That was 14 years ago–the last time I thought about him until the Roman Catholic Church scandal broke in 2001 and I found myself wondering why the victims had waited so long to tell anyone. I never stopped to ask myself the same question. I didn’t yet realize that they were just like me: they had been used by someone they looked up to and were too ashamed to admit it, even to themselves.

My older brother Mike (no real names are used) and I were “Irish twins,” born 10 months apart. We grew up on a dead end four blocks from where Ed Kell lived in a blue-collar, predominantly Catholic suburb an hour west of Boston.

Being around Ed–a former Packers draft pick–was like walking on an active volcano. Whoever was foolish enough to argue with him, or wasn’t white, Irish or Catholic, became his prey, but the times he was nice to you made you feel as if you’d won an award. He was just a self-appointed neighborhood coach, but to us he was superhuman, and he would demonstrate this by reverse-curling hundreds of pounds or crushing bottle caps between his fingers.

The day before it happened, I was shooting free throws at Mr. Johnson’s when Ed came down the road. “Heard you sprained your ankle,” he said.

“Yeah, but the doctor said it’s almost better,” I said, turning the ball in my hands.

“Doctors don’t know jack,” he said. “Come by tomorrow. I’ll check the muscle tone like I did for your brother.”

The next day I walked to Ed ’s house. He seemed nervous. Without any small talk he nodded to the door of a room. “I’ll be in in a minute. Take off your sneakers and socks.” I did what he said and waited. He walked in smoking his cigarette, pulled a chair in front of me and, speaking lower than usual, said, “Let’s have a look.”

He looked at my sprained right ankle and compared it with the left. Then he said, “Stand up.” He touched them both, mumbling about swelling and ligaments, then told me to roll my pants up to my knees so he could look for signs I was favoring it. When I did he said, “No, you’re gonna have to take ’em off. I need to look at the rest of your leg.” I was in shock, but with the notion of being at the doctor’s–awkward but necessary–I took them off.

As I walked home, I kept remembering his hands shaking as he said, “Take down your underwear.” It all came flooding back to me–the day my mother saw Ed going through Mike’s underwear drawer and he claimed he was only looking at his posters, and another time when she saw him talking to Mike in his bedroom. It hit me–I’d been molested.

When I got home, I took the basketball outside and started punching it until I was on the verge of tears. I thought, what if he comes over now looking for more? I’ll throw this ball at his head, then get the hammer from the garage and tear into him with the hooked end. Sure enough, a couple of hours later he came by. “How’s it going?” he said, leaning out his car window. I didn’t answer. “Your brother home?”

“No.”

“All right, tell him I dropped by,” he said as he eased the car down the street.

I hadn’t even raised my voice. I stood there, hating myself even more than I hated him. Telling my parents would only make the nightmare real. I wasn’t trying to stop Ed Kell or even avenge my brother–if it had happened to him he wouldn’t want to talk about it, either. I was trying to forget.

The next time I thought about it was a couple of years later, when I heard a state trooper came home and caught Ed molesting his son. There was no exposure–just the officer and his friends beating Ed unconscious.

Ed’s death made me face, as an adult, what had happened, but I needed 14 more years of forgetting and months of reading about the church scandal before the memory surfaced again. For all those years I was either in denial or too ashamed to tell. If I had, maybe it never would have happened to the state trooper’s son. Maybe my brother and I wouldn’t have waited 20 years to talk about it.

As Tim Robbins accepted his Oscar last February for playing an abuse victim in “Mystic River,” he told all victims that “there is no shame” in telling. As a 13-year-old, I didn’t realize I had a choice, but as an adult, I do. I choose not to be ashamed anymore. I choose not to be silent.