As a divorced mother in the 1970s, Carole Hines was happy to drive her son to camping trips with the Boy Scouts or host parties in their home for his men and boys’ choir. Both the troop and the choir were affiliated with the Catholic school he attended in Highlandtown, which she herself had gone to as a child.
“I thought, ‘He has male role models,’” Hines recalled. “I was so oblivious.”
These days, the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church no longer command such unquestioned trust. Both are in the throes of a reckoning over decades of child sex abuse committed by troop leaders, clergy, teachers and others affiliated with them, and the institutions’ role in enabling and covering it up.
The Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy in 2020, resulting in a record $2.46 billion fund from which they will compensate about 82,000 men who say they were sexually abused as children.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for bankruptcy Sept. 29, just before a new Maryland law lifted a statute of limitations on pursuing child sex abuse claims, anticipating a rash of civil suits.
Hines’ son, Paul Jan Zdunek, has claims against both institutions.
Now 56 and living in Southern California, Zdunek said he was sexually abused from the time he was 8 and into his teens. He said the perpetrators were three men: a Scout leader, a Catholic middle school teacher and a member of a choir connected to the school.
“I just thought that’s what childhood was like,” said Zdunek, who agreed to let The Baltimore Sun identify him. “I thought this is how everyone grows up.”
That someone would be sexually abused by more than one person during their childhood is sadly not uncommon, researchers have found. According to one review of studies on the subject, nearly half of victims on average will again be preyed upon by other abusers.
“They might have poor detection of risk, a numbing or dissociation when it happens again,” said AJ Ortiz, social science director at the advocacy group Child USA. “They might have trouble developing healthy relationships. They might not know what normal sexual behavior is.”
For decades, Zdunek said he kept his ordeal secret — out of shame, and a desire to protect first his mother and then, after he graduated from the Peabody Conservatory in 1991, a burgeoning career as a conductor.
Slowly, he began talking. In 2007, he reported Patrick McIntyre, who had taught at Bishop John Neumann School in Highlandtown, to the Baltimore archdiocese. His report was included in a Maryland Attorney General’s Office report detailing the church’s decadeslong history of abuse. McIntyre could not be reached for comment.
Around the same time, Zdunek reported to police that Ronald Reckline, a member of the men and boys choir, had abused him. After Zdunek got him to discuss their past on a taped phone call, Reckline was convicted in 2009 of abuse by a custodian of a minor. He died the next year.
Zdunek said he realized the scouts and the church didn’t just have “a few bad apples” who abused children, but instead a systemic issue: Both knew the extent of the problem and sought to conceal it.
In the archdiocese bankruptcy case, Zdunek was recently named to the seven-member creditors committee and elected its chair. The panel will represent fellow abuse survivors with claims against the archdiocese.
“If this was an organization that had bad actors and truly repented and cleaned it up, that’s a totally different scenario,” Zdunek said. “They created this monster, now they can pay for it.”
A lost childhood
When he looks at pictures from his past, it hits hard just how young and innocent he was when the abuse began, he said. With his mother working full time and attending school part time, he was a latchkey kid.
The abuse began on a scout camping trip when he slept in the same tent as a troop leader and went on for about twice a week for three years, Zdunek said. The man, who has since died, would give him rum and Cokes and cigarettes, show him porn and then orally and anally rape him.
Zdunek said he would pretend to be drunk or asleep. The drinking and smoking made him feel grown-up, he said, but also prevented him from reporting the abuse to avoid admitting to “doing all this bad stuff” and because he felt he brought it on himself.
When he went to middle school, he said, he quit scouting.
But then McIntyre, the teacher, took an interest in him, bringing him fishing and to Baltimore Blast games and the YMCA, he said. When Zdunek was given an old piano at the school, McIntyre helped the boy drag it six blocks and wrestle it into his house.
But there was a price. In the locker room of the Y, when they were naked after a workout, McIntyre would hold him and profess his love, Zdunek said.
“He was always hugging me,” he said. “That was the extent of the physical abuse. What was worse was the psychological piece of it.”
The teacher started coming to his house after school every day, staying until 6:10 p.m., when he knew Zdunek’s mother would get home, he said.
