"Ex-swim coach accused of abuse appears in court" by Peter Schworm | Globe Staff, May 20, 2013
MEDFORD — When the young boy joined the Arlington Boys & Girls Club swim team in the late 1970s, his coach was Paul Collins, who also dated his family’s neighbor and would sometimes fill in as baby sitter.
On those occasions, when the boy went to sleep, Collins would sit at his bedside and “begin rubbing his back and chest,” according to allegations detailed in court documents released Monday. Collins would then massage the boy below the waist and tell him he should not talk about it to anyone else.
It was, he told the boy, “our little secret.”
The boy, now a middle-aged man, is one of four adults who in recent weeks have accused Collins of sexual assault, part of an expanding investigation into child abuse at the youth club. The men came forward after club officials announced in February that another former employee, William Sullivan, had allegedly sexually abused children at the club between the 1970s and 1990s. Sullivan is deceased.
Related: Arlington youth facility reveals sex abuse allegations
On Monday, two days after being arrested in his Long Island home, Collins, 62, was arraigned in Cambridge District Court on charges of sexually assaulting the boys and ordered held on $250,000 bail. Collins pleaded not guilty to the accusations, but prosecutors said he had admitted to sexual contact with two accusers and told investigators he may also have had contact with the other two.
Prosecutors said Collins, who left Massachusetts in 1980 after being fired from the youth club, had lived in a number of states before settling in New York and told authorities he had been “looking over his shoulder for the past 33 years.”
He never stopped swimming.
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Related:
"Allegations of sexual abuse at the Arlington Boys & Girls Club from the 1970s to ’90s continue to escalate as police said they have identified five more victims and arrested a former club employee in New York."
Also see: Arbitrary Justice in Arlington
