PHILADELPHIA (AP)—A veteran sportswriter and columnist for thePhiladelphia Daily News was accused in a newspaper report Tuesday of molestingthree girls and a boy in the 1970s, including his niece, who is now aprosecutor.Authorities said no criminal charges would be pursued against Bill Conlinbecause the allegations of abuse happened too long ago.Conlin, a Hall of Fame baseball writer and author, retired just ahead of thestory’s publication online by The Philadelphia Inquirer, his former editor said.Conlin’s lawyer said his client would not comment about the story(http://bit.ly/sow9jx ) but would fight the claims.“Mr. Conlin is obviously floored by these allegations which supposedlyhappened 40 years ago. He’s engaged me to do everything possible to bring thefacts forward to vindicate his name,” said attorney George Bochetto.The newspaper reported that Christian Louboutin Outlet the four accusers claim Conlin groped andfondled them in the 1970s, when they were ages 7 to 12.Kelley Blanchet, a niece of Conlin’s who is now a prosecutor in AtlanticCity, N.J., and others told the newspaper they were speaking out in part becauseof the child sex abuse allegations being faced by Jerry Sandusky, a former PennState University assistant football coach. Like in the Sandusky case, peopleaware of the allegations involving Conlin years ago did not go to police, thenewspaper said.“This is a tragedy,” Blanchet said. “People have kept his secret. It’snot just the victims, it’s the victims’ families. There were so many people whoknew about this and did nothing.”Prosecutors in Gloucester County, N.J., took videotaped statements from thefour accusers last year but said no charges would be pursued because assaultsthat occurred before 1996 fall under the statute of limitations. The allegedvictims said they also came forward to highlight the shortcomings of those timelimits.Conlin had worked at the newspaper for more than four decades, starting in1965 and becoming the beat writer for the Phillies the next year. He held thatjob for 21 years and became a columnist in 1987. He also was a commentator onthe ESPN program “The Sports Reporters” and wrote two baseball-related books,the “Rutledge Book of Baseball” and “Batting Cleanup, Bill Conlin.”He received the 2011 J.G. Taylor Spink Award presented at the Baseball Hallof Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and is honored in the hall’s “Scribes Christian Louboutin Boots andMikemen” exhibit. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America said theallegations would not affect his award.Daily News editor Larry Platt, speaking at a news conference, said heaccepted Conlin’s offer to retire by phone on Tuesday afternoon. Platt wouldonly characterize the conversation as “painful.”Platt said he didn’t know about the allegations until Tuesday. He describedthe emotions in the newsroom as “overwhelmingly a sense of shock, a sense ofoutrage, a sense of sadness.”The Daily News and Inquirer are owned by the same company, PhiladelphiaMedia Network, and operate out of the same building downtown but compete onstories. Inquirer editor Stan Wischnowski said at the news conference the storyhad been in the works for about a month.In one recent column titled “Tough Guys Are Talking About Sandusky,”Conlin questioned people who say they would have intervened had they witnessedchild sex abuse.“Everybody says he will do the right thing, get involved, put his own asson the line before or after the fact. But the moment itself has a cruel way ofsuspending our fearless intentions,” he wrote.
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