This article contains descriptions of sexual abuse
Ron Hunter is taking us on a trip down memory lane – or more precisely, 42nd Street in Manhattan. He is showing us the spots where, half a century ago, he was repeatedly molested, sexually assaulted and raped from the age of 13.
All because of the Boy Scouts.
He leads us to the block that for four years in the early 1970s was his patch. It was here that he was brought by the Boy Scout leader who groomed him, then sex-trafficked under his street name “Angel” for five bucks a trick.
Hunter stands beneath the awning of the former Selwyn Theatre, which in 1972 was a movie house showing pornographic films like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. That’s where in the winter he sheltered from the rain and driving snow.
Next door is a now defunct sporting goods store where Hunter was trained to ply the trade. He would pretend to be window shopping, then catch the eye of a potential john reflected in the glass.
“They would say, ‘Those are pretty nice sneakers, aren’t they?’ and I would know I was going to make contact. Then we’d negotiate a price, and go from there.”
Across 42nd Street on the opposite sidewalk is the place where the Boy Scout leader, Carlos Acevedo – Charlie, as everyone knew him – would stand watching and waiting for the 13-year-old to bring back the cash. “I’d signal to him so he knew how much and how long,” Hunter said.
“Right hand was for the price – three fingers, 15 dollars, five dollars apiece.”
•••
On one level, the story of Ron Hunter – Ronnie in his teenage years – is just a grain of sand in a vast mountain of abuse.
Now aged 63, he is one of more than 80,000 men who have made bankruptcy claims against the Boy Scouts of America on grounds they were violated by troop leaders in incidents spanning decades. It is the largest case of child sexual abuse involving a single organization in US history.
Amid that epic mass of suffering, Hunter stands out. Not just because of the severity of the abuse that he endured, or its longevity. But also because of his determination to speak out, to tell his story, in order to advance his own healing and to ensure that others are spared his ordeal.
He is suing the Boy Scouts of America and his now defunct local Scouts chapter in Brooklyn in federal court for failing to protect him from Acevedo’s clutches. The lawsuit takes advantage of the 2019 Child Victims Act that opened a window for abuse victims to seek justice long after the statute of limitations had closed.
The legal complaint points out that the Boy Scouts of America was aware for at least a century that adult volunteers were infiltrating the organization in search of vulnerable children – but did too little to stop it.
Hunter is also claiming compensation. The Boy Scouts entered bankruptcy in 2020, but emerged from it this year. Even though a $2.4bn settlement fund for victims has been set up, he has yet to receive a penny and his lawsuit remains on hold. Fifty years after the tragic events that shattered his life, he is in limbo, waiting for justice.
He’s not waiting quietly. He’s written a book, Angel Finally Found His Wings, which vividly recounts the world of blackmail and sex trafficking into which he was lured. It took him 12 long years to finish writing it.
The memoir makes for some unbearable reading. It describes through the eyes of 13-year-old Ronnie the gradual step-by-step process through which his innocence was stripped from him as he was drawn, scared and confused, into Acevedo’s orbit and on to the streets.
Taken together, the book and the lawsuit provide an extraordinary insight into the trust that the Boy Scouts betrayed. “Be prepared” is the institution’s motto, but as the lawsuit points out, the Boy Scouts of America itself was woefully unprepared, and until recently arguably unwilling, to address the rampant sexual abuse of children in its care by its own adult volunteers.
The book is extraordinary for another reason: it is the account of a man who has prevailed against the odds. As Hunter’s therapist once told him: “Ron, you shouldn’t be here. You should be dead, or in jail, or strung out.”
Instead, the Ron Hunter who gives us a tour of his childhood patch on 42nd Street is dapper, eloquent and poised. “That’s how I see it – Angel gets his wings,” he said. “Because I was able to escape.”
He lists the emotions that to this day he strives to control in his daily struggle to overcome the past. “I won’t be angry. I won’t be bitter. I won’t be hurtful or hateful. I won’t let what happened to me change who I ultimately am. Yes, I’m a victim. But more importantly I’m a survivor. I won’t let Charlie win. He will not define me.”
•••
Ronnie loved the Boy Scouts. “It gave me everything I lacked in my childhood – camping, travel, learning things, belonging to a group, wearing the uniform,” he said. “And trust. It gave me trust.”