“He didn’t allow me to play with other kids,” Zdunek said. “I would say, ‘I have to practice piano,’ and he’d say, ‘I’ll just sit here and watch.’
“It was like being held hostage,” he said.
Around the time he was 12 or 13, he joined a men and boys’ choir at his church, Sacred Heart of Jesus, a group that he now describes as a “pedophile ring.” The men paired off with the boys, giving them alcohol and even taking them to gay bars, Zdunek said.
Zdunek went on to Calvert Hall High School, and thought he could leave the past behind. But McIntyre told him he would try to get a job there, and Zdunek said the teacher tried to stay in his life.
One night when Zdunek was 16, he broke down.
“The whole room started spinning,” he said. “I remember it like really bad vertigo times a million.”
Zdunek said he made a halfhearted suicide attempt, taking something like a bottle of Benadryl.
“It was just a call for help,” he said. “I felt like I’d run out of options.”
He was hospitalized for a week and sent to counseling, but told no one the source of his despair.
He delved into music, having been inspired by a trip to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He improved his piano and organ playing to the point where he got gigs at churches, went to community college and then the Peabody. He earned a master’s degree in conducting at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Coming to terms with the past
Zdunek has enjoyed success professionally: He founded and directed the Young Artists Concert Series in Baltimore, served as artistic director and conductor of the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies in Minnesota and guest-conducted other orchestras. He became known as a turnaround specialist as president and CEO of symphonies in Modesto and Pasadena, earned an MBA and now is an executive for an accounting and business management firm. He cowrote a book on leadership that was published last year.
But he remains scarred.
Being sexualized so early, Zdunek struggles with the role sex plays in his life. He said that led to the breakup of his first two marriages, although he’s married again now. He has trouble with trust and friendship, and nightmares about the abuse.
As he’s gotten older and more comfortable in his career, he’s taken a more active role in addressing the past.
In 2007, when Zdunek was 40, he told archdiocese officials about McIntyre, who was then teaching at Immaculate Conception School in Towson. According to the attorney general’s report, the archdiocese found McIntyre’s denials of any inappropriate behavior “not to be credible” and suspended him from teaching. After the attorney general’s office this year named McIntyre to the list of abusers in its report, the archdiocese included him on a list of accused staff on its website.
Zdunek reported the abuse by Reckline to authorities and worked with Baltimore County police to record a call to him. Zdunek told Reckline he was trying to understand their relationship when he was in the choir, according to charging documents.
“I’m mainly just trying to get my therapy sessions in order and get past that, so I wanted to talk to you about the sex and see if you know what that was,” the documents quote Zdunek as saying. “If that was just a crazy gay stage, or love, or what the hell it was?”
“On my end, it was love,” Reckline said, according to the documents. “I wasn’t one to just float around.”
Reckline was charged with multiple sex and child abuse offenses, and pleaded guilty in 2009 to one, abuse by a custodian. Court records indicate he received home detention for all or part of his sentence.
Hines, who lives in Harford County, said she only recently connected her son’s abuse to his marital troubles. She said the light bulb went on at a hearing on the bill lifting the statute of limitations on child sex abuse claims when its chief sponsor, Del. C.T. Wilson, talked about his own abuse and being on the verge of “another divorce.”
Hines said she hopes her son’s claims against the archdiocese and the Boy Scouts will bring him some measure of peace.
Zdunek’s claim against the Boy Scouts is among those undergoing review as part of the bankruptcy settlement that will evaluate the severity of the abuse and how much he will receive.
“I think he will see some calm about this,” Hines said. “Now he can take control of his life, he didn’t have the power before.”
These days, Zdunek is focused on the creditors committee that he chairs, which represents those with claims against the archdiocese in the bankruptcy proceedings.
“It’s a pretty weighty role,” said his Baltimore-based attorney, Andrew Freeman, who recommended that he serve on the committee. “He’s very smart, levelheaded and has significant business experience.”
After years of keeping silent, Zdunek said he hopes to use the position “to finally get the acknowledgment of harm, accountability of wrongfulness and justice due to every child survivor.”
It’s been a journey, he said, and one he vows to see through the end.
“Now that I’m in the process, I want to conclude the process,” Zdunek said. “I want to stand up.”
©2023 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Source: Orange County Register
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