The next day, Willard and Lewis confronted Charles “Chuck’’ Devita, the camp’s groundsman and former boating director. As Lewis recalls it, Willard asked Devita only one question: Are you a homosexual? Devita, then 29, said he was not and explained that he had stumbled upon the images by accident.
Apparently satisfied, Willard suggested that they pray.
“We all three put our heads down, and Faith led us in prayer,’’ recalled Lewis. “And that was more or less that. Faith wanted to believe it was an accident, and so that is what it was. To think otherwise would have been far too painful.’’
Fourteen years later that decision is the subject of intense scrutiny as Camp Good News has become engulfed in a mushrooming cloud of allegations of sexual abuse committed by members of its staff. The accusations come from former campers moved to act after Senator Scott Brown’s revelation in February that he had been abused at a Cape Cod summer camp, later identified as Camp Good News. Since then, at least 14 former campers have come forward, to an attorney or to police, alleging they were sexually assaulted there from the 1970s through 2000. They have identified Devita and four other staffers as their abusers.
Their claims are as varied as they are sordid. One former camper says he was roughed up and molested by a counselor on a field trip to Battleship Cove in Fall River. A 45-year-old Florida woman who was a camper in the 1970s says she was raped in a bathroom on three occasions by a janitor who threatened to kill her mother if she told.
Brown wrote in his autobiography, “Against All Odds,’’ that he was the victim of a long-haired staffer who followed him into the infirmary bathroom and fondled him. Then 10, Brown held his secret for more than four decades, identifying neither the camp where he was abused nor his abuser.
