, Foley blames his priest, the booze and his love of power for his downfall....
Not a word about his reasons to pursue youthful House pages....
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/...
some excerpts:
He thought about suicide. They were in a rented van, he and his sister, and he looked at the handle on the van's sliding door. There was a semi coming from the opposite direction and he considered hurling himself into its path.
The moment passed, mostly because he couldn't bear the idea of doing something like that right in front of the family that was supporting him unconditionally and always had. "The only thing I cared about was taking care of Mark," says his sister Donna Winterson, older by eight years. "I was in full protection mode. If we had something to face, we'd face it together."
The priest is not denying Foley's story....
But things were normal only up to a point, that point being when Father Anthony Mercieca, of the Sacred Heart Catholic School, took his young altar boy to a sauna on E Street in Lake Worth.
What did the priest do?
"He did everything," Foley says. "He told me he'd kill himself if anybody ever found out. It was a lot for a 12-year-old to process. My first sex was with a priest who told me, 'Don't tell anybody anything,' and who threatened to commit suicide."
Foley had been the perfect altar boy. "I took great pride in laying out the vestments just so. Perfect. Everything was perfect."
Although he is sitting in as public a place as you can find - a Starbucks in Lake Worth - Foley's eyes well up and he begins to sob convulsively.
"Why did he pick me? Was it something I did?"
Mercieca, now retired in the remote country of Malta, basically confirmed Foley's story when he told Vanity Fair, "For some people it's molestation. Maybe for other kids, it's fun, you know?"
on his closeted lifestyle....
"I dreaded town hall meetings,'' Foley says. "I was always waiting for the question: Are you gay? And one time in Jupiter I actually got the question and I just blurted out, 'None of your damn business.' And the crowd applauded, which was an indication that the public was readier to deal with the issue than I was."
So Foley represented his constituency and his politics, if not his sexual politics.
"In my district, gun control meant holding steady with two hands. They are rock-ribbed fundamentalists. On reflection, had I come out, I would have lost some votes on one side, but probably gained votes on the other side, maybe more than I would have lost. I regret my lack of authentic honesty."
He liked women, flirted with women, accompanied women, but he never considered getting married. "I couldn't do that to someone, even though it was a sure path to the governorship at that point. I've known men who were good husbands and fathers but who simply aren't cut out for heterosexuality. It wasn't worth ruining someone else's life for my gain."
The booze and the emails....
"The drinking started at 5 p.m.,'' he says. "I'd sit by the keyboard, after having been admired and adulated all day long, and send out e-mails. A compulsivity. Another mask. Another camouflage."
The e-mails began circulating around Capitol Hill and got as far as two Florida newspapers beginning in August 2005, but nothing happened for another year. The e-mails - sometimes flirty, sometimes considerably more than that - were not, Foley believes, an exotic form of self-sabotage.
"I didn't want to do it, not even subliminally,'' he says. "I just fell victim to my demons without realizing it. I would never talk in public like (I did in the e-mails). I was pushing stuff that was immature and ignorant. It was all my fault."
The new Mark Foley, now hosting his own radio program locally in Palm Beach County...
"It was an awakening. Now I can be totally honest,'' he says. "One time on the floor of Congress a reporter from The Boston Globe came up to me and asked about the charges that were coming out about priests. I just about turned on my heel. I was so concerned with my political survival I couldn't be a hero. I let people down.
"If I'd had the courage to sit him down and say to him, 'You want to hear about priests? I'll tell you about priests. ...' I could have helped people who were in need of help. I remember thinking, 'What a coward!' Boys were being accused of bearing false witness against priests, and I said nothing."
and...
He doesn't drink anymore. He works a 12-step program, although not daily.
"I go to meetings from time to time" is the way he puts it.
Much more interesting stuff in the full interview...
I'll give anyone the benefit of the doubt when reforming a lifestyle after such notorious circumstances, but I'm not betting the farm. To get back in the public eye, albeit in the media, after such escapades smacks of a need for publicity and power again. This is a dangerous man, IMHO.