For 44 years — as a husband and father, working as a glazier for the public schools, volunteering for community programs and through five elections to the Ramsey County Board — Jim McDonough kept the secret.
But on his 60th birthday Tuesday, the Ramsey County Board chairman couldn't keep it to himself any longer. Thanks to the Minnesota Child Victims Act, he said, he no longer had to.
McDonough filed a civil suit in Ramsey County District Court Tuesday against the Boy Scouts of America and its St. Paul-based Northern Star Council for allegedly failing to protect him in the late 1960s and early 1970s from four years of sexual abuse at the hands of an adult scout leader.
In an emotional news conference at his attorney's office in Minneapolis, McDonough said the abuse, which happened from when he was 12 to 16, killed his desire to go to college and launched him into years of self-destructive behavior that finally ended with counseling in the 1980s.
He said he long had been resigned to the fact he would never tell anyone, and was OK with that. But he said the Child Victims Act, which became law in 2013 and opened a three-year window to sue in cases previously barred by the statute of limitations, gave him the chance to "make some changes" and confront his past with the love and support of his family and friends.
"This shame is no longer mine," he said. "The shame belongs to my predator. This shame belongs to the Boy Scouts of America. No longer will this sexual abuse define me."
The alleged predator was identified in McDonough's complaint as Leland (Lee) Opalinski, then a 26-year-old bakery route salesman who met McDonough in 1967 while volunteering as a scout leader with Troop 12 at First Covenant Church on St. Paul's East Side.
Just months after McDonough refused to see him anymore, Opalinski pleaded guilty in August 1971 to a charge of indecent liberties with another teenage boy and was placed on seven years' probation. Opalinski, who had been living in Forest Lake, died last year at age 73.