Foley: We Will Make You Successful…
Often implicit in the chats is an exchange of professional advancement in exchange for sex that plays on the allure of power that Foley used to entice one of the teenagers. Foley at one point promised to help him become the “stylish elite type” person the teenager said he wanted to be.”We will make you successful,” Foley promised, “as long as you don’t mind me grabbing your [deleted] once in a while.”
Oh, this bothers me more than the messages, than the political denial, than the calls for heads to roll that are nothing more than symbolic distractions intended to appease an angry, clamoring crowd, because these words reveal the true motivation for Foley’s Follies. Forget childhood sexual abuse, forget alcoholism. The real motivation was Foley’s obsession with power and with molding and mentoring those boys into men molded in his own image. If he had done that in the corporate world today, it’s likely that there would’ve been a nice fat sexual harassment claim or two for him to defend.
Look past all of the posturing on this. I can’t stomach the silly little excuses that are being thrown against the wall by his spokespeople in the hopes that one will stick. The evil that Foley was doing was far worse than some frivolous IM sex conversations. The true evil was holding out the carrot of advancement to an ambitious kid in exchange for sexual favors.
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