He was eight years old the first time. Eight years old, on a camping trip in Kennebunkport with a man in a Roman collar who smiled at him in front of his parents and put drugs and drink in his hand the moment they were gone. His name is Keith Townsend. He is fifty-two now. He lives in New Hampshire. He has a wife. He is alive because he chose to be, and because, when the system that had already failed him once tried to fail him again, he refused to let it.
The system is the Catholic Church. The man in the collar is Ronald Paquin. Paquin pleaded guilty in 2002 to sexually abusing an altar server at St John the Baptist in Haverhill, Massachusetts, between 1989 and 1992. He was stripped of his collar. He was imprisoned. A Pulitzer-winning Boston Globe investigation had exposed him. An Oscar-winning film, Spotlight, made his name permanent in the public record, along with the names of the men in the chancery who shielded him — shielding that, at the end of 2002, cost the archbishop of Boston, Bernard Law, his seat.
Then Massachusetts let him walk. Released in 2015. As if a confession and a sentence were the end of it. As if the children he had hurt in Maine between 1985 and 1989 — when Townsend was between eight and thirteen — would never come forward.
Townsend came forward. He had been an altar server at St John the Baptist too. He had been on those camping trips. He had been plied with drugs and alcohol during the abuse, and he had spent years afterward drowning in the addiction that followed. He had been incarcerated. He had clawed his way back. He watched Paquin walk free and he went to Maine authorities.
A Maine grand jury indicted Paquin in 2017 on gross sexual misconduct charges. A jury in November 2018 found him guilty with respect to Townsend. Maine judge Wayne Douglas sentenced him in May 2019 to sixteen more years behind bars.
Sixteen years, for an eighty-three-year-old man, is a death sentence with a slow fuse.
The fuse ran out on 11 September. The Maine Department of Correction confirmed that Paquin died in custody at the Mountain View correctional facility in Charleston. He was eighty-three. He died alone, in a cage, having confessed to the destruction of children and having spent his final years trying to wriggle free of the consequences.
Townsend was asked, on Wednesday, five days after the news broke, what he felt. He said he understood the people who took delight in it. He said he was not one of them. He said he had done the work of shaking the addiction off his back, of building a family, of becoming someone his eight-year-old self would have been proud of. He said: “I get those who think the attitude should be, ‘Fuck him. Fuck what he did to me.’ But look where I am today.”
His aim, he said, was never revenge. It was protection. “I had to dig deep,” he said, “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.” Massachusetts, by his account, did not. Massachusetts released a confessed child molester into whatever darkness he chose. Maine took the case. Maine held him. Maine buried him.
The attorney Mitchell Garabedian — who has represented victim after victim of Paquin and other clerics, and who was portrayed by Stanley Tucci in Spotlight — said the famous scene in which Rachel McAdams’s reporter confronts a man standing in for Paquin on his own doorstep gave survivors something they had rarely been given by the institution that employed their abusers: proof that they were not alone. “It gave a sense of, ‘Aha, I’m not the only one. It wasn’t my fault, and I shouldn’t feel guilty.’”
Townsend said he had not yet watched the film. He said he was grateful regardless for anything that raised the alarm about Paquin before he could act on his own behalf. “When I lay my head down tonight, I know it saved lives,” he said of the second imprisonment. “And that’s what matters to me.”
Good. Paquin died alone in a cage in Maine. Good. The survivor who put him there is alive, sober, and raising a family, and is not asking for pity. He is asking only that you remember what the institution enabled — and what its survivors rebuilt on top of the rubble.
This is not an isolated horror. Within the past week, a New Orleans priest accused of deaf-community abuse died at 87, the same pattern repeating itself within days. The financial reckoning has begun — the San Francisco archdiocese agreed to a $395 million settlement just this summer — but the human reckoning has not, and will not, until the institution that built this machine admits what it built.
The cathedral doors are still open. The next child is still on the next camping trip. The next confession is still being buried in a chancery file somewhere in Boston. Do not look away. Do not call it “tragic” in a way that splits the blame between the abuser and the abused. The blame lives in one place. The man who died in Maine last week was a monster. The survivors who chased him are not.