by Sean Adl-Tabatabai, The Peoples Voice:
A former top Clinton aide and senior Democratic official has been sentenced after pleading guilty to a sickening slew of child rape charges.
Gerald Steven “Steve” Pigeon, the former chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party, received a prison sentence for the rape of a 9-year-old girl, the Erie District Attorney’s Office announced on Friday.
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Pigon was close friends with the most senior member of the Democratic Party, including the Clintons, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Nancy Pelosi.
Buffalo News reports: But on Friday, he stood before a judge in a Buffalo courtroom as a criminal.
Pigeon, 63, pleaded guilty in November to first-degree sexual abuse of a child, and State Supreme Court Justice M. William Boller was to sentence him to one year in jail.
But before that, the girl whom Pigeon admitted to abusing finally had her say, two and a half years after coming forward with shocking allegations.
She was 9 when it happened, according to previous court proceedings. A fourth-grader. Someone Pigeon knew.
A prosecutor said Friday the sexual abuse took place between Nov. 23, 2016 and Christmas of that year – he was taking her out as a Christmas celebration.
The girl, now a teenager, was in the gallery Friday morning, surrounded by loved ones. Another girl held her hand and at times stroked her cheeks.
The girl had planned to read her own statement but decided to have one of the prosecutors, Chief Cathleen M. Roemer of the Buffalo City Court Bureau, read it aloud in court for her.
The Buffalo News is not identifying the girl because she was the juvenile victim of a sex crime.
“I remember for the first year after it happened, I honestly didn’t know what actually happened,” Roemer read from the girl’s letter addressed to Boller. “I knew it was wrong and that it shouldn’t have happened. But I was a child. I didn’t know what rape was or what it meant.”
She continued: “The day I found out what actually happened to me, I remember feeling so disgusted and scared.”
She said she wanted to tell her mother, but then remembered Pigeon warning her that he would “hurt my mother and my brother.”
The girl said she went from a “happy little girl to someone my family couldn’t even recognize.”
She attempted suicide twice, once when she was 10 and then when she was 12. She fell in with a bad crowd and acted out. She would sneak out of the house and use drugs and alcohol.
“Just so I could feel absolutely nothing,” she said.
She talked about the years of trauma she has endured. She has panic attacks and nightmares. She remembered waking up from one sweating and out of breath at 3 a.m. and needing to take a shower “because of how gross I felt.”
Her relationships have been affected, she said, even with with her mother. “There was a point I couldn’t even look at her. Part of me felt that she should have known what was happening and I blamed her for my suffering,” she said.
“You took away practically my entire childhood,” she said.
The girl came forward with her accusations against Pigeon in the summer of 2021.
He was charged in December 2021 after being indicted on six charges, including two counts of predatory sexual assault against a child, a class A felony that has the potential to carry a life sentence, if he was convicted. He also was charged with one count each of first-degree rape, first-degree criminal sexual act and first-degree sexual abuse.
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