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Former Jesuit priest and teacher sentenced for sexual assaults

Associated Press/January 25, 2005

Boston -- A Jesuit priest who taught and coached at Boston College High School was sentenced Tuesday for molesting two teenage boys during wrestling drills.

The Rev. James Talbot was sentenced to five to seven years, plus three years of probation, during a hearing in Suffolk Superior Court. The 67-year-old priest pleaded guilty earlier this month just before he was to go on trial.

Prosecutors say he sexually assaulted two students in the late 1970s, when he was teaching history and coaching soccer and hockey at the all-male parochial school.

Talbot worked there from 1972 to 1980 before being transferred to Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine. He was removed from that school in 1998 following a lawsuit by a former student who accused Talbot of molesting him.

Talbot is the first member of the Jesuit order prosecuted in the Boston Archdiocese since the clergy sex abuse scandal erupted here in 2002.

He pleaded guilty to one count each of rape and assault with intent to rape, and three counts of assault and battery.

Prosecutors said Talbot held what he called "aggression drills" with students. In the case of the two victims, Talbot encouraged them to take most of their clothes off, then grabbed their genitals while they were wrestling with him. Talbot also orally raped one of the boys and tried to orally rape the other, but the youth broke free and ran out of the gymnasium, prosecutors said.

Talbot went to the state Supreme Judicial Court in an effort to keep prosecutors from viewing his personnel files, which included communications between Talbot and his superiors. The high court rejected that request in November.

Talbot left Massachusetts some time after the offenses, which froze the statute of limitations and allowed prosecutors to bring a case against him more than two decades later.

Talbot was indicted in 2002 and had been out on bail since then, living at a Jesuit residence in Weston.


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