Content Owner: Joachim Hagopian
Though each child victim’s story is uniquely tragic in its own devastating way, in far more ways their stories are the same, regardless of sport, perpetrator, nation or time of crime. Sports pedophilia scandals as depicted by mainstream news always casts one abhorrent deviant predator who for many decades exploits both his authority and reputation to get away with chronically abusing multiple generations of children before ultimately being exposed and spending the rest of his life behind bars. The power differential between each authority figure, most often a renowned coach, and his fledgling underage athletes all eagerly vying for playing time, recognition, approval, and a chance to fulfill their dream of success and fame, is the common dynamic behind every single scandal in both the sports and entertainment worlds. In all cases the brave young souls who eventually do come forth to report their sexual abuse go unheard, dismissed and cast aside, only permitting the abuser to continue to abuse for many, more years.
In every case the larger sports organizations – be they Olympic entities or regional and international associations to all the national governing bodies, they are always guilty of protecting the perpetrator(s) at all cost. And other than one singled out monster, the surrounding private elite club of fellow pedophiles and pedophile enabling system associated with each of these horrifying scandals seems to by design always remain relatively unknown and hidden from public view, unexposed and free of all culpability and accountability. Ultimately at the top of this Luciferian power pyramid, too much power, control and money is at stake, thus saving the undeserved reputations and private identities of other guilty parties and more powerful elite pedophiles become far more important than saving the lives of mere expendable children regardless of their growing numbers. And the media is always there to protect the pedo-interests that would otherwise unveil the deeper incriminating connections to the larger global pedophilia network. And in the end, you can plug in and interchange in any given sport the names of the sole MSM designated child raping monster eventually caught and the multitude of his child victims, along with the times and places of each scandal, and without exception, all are characterized by these same definable constants driving each and every tragedy currently being played out on the world stage.
Since the previous section of chapters laid out in full detail the biggest known pedophilia scandals in sports history, at least in America, the one covered next involves the game of soccer (or football) played at the junior club level at the planet’s very pedophilia epicenter – the United Kingdom. And true to form, all the same common features listed above are present in this biggest ever British sports scandal as well. Additionally, this chapter launches the next book section examining the slew of pedophilia scandals uncovered in recent years outside the US in the ever fertile pedo-pastures of Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
Barry Bennell is the designated predatory pedophile coach who is the Coach Sandusky of the UK football world still rocking Britain today. Earlier this year the 64-year old Bennell was finally locked away for good after receiving a 31-year prison sentence following his fourth and final conviction for more than four decades of raping hundreds of little boys with big dreams.[1] For a couple decades Barry Bennell was employed by such hugely successful professional football clubs as Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra as both a coach and talent scout who helped develop the skills of a number of junior players that went onto the professional Premier League. With Premier the world’s richest (£4.5bn in the 2016-17 season),[2] most watched soccer league,[3] featuring stars peddled by the pedophile, in recent decades the United Kingdom singlehandedly has jumpstarted the current obsession and popularity for the #1 international game of football. Again, just like the Catholic Church and Olympic US national teams in Swimming and Gymnastics, it was far more feasible for the sport’s pedophile enablers at the top busily raking in billions to quietly reassign its pedo-coaches to different locations to do more damage rather than take any serious steps to protect child athletes and stop the tightly-under-wraps, rampant abuse from escalating into today’s endemic crisis.
In addition to longtime employment as a scout and coach for junior teams at Manchester and Crewe Football Clubs (FCs), as an important side job from 1979 to 1981, no doubt to hone his predator skills, the serial child rapist worked at Taxal Edge residential school.[4] Historically children’s group homes in the United Kingdom are pedophilia havens.[5] Raping and pillaging group homes complete with buried corpses[6] have been servicing the likes of Jimmy Savile,[7] PMs[8] and MPs[9] and the royals[10] for over half a century (topics covered thoroughly in the next couple chapters). In fact, Bennell’s Taxal Edge co-worker and fellow pedophile is also currently under police investigation. The now 62-year old Bruce McLean worked at Taxal Edge from 1975 to 1978, and later founded the children’s charity Adventure Farm Trust in Cheshire, receiving philanthropic support from actor Michael Cane and musician Phil Collins.[11]
As a volunteer football coach who must’ve known Barry Bennell, they both shared the same hankering for children down to even sharing the same grooming M.O. – escorting victims to Manchester football games and then abusing them afterwards.[12] McLean was arrested for molesting boys in a Cheshire group home in 1995 and in 1997 began a 9-year prison sentence while his cohort Bennell started his own 9-year sentence a year later in 1998. In 2014 the Derbyshire Police arrested McLean again after an investigation of historic child sex abuse involving a boy attending Taxal Edge dating back to the 1970s. And just like clockwork, a year later it was Bennell’s turn to return to prison again. McLean represents an important link between Bennell, Manchester and Cheshire FCs, group home charities and a mutually active participation in the wider child sex abuse ring exploiting soccer lads.
The earliest report of Bennell’s pedophilia dates back to 1972 when the derelict was only 18 or 19 years old.[13] Yan Nowacki, now 57 years old as Bennell’s earliest known victim, claims he was a 13-year old Manchester City player when invited to a sleepover at Bennell’s mother’s home. While Yan slept he was awakened by the predator still pretending to be asleep groping his genitals and buttocks. The boy immediately sought refuge on the floor where he spent the remainder of his sleepless night untouched yet frozen in the predator’s presence. Yan says that the warning signs were there from the start. In the locker room the young coach couldn’t keep his hands off his players, religiously applying ointment on boys right up to their inner thighs just centimeters from their crotch.
Another relatively early and most detailed account of them all regarding Bennell’s longtime abuse came from future professional baller Andy Woodward. His sexual assaults by Bennell commenced in 1984 when the shy 11-year old and his working class parents were approached by the eventually disgraced Crewe coach and talent scout.[14] Promising a shot at the pros, Bennell invited Woodward to train at the professional Crewe Alexandra club and spend weekends at his nearby residence to improve his skills. And just like the Penn State abuser’s basement game room, this serial predator on the other side of the pond made sure his home was similarly decked out as a “child paradise,” complete with a pool table, juke box, arcade games and a live pet monkey and a wild puma for entertainment along with all the football accessories and equipment… the perfect groomer’s flytrap.
From the very start little did young Andy and his parents realize that he was being taken in by a coldblooded sexual predator. On his first visit the coach gifted him a pair of soccer cleats. Then on his second weekend stayover, Bennell asked Andy to come to his bed where, at the predator’s direction, the game of “follow me” was played where they took turns touching each other.[15] By the third visit, the child rapist escalated his criminal advances quickly leading to rape and sodomy over the next four years.
Bennell regularly had two or three, or sometimes as many as a dozen kids staying with him over the weekend for years at a time. That should have been a red flag in and of itself to both the Manchester and Crewe football clubs. When each organization found out, they feebly told Bennell to stop the sleepovers.[16] But as long as the renowned scouting coach continued sending potential stars to the professional Premier League, the serial child rapist’s employment always remained in good standing. Crewe’s feeble admonishment is no different from the Penn State honchos telling Sandusky not to shower anymore with his victims over a decade before he was finally arrested.
One of Andy’s teammates, Anthony Hughes, disclosed that a mini-bus would pick up 11 or 12 boys at a time and take them back to Bennell’s home in Derbyshire:
There was plenty of things for us to play with, pinball, a jukebox, computer games. Then he’d put a video on of us playing football and analyze