It was a surreal moment last week to sit in an ornate Illinois Senate hearing room with a group of young men from a championship Chicago high school football team and listen, with them, to two women describe in excruciating detail having been raped and repeatedly sexually abused back in high school by their club volleyball coach.
Everyone in the room was riveted to their words.
The coach, Rick Butler, wasn’t present. He repeatedly has denied the claims made by the women. The statute of limitations for criminal charges ran out before they came forward. Still, the women repeat their story, again and again. “I want to stop it from happening to another child,” Julie Romias told lawmakers serving on a sexual harassment and discrimination task force last week.
Now, with less than two weeks left in the spring session, will lawmakers fix the broken process within their own walls and throughout Illinois?
Read the rest at the Chicago Sun-Times.
