According to Huffington Post Black Voices, another old white and dirty sports figure had been molesting young black boys:
Long before revelations that former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky had allegedly sexually abused a number of at-risk youth, another high-profile predator used the cover of athletics to molest young boys. Between 1971 and 1991, Donald Fitzpatrick, a long-time Red Sox clubhouse manager, systematically molested and abused nearly a dozen African-American boys in their hometown of Winter Haven, Florida, where the baseball team held their Spring training.
“He grabbed me and told me to take my clothes off,” Leeronnie Ogletree, who said Fitzpatrick lured him into years of molestation when he was just 10, told thepostgame.com. “I’ll never forget him putting his mouth on my pe**s. I don’t mind telling it now because I’m over it. But that stands out. And I’ll never forget it.”
It took decades for the truth to come out about Fitzpatrick, who is white, and his criminal desire for young black boys. In 2003 the Boston Red Sox settled a $3.15 million federal lawsuit brought against them by Ogletree and seven other men from Winter Haven who said Fitzpatrick repeatedly molested them as boys.
Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who handled Ogletree’s case against Fitzpatrick and the Boston Red Sox, said the similarities between the Penn State and Red Sox scandals are startlingly similar. There were cover-ups, denials and the enabling of pedophiles to use the power of their institutions to prey on the weak, in the Red Sox case, “poor black boys,” he said. The kinds of youth often considered society’s “throwaways.”
It wasn’t until 1991, two decades later, that wheels of justice began to turn. Howard Bryant of ESPN.com, wrote that in ’91, a young aide whom Fitzpatrick was suspected of recruiting showed up at a nationally televised Red Sox game with a sign that read “Don Fitzpatrick sexually assaulted me.” The Red Sox paid out a $100,000 settlement, Bryant wrote. The $3.5 million settlement came years later.
Mr. Fitzpatrick served as the team’s clubhouse manager from the 1960s until 1991, and the actions you have inquired about occurred between 1971 and 1991. When the team, then under a previous ownership group, became aware of the allegations against Mr. Fitzpatrick in 1991, he was promptly relieved of his duties. Civil litigation was filed in 2001 by victims of Mr. Fitzpatrick for actions that had occurred more than 20 years earlier. The team, which was acquired by the current ownership group after the lawsuit was filed, reached a settlement in 2002. Mr. Fitzpatrick has since passed away. The Red Sox have always viewed the actions of Mr. Fitzpatrick to be abhorrent.
