Lawsuit against Dennis Hastert involving hush-money pact settles before trial
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Days before a trial was set to begin, former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert reached a tentative settlement in a hush-money lawsuit filed by a man whose decades-old sexual abuse allegations led to the disgraced politician’s epic downfall six years ago.
The financial terms of the agreement will be confidential, attorneys told reporters Wednesday after meeting for a couple hours behind closed doors. Lawyers had been expected to begin selecting a jury Monday in the Kendall County lawsuit.
Chief Judge Robert Pilmer ruled last week that the man who sued Hastert, seeking the unpaid balance of an alleged $3.5 million pact, would be named publicly once the trial began. The man had filed the breach-of-contract lawsuit under the pseudonym James Doe in April 2016.
His attorney, Kristi Browne, would not say whether the judge’s ruling was a factor in her client’s decision to settle. While the tentative agreement ends the litigation, Browne said he will suffer for years to come.
“It’s never over for a victim of child sexual abuse,” she said.
Attorney John Ellis, who represents Hastert, declined to comment Wednesday. Hastert, 79, and the plaintiff have never appeared in court while the lawsuit inched forward over the past five years.
Hastert was the longest-serving Republican House speaker in U.S. history and later became a consultant and powerful lobbyist. But before entering politics in the early 1980s, he was a teacher at Yorkville High School and state champion wrestling coach.
The man who sued Hastert alleged the coach sexually abused him in the 1970s at an out-of-state wrestling camp when he was 14. Though the Yorkville boy was not yet in high school, his parents were close friends with Hastert and had allowed Hastert to take their son to the camp.
The lawsuit alleged the man has suffered periods of unemployment, bouts of depression, hospitalization and psychiatric treatment but didn’t connect his problems to Hastert until 2008, when he learned that his former coach had allegedly inappropriately touched someone else decades ago as well.
The man and Hastert later made a verbal $3.5 million pact for the man’s silence. According to the lawsuit, Hastert rebuffed the man’s suggestion that they involve a lawyer and put the verbal agreement in writing.
Hastert paid the man $1.7 million from June 2010 to December 2014 but stopped payments after federal authorities, aware of suspicious bank withdrawals, approached him to investigate whether he was being victimized. The FBI investigation instead revealed the allegations that Hastert had sexual contact with the former student-athlete and some other male teens decades earlier.
One of the other teens was Scott Cross, a younger brother of former Hastert political ally Tom Cross, the former longtime Illinois House GOP leader. On Wednesday, Scott Cross told the Tribune he was not surprised the lawsuit settled because “there’s no way Hastert is going to want to get on that (witness) stand.”
“I think it’s in the best interest it got settled this way and the victim has a chance to move forward a little bit with his life, to the extent that he can,” Cross said in a telephone interview. “I just wish (James Doe) the best of luck and hope this provides a small measure of closure for him.”
The man who filed the suit is now in his early 60s and lives out of state. Tribune reporters learned his identity in early 2016 but he has repeatedly declined to comment. The Tribune typically does not name victims of alleged sexual abuse without their consent.
Hastert was indicted in May 2015 for allegedly violating bank regulations and pleaded guilty in October of that year, admitting he withdrew more than $950,000 from banks in a way that would avoid detection. Prosecutors in that case referred to the victim as Individual A.
At Hastert’s 2016 federal sentencing hearing, in which the judge called him a “serial child molester,” Hastert was apologetic, saying he “mistreated” and “took advantage” of some of the boys when he was their coach.
Hastert was released from federal prison in summer 2017 after serving part of a 15-month sentence. In a 2018 deposition in the civil suit obtained by the Tribune, Hastert denied anything sexual occurred with the man who sued and said he simply helped the boy with a groin injury.
In earlier rulings in the lawsuit case, Judge Pilmer had limited lawyers’ attempts to litigate questions concerning the sexual abuse allegations and whether Hastert was extorted. Rather, the civil trial would have focused on whether Hastert breached his verbal contract with the man.
Ellis, Hastert’s attorney, has argued that whatever verbal pact the two had was not a valid and enforceable contract.
Following Hastert’s indictment, made public in May 2015, authorities would not acknowledge the motive behind the hush-money payments. Tribune reporters spent several months contacting scores of former wrestlers and students and filing open-records requests in an effort to uncover the truth.
Cross told the Tribune privately that he was victimized in fall 1979 when he was wrestling team captain. Because of his uncertainty about coming forward at the time of the interview, given the possible implications for his family and work in the financial services community, Cross asked the Tribune to keep his identity confidential until he made a public statement.
Cross later did go public, even championing legislation in Illinois in 2017 that eliminated the statute of limitations for sex crimes against children.
“You never really recover from something like this,” Cross told the Tribune Wednesday. “The memories are always going to be there. The sad reality is he’ll (the plaintiff) live with this the rest of his life.”