It’s a truism of child abuse that predators tend to prey on vulnerable and wounded kids. They make easier pickings as they have weakened self-preservation instincts and scant support networks to protect them from outside attack. As such, Ronnie made a perfect target.
He was the 22nd of his father’s 22 children with two women. His father, Saturnino, who came to New York from Puerto Rico, died when he was six. His mother, Maria Louisa, had schizophrenia and was in and out of the psychiatric hospital.
Ronnie’s eldest brother, Danny, returned from Vietnam with PTSD. He would lock Ronnie and his other brother Tommy in a broom cupboard for up to eight hours at a time.
Danny also set up a fight club with a group of his friends. They’d get drunk, then form a circle and have Ronnie and Tommy fight each other, betting on which one would come off worst.
Ronnie was six when all this was brought to the authorities. He was taken into foster care, and then to an orphanage up the Hudson River. It was on a weekend visit home from the orphanage to his mother’s apartment in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn when he was 10 that he first came into the orbit of Charlie Acevedo.
“That was the beginning,” Hunter said. “Meeting him and seeing him in action, his strength, his control of everything.”
That first encounter in 1970 was at a local Bushwick church, where Ronnie was invited by friends to play basketball. Acevedo, a short, wily man in his 40s, reminded Ronnie of his Hollywood idol Charles Bronson.
Acevedo had appointed himself coach, but it was in a different role that Ronnie got to know him best. Acevedo was the assistant scoutmaster with troop 351, a Brooklyn-based Boy Scouts group.
Hunter recalls that Acevedo began to show intense interest in him only after he learned that the boy was in an orphanage. “He said, ‘Really? Where’s the orphanage? How do you get there?’ He kept pulling information from me.”
As soon as Ronnie turned 11, Acevedo invited him to join the troop. For that to happen, Ronnie’s mother had to sign the permission papers – and so the charm offensive began.
“His shtick was presenting himself to my mom as saving these kids from getting swept up in the gang environment which was heavy in our neighborhood,” Hunter said. “He gave her a sense of security – that the Boy Scouts stood for truth and decency and would stop me getting into a gang or being on the streets.”
Ronnie’s mom signed the permission form.
In those early days, Acevedo, or “Pop”, as Hunter called him, was diligent in building trust with the child and his family. He bought Ronnie his first Boy Scouts uniform, which his mother could never have afforded.
“That moment when he gave me the uniform, and I got dressed in it, that was awesome. I could see the pride in my mom’s face, how she looked at Charlie, so grateful for all that he was doing for her baby.”
Ronnie’s mother was so happy about how well her son was doing under Acevedo’s guardianship that when the scout leader pressured her to make him the child’s godfather, she agreed.
That summer, Acevedo took Ronnie on his first camping trip with troop 351 to Alpine Scout Camp in New Jersey. Ronnie thought he was living the dream. He was finally somebody, accepted in his own reputable gang. He was so special that the assistant scoutmaster even selected him to be the chosen one – the scout who would share his tent at night.
Once inside, the zip closed, Acevedo instigated a game of mock wrestling. Then he forced Ronnie to give him oral sex. The boy was 12.
•••
Hunter has a potent way of describing how the scout leader got his claws into him: “He didn’t steal me as much as he slid me out from under everyone’s noses.”
The grooming process was the classic one of carrot and stick, reward and threat. On a good day, Acevedo would take Ronnie to a movie or treat him to steak and baked potato at Tad’s on 42nd Street.
On a bad day, the scout leader would get angry and make Ronnie feel guilty for being ungrateful for all the nice things he’d given him. Worse, he would threaten to tell child welfare officers that they were having sex, and that way the boy would be sent back to the orphanage and his mother would be locked up again in a mental hospital. “He held that over my head,” Hunter said.
The lawsuit alleges that Acevedo sexually assaulted Ronnie on at least 15 overnight Boy Scouts camping trips, including at sites owned by the organization such as Ten Mile River and Alpine. Ronnie was unable to resist because he was terrified of what would happen to his mother, and because of Acevedo’s leadership role in the Boy Scouts, an institution which emphasized loyalty and obedience to adult scoutmasters.
One of the most difficult things Hunter has had to grapple with over the decades is the realization that many people knew that Acevedo was dangerous, but did nothing to stop him. They included his own late brother Tommy, who Hunter learned much later had been told early on by neighbors that Acevedo “did bad things with little boys” but didn’t share the information with him.
Those in the know went much higher up. The head scoutmaster of troop 351, Gordon Bennett, who has since died, was also a sexual predator.
