Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown is appearing on 60 Minutes this Sunday to promote his memoir, and in a preview released today he discusses being physically abused by his step-fathers and molested several times by a camp counselor.
Brown describes the sexual abuse, saying, “Fortunately, nothing was ever fully consummated, so to speak, but it was certainly, back then, very traumatic,” and adds that he thinks the physical abuse made him more susceptible to predators:
“He said ‘If you tell anybody…I’ll kill you. I will make sure that nobody believes you … When people find people like me at that young vulnerable age, who are basically lost, the thing that they have over you is, they make you believe that no one will believe you.”
He tells Lesley Stahl that his mother and wife will be learning about the abuse for the first time with this interview. Brown also describes revisiting the house he grew up in when it was up for sale recently:
I actually called the realtor and went in and took the tour and relived kind of where everything was…to make sure I wasn’t …dreaming. As I left, I said, ‘Man, I wish I had the money. I’d just buy this thing and burn it down.’
Brown says the silver lining to having such a traumatic childhood is that it prepared him for politics. “When I’m getting the crap beat out of me outside, in the political spectrum,” he says, “I’m like, ‘Psst. This is nothing. Bring it on. Let’s go. Next!” The full interview airs Sunday on 60 Minutes.
Sen. Scott Brown Speaks Out On Childhood Abuse [CBS News]