Not so long ago, Frank Spinelli seemed to have sorted out his life. He was happily married, working as a doctor and had a sideline writing medical thrillers. He thought he had dealt with the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child – not only had he helped bring the man who groomed and abused him to justice, but also he had written a memoir about it.
The Covid pandemic took away his routine and structure: “All the external pillars that were tightly holding me together – the engagements at the office, the work trips.” Two years earlier, he and his husband had moved from Manhattan to a leafy suburb, from where he is speaking to me over a video call today. He was dealing with uncertainty and felt isolated. In the lockdowns, though, he found himself drinking more and more.
A glass of wine while cooking dinner turned into two; a bottle shared with his husband turned into another. Drinking was no longer something that mainly happened at the weekend, but had blurred into the week. Three months into lockdown, Spinelli’s husband realised it wasn’t doing him any good and decided to stop drinking, but Spinelli continued.
He convinced himself that if he drank in secret, it didn’t really count, so he started to take long dog walks, sipping from a water bottle filled with vodka; he hid empty bottles in the garage. When his husband confronted him about it, Spinelli promised to stop, but it lasted less than a week. He found better hiding spots: old bags in the wardrobe, empty cleaning-product bottles, the recycling bin.
At this time, a class-action lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America was going through the courts. Spinelli was one of 95,000 alleged survivors of sexual abuse within the organisation. The man who had abused him from the age of 11, from 1978 to 1980, was his scoutmaster, William Fox.
In September 2022, a $2.5bn (£2.2bn) compensation fund for victims was established. In order to work out how much he would be entitled to, Spinelli was sent a 47-page questionnaire to fill out, in which he was asked to detail the abuse and its impact on him. He read this piece of brutal bureaucracy, relying on alcohol to get him through.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