It was widely known that Bennett “took care of” another boy who lived on Ronnie’s block, yet the Boy Scouts allowed him to stay on as leader, the lawsuit alleges. Bennett would hardly disguise his predilections, as Hunter recalls.
“We would play softball at scouting events, and in the last inning Gordon Bennett would get up to bat. He’d take off all his clothes, hold the bat up and say, ‘Now I’m going to show you all how it’s done,’ and run around the bases butt naked.”
There is a long and distressing history to such behavior. Hunter’s lawsuit cites a 1935 New York Times interview with the institution’s chief executive, Dr James West, in which he admitted that adult men “seek to enter scouting” to “undertake to deal with sex matters”.
The Los Angeles Times has exposed how the Scouts started keeping records, known as “perversion files” or “ineligible volunteer files”, from as early as 1919. The newspaper has records of almost 5,000 such cases since 1947. Between 1965 and 1985 – the period of Hunter’s abuse – the Boy Scouts of America created at least 1,247 such files, 10 of them in Brooklyn alone.
The Boy Scouts of America has said it created the files as a way of removing sexual abusers and other transgressors from the organization, and has argued that confidentiality is important to protect victims and those wrongfully accused. But as the New York Times has reported, files were frequently kept secret in order to spare the organization the discomfort of public disclosure, and there have been cases of volunteers ejected from one scout troop reappearing in another.
In 1972, the year that Ronnie was first put on 42nd Street by Acevedo, the Boy Scouts of America adopted a new policy. Leaders who were removed from their posts because of sexual abuse allegations were to be sent a letter. It read: “We are making no accusations and will not release this information to anyone, so our action in no way will affect your standing in the community.”
It is not known whether Acevedo had his own perversion file.
Hunter said that when he learned of the institution’s decades-long failure to deal with known predators, keeping the case files hidden and avoiding the involvement of police, he was distraught. “I’m very angry about that. I feel betrayed, violated by them. That was probably the biggest hurt I had, because they sent us into the lion’s den. They exposed us, knowingly, willingly.”
Debbie Greenberger, Hunter’s lawyer from the New York firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel who specializes in sexual abuse cases, said that Hunter’s was one of the worst she had ever seen. “I keep thinking not only of Ron, but of all the other children who came after him who were abused by Acevedo because the Boy Scouts didn’t stop him,” she said.
Greenberger said that Hunter, like many survivors, wanted his day in court, a chance to hold the Boy Scouts accountable. But that is now in jeopardy as a result of the chapter 11 bankruptcy the organization entered in February 2020.
As a result of the bankruptcy, it is much less likely that he will be able to extract information about what the Scouts knew and when they knew it through disclosure of documents and sworn witness testimony.
“A lot of survivors want the opportunity to tell their story to a jury of their peers, to look into the jurors’ eyes and tell them that they were wronged and that the Boy Scouts were responsible,” Greenberger said. “The bankruptcy process is going to take that away for many survivors.”
In a statement, the Boy Scouts of America said: “Nothing is more important than the safety and protection of children in our scouting programs.” The organization said it recognized “that in the past, our efforts to protect youth participants have at times failed some of the very children they were meant to protect”.
It added: “In certain circumstances, predators used Scouting to gain access to children” and the institution “did not always effectively address allegations and transgressions. We are deeply sorry.”
The statement stressed that the organization had introduced new protections including thorough screening and background checks for all adults, banning of all one-on-one interactions between adults and children, and mandatory reporting to police of any allegation or suspicion of abuse. As a result, “scouting is safer than ever before”. On the bankruptcy process, it noted that 85% of survivors had supported the court-approved plan for compensation.
•••
Hunter reckons that over the four years in which he was coerced to work on 42nd Street, he was criminally assaulted thousands of times. Acevedo put him out there most days from about 8am to 10pm and would fly into a rage if his earnings weren’t up to scratch.
He made sure Ronnie always looked clean and well turned out, his hair blow-dried in the style of Donny Osmond. That way, he could attract a better class of higher-paying customer.
“Ambassadors, high-ranking diocese people, Wall Street, top execs, corporate lawyers, they all came,” Hunter recalled. “And yeah, they definitely knew I was a kid. That was absolutely the attraction for them.”
It was not until he was 17 that Ronnie managed to wrestle himself free of Acevedo. Perhaps the most gut-wrenching portion of Hunter’s book is, paradoxically, his description of how he broke free from the scout leader.
