Dr. Reardon’s Victims: Their Shame Lives On

Kevin Hunt had the courage to reveal his identity as a child victim of the late Saint Francis Hospital rogue physician George Reardon, but how many Connecticut children have yet to come forward?

In March 1970, Hartford Courant assistant features editor Kevin Hunt was a boy of thirteen. One Sunday afternoon that month, Dr. Reardon, a prominent endocrinologist engaged in a spurious research study, photographed Kevin and another boy recruited from a local judo club while naked, and in lewd, sexually provocative poses. Although both boys had obtained permissions of their parents to volunteer in a “groundbreaking” growth study that could possibly help less fortunate children obtain better nutrition, a few basic physical measurements like “arms spread wide,” and some photographs, perhaps one in the child’s “birthday suit,” the naïve and cooperative parents were told, soon escalated in an unsupervised Catholic hospital setting from the promised basic measurements (including penile measurement affording Dr. Reardon plausible deniability) to fondling, sexually suggestive bodily contortions in a nude game of Twister, to forced erections and pornographic poses. The single session that Kevin Hunt participated in lasted for hours. By the time it had ended, Hunt was left emotionally scarred with a sense of shame that lingers in his adult psyche to this day – thirty-eight years later.

Reardon certainly victimized dozens of Connecticut children, most of them boys, during decades of contact with them during a lengthy career at Saint Francis Hospital, the largest Catholic hospital in New England. Other children were taken by Reardon for summer weekends to the physician’s Brant Lake Cabin in Horicon, New York. A large cache of child pornography was recovered from a hidden room in the physician’s primary residence subsequent to his death at the age of 68 in 1998. Only one child told a parent what had occurred to him after only a single episode. Kevin told his mother, and amazingly, she believed him.

How many other victimized children, perhaps some of them now residing in cities like Stamford, Bridgeport, or New Haven, are still living their lives while stifled in a mist of long ago secret shame? It’s not too late. Litigation against a negligent institution, Saint Francis Hospital, can still balance unforgotten ledgers.

Alexandra Reed writes for Connecticut personal injury law firm, Stratton Faxon. Contact Stratton Faxon to speak with a Connecticut accident lawyer about your personal injury, wrongful death, or Connecticut malpractice case. To learn more, visit Strattonfaxon.com.

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