Survivor Keith Townsend’s Maine case returned Paquin to prison in 2019
Defrocked Boston Catholic priest Ronald Paquin, whose admission of sexually abusing a minor was portrayed in the Oscar-winning 2015 film “Spotlight,” died on September 11 in a Maine state prison at age 83, the Maine Department of Correction said in a news release. Keith Townsend, 52, who reported being abused by Paquin as a child and pursued a separate Maine criminal case that resulted in Paquin’s 2019 re-imprisonment, said Wednesday that he hoped the death would help victims find closure and move on.
Paquin was one of the clerics whose admissions surfaced in the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-winning Spotlight investigation into the sexual abuse scandal inside the Boston archdiocese, reporting that helped prompt the resignation of Archbishop Bernard Law at the end of 2002 and produced policy reforms across the U.S. church. The 2015 film dramatized that investigation. In a notable scene, an actor portraying the Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer, played by Rachel McAdams, questions an actor playing Paquin, Richard O’Rourke, on the priest’s front steps.
“Sure, I fooled around – but I never felt gratified myself,” the actor playing Paquin replies. Pressed further — “Right, um, but you admit to molesting boys at St John the Baptist?” — the on-screen Paquin answers: “Yes, yes. But, as I said, I never got any pleasure from it.”
Paquin had pleaded guilty in 2002 to sexually abusing an altar server from 1989 to 1992 while working at St John the Baptist church in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He was stripped of his clerical status and imprisoned in Massachusetts for that abuse, which was first publicly exposed in the Globe’s Spotlight series. Paquin was freed in 2015.
Learning of that release motivated Townsend — once a St John altar server himself — to come forward and report being abused by Paquin between 1985 and 1989 on camping trips to Kennebunkport, Maine. Townsend said he was between the ages of eight and 13 when Paquin molested him. Townsend recalled Paquin plying him with drugs and alcohol during the abuse, eventually leading him to battles with substance abuse addiction and incarceration.
A Maine grand jury indicted Paquin in 2017 on new charges of gross sexual misconduct in connection with Townsend and another individual. Paquin faced a jury trial in November 2018 which culminated in a guilty verdict against him with regards to Townsend, though he was acquitted of having abused the other individual. Maine judge Wayne Douglas sentenced Paquin in May 2019 to 16 more years in prison. Paquin was in the Mountain View correctional facility in Charleston, Maine, when he died, the state’s department of correction said in a news release.
Townsend said he first got word of Paquin’s death from his wife, who saw it circulating on the news and social media. He said he understood the many reactions he subsequently heard or read that took delight in news of Paquin’s death. But Townsend, now a New Hampshire resident, also said he used the occasion to think about his “shaking off” the drug and alcohol addiction that followed Paquin’s abuse. He said he contemplated the family he had built after overcoming “one of the biggest obstacles that could be thrown” at a person.
“I get those who think the attitude should be, ‘Fuck him. Fuck what he did to me,’” Townsend said. “But look where I am today.”
Townsend said he sought Paquin’s re-imprisonment with the aim of “protecting children … not [from] a man [but] a monster.” He criticized Massachusetts for having released Paquin in 2015. “Massachusetts just kind of let him go,” Townsend said. “So I had to dig deep … [because] I didn’t want anybody else to possibly have to go through [his] abuse. Maine thankfully had the balls to take this case, aggressively prosecute it and get a good outcome.”
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian — who is portrayed in the 2015 movie by Stanley Tucci and has represented numerous victims of sexual abuse by Paquin and other clerics — said the doorstep scene in the film provided a powerful cue to survivors of clergy molesters that they were not alone. “It gave a sense of, ‘A-ha, I’m not the only one,’” in one of Hollywood’s most critically acclaimed films, Garabedian said. “It wasn’t my fault, and I shouldn’t feel guilty.”
Townsend said he had not yet been able to see “Spotlight” and therefore had not viewed the doorstep scene with his own story on screen. Townsend said he was grateful for anything that had raised awareness of Paquin’s crimes before his own push to bring the priest back to prison.
“When I lay my head down tonight, I know it saved lives” getting Paquin imprisoned for his remaining years, Townsend added. “And that’s what matters to me.”
“We live with a big burden in our hearts and on our backs,” Townsend said. “And my hope is that people can find closure and move on.”