He did it with the help of a man he calls “Jim” whom he met on 42nd Street. Jim was a British company executive in his late 50s, impeccably dressed, well-educated and gentle in manner.
Over the ensuing months and years, Jim slowly edged Ronnie out of Acevedo’s world and into his own. He lavished money on Ronnie, gave him the latest Jackson Five albums, bought him books and encouraged him to go back to school. Eventually, he helped Ronnie escape from Acevedo altogether and move in with him, and they went on to cohabit for several years.
Hunter describes Jim in the memoir as the “nicest man I ever met”. He said: “He got me away from Charlie, and educated me and gave me a new life – without him I would not be sitting here right now, I would be dead.” He was devastated when Jim died of a heart attack in 1983 when they were still living together; he was 23 and Jim 67.
There was only one problem with Jim-the-saviour as depicted in the book: he too abused Ronnie as a child. When they met, Ronnie was 13 years old – Jim procured him for sex knowing that he was a minor.
Hunter said that coming to terms with that reality has been his greatest battle. It was only a couple of years ago, he said, that he could admit it to himself. “It took me years and years, and only then did I finally acknowledge the one thing that I never wanted to associate with him: Jim was a pedophile.”
After Jim died, years followed for Hunter of bouts of depression, alcoholism and drug abuse, culminating in a suicide attempt. Today, he still takes medication for depression. He has had relapses, though he is now sober. He frequently wakes up at night screaming: “Get off me!” and “Please don’t hurt me!” He has had three surgeries to repair damage caused by the abuse.
But to leave Hunter’s story at rock bottom, where Acevedo and the Boy Scouts deposited him, would be to give entirely the wrong impression. Ron Hunter has made sure that he’s moved on.
The turning point was in his 20s, when he joined the US army and later became a flight attendant with American Airlines. In both cases, he had the joy of putting back on a uniform, this time without the stab wounds that came with his first.
In 1999, he met his life partner, Scott Hunter, and they married five years later – one of the first same-sex couples in the US to do so. Together, they continue to work through the trauma and nightmares that Ronnie’s childhood relentlessly throws at them.
I asked Hunter what, after the space of so many years, he thought today of Acevedo. The former scout leader ended up serving a life sentence in Florida, having been convicted of the serial child molestation of an 11-year-old boy; he died behind bars last year.
“I don’t give Charlie any space in my head, because if I did I would be in trouble again,” Hunter said. “I try to avoid anger because I have a lot of rage inside – I see red and I see Charlie and I see all these horrible things that happened. So I can’t afford to get angry. He doesn’t have power over me any more.”
And the Boy Scouts? How does he feel about them?
The Boy Scouts of America announced earlier this month that it had opened the payment portal for 7,000 claimants who opted for “quick pay” of the minimum compensation of $3,500. That still leaves in limbo 75,000 other claimants, Hunter among them.
“It’s frustrating and disappointing,” he said. “The Boy Scouts represented truth, honesty, all those good things to me, and here they are still hurting people by dragging things out.”
He holds the Scouts responsible for what happened to him. “They allowed it to happen. They allowed us to be violated and didn’t do enough about it.”
But that is not where his reckoning ends. It has taken him time, Hunter said, but he is finally able to separate the agony that was channeled through the Scouts from the pride that he felt – and still feels – in belonging to them.
In his biography printed at the back of the book, he puts “Eagle Scout (1976)” alongside his army record in pride of place.
He said he wants to see the modern Scouts succeed, by rigorously implementing policies that will protect every child. “Trust and verify,” he urged. “Instill trust by verifying all you do.”
And then he told me this: “I still donate.”
“You do?” I exclaimed, rather too forcefully, unable to contain my astonishment. You donate to the Boy Scouts?
“Of course I do,” he replied. “There are people who need them.”
I asked Ron Hunter, 63, a final question: what does he make today of Ronnie, 13, that sweet little boy tumbling exposed and unprotected into the vortex? “I’m proud of him,” he said. “I like his courage. I like his kindness. I like his loyalty to his mom. I’m proud of him because he survived.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support at 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html.
The Boy Scouts of America also offers a 24/7 helpline at 1-844-SCOUTS1 (1-844-726-8871) and an email contact address (scouts1st@scouting.org) for help reporting suspected abuse or inappropriate behavior.
