Victim in Vermont priest sex abuse case authors book about ordeal

 

RUTLAND — Dan Gilman stood on the rickety platform nailed to a remains of a tree and looked down at the inner tube floating on the surface of the above-ground pool 6 or 7 feet below.

It was July 28,1972. Gilman was15 with light-brown hair and a mischievous smile, a bit of a hell-raiser by his own admission. He wasn’t above pranks like sneaking beers or joining his friends to shoot off their rifles on Pine Hill up behind the Rut­land Country Club.

Gilman also was a good diver, and on this steamy, cloudy day he had decided he wanted to show off to his three buddies by using the inner tube as a target for a dare­devil dive.

“I had the smart idea of diving through it,” he recalled in a recent interview. “My last memory of it is looking down at my toes, curling them on the plank so I wouldn’t slip, and seeing the tube come.”

He nailed the dive, but it changed his life forever.

The pool, barely 4 feet deep, was far too shallow for such a dive. His head hit the bottom of the pool, and the impact crunched the vertebrae in his neck and fractured his spine, rendering him a quadriplegic.

Gilman, now 57, has learned to live with his physical disability.

He’s had a much harder time dealing with what happened after the Rev. Ed­ward Paquette, hired a month earlier by the state’s Roman Catholic diocese, began visiting Gilman while Gilman was being treated at Rutland Hospital.

Paquette molested him, repeatedly.

At first, Gilman said the incidents in­volved Paquette’s pulling back the bed sheets and fondling Gilman in the genital area as Gilman lay in his bed, unable to move.

In the weeks and months that followed, Gilman said, the sexual abuse became more aggressive, finally ending when Pa­quette was transferred to a parish in Montpelier in 1974.

Only decades later did Gilman learn Paquette was a serial child molester, sex­ually abusing dozens of boys in Vermont following similar incidents in Indiana and Massachusetts.

Paquette now lives in Westfield, Mass., and in a 2009 interview with the Burling­ton Free Press, acknowledged his abuse and apologized.

Close to 40 of the victims, including Gilman, sued the state’s Roman Catholic diocese. In a series of out-of-court settle­ments during the past seven years, the diocese paid out an estimated $25 million in damages to Paquette’s victims.

Last week, Gilman published a memoir titled “The Blue Hole,” the first book writtten by one of Paquette’s many vic­tims. The memoir details Paquette’s con­duct with Gilman and with how Gilman struggled to come to grips with what the priest did to him.

False hope

Gilman steered his powered wheel­chair up to the dining-room table of the modest home he shares in Rutland with his partner, Meredith Kelley.

“He was very convincing,” Gilman said, talking about how Paquette gave him hope in the days after the accident that one day Gilman would walk again.

“To hear from him that I will be cured, not if I’ll be cured, I just fell for it hook, line and sinker,” he said. “Having him con­tradict everything that the medical staff told me was very comforting.”

“He said the Lord would go through him and heal me,” Gilman continued. “The both of them would heal me. Any lit­tle improvements that came on, just a re­duction of pain, he took credit for it.”

Gilman said Paquette’s increasingly assertive sexual acts were hard for him to understand. He reluctantly went along with the conduct on the premise that Pa­quette was an agent of the Lord, and the actions would result in Gilman’s walking again.

“It was all part of the process,” he said Paquette told him. “I know it was inappro­priate, but if that’s what it took me get out of bed, I’d put up with it.”

Paquette became friends with Gil­man’s family, visiting the family home in Rutland, even going on camping trips with them and having Paquette’s elderly parents join them.

The sex abuse, Gilman said, didn’t stop until Paquette was transferred abruptly to the Montpelier parish in 1974. Internal church documents show thediocese made the move after learning Paquette had sex­ually molested two other young men at the hospital in the summer and fall of 1974.

As Gilman gained distance from Pa­quette, he realized how angry he was with him. Paquette, he said, wrote him letters regularly for years afterward, but Gil­man threw them away, often without reading them.

Instead, Gilman started thinking about how he’d like to kill Paquette.

“The more time that went by, the more I realized how stupid I’d been to be taken in by his promises,” Gilman wrote in his memoir. “There was only one way I could make up for my handicap. I had to make myself as powerful as my enemies, and the only way I could do it was with a gun.”

Gilman said he never took steps to act on his desire to kill Paquette and was able to understand the anger he felt only by go­ing through counseling more recently.

“All the pain I’ve been through, and there’s been a lot, it’s the emotional pain that I can’t get rid of,” he said. “You have a broken bone, cut, scrapes, falls, the pain lasts a few days or weeks, but it goes away eventually. This stuff just rides forever. Even to this day today I still have it.”

Going forward

Gilman, now retired from a state job with the Department of Vocational Reha­bilitation, is spending these winter days painting images of wildlife and land­scapes.

It’s not easy work. He has no dexterity with the fingers of his gnarled hands, but he’s devised a way to hold a paint brush firmly between the fingers of one hand, then lean against his other and dab the canvas.

He employed the same determination to typing the manuscript for “The Blue Hole.”

To do it, he employed a pencil-shaped stick of wood bound to his hand with an ex­tra- wide, taut rubber band to peck out the words to his book on a computer key­board, one character at a time.

He said he made writing the book his mission in life after grudgingly agreeing to go along with an out-of-court settle­ment with the diocese in January 2013.

“I said I’d go with the settlement if they let me write about what happened, and why the settlement happened versus me going into the court and confronting them,” he said.

He also hopes the book will give cour­age to people who have been sexually abused.

“I hope it gives other women and men and children the confidence to come for­ward and … not be fearful of being stig­matized in this regard.”

Contact Sam Hemingway at 660-1850 or shemingway@burlingtonfreepress.com. Follow Sam on Twitter at www.twitter.com/SamuelHemingway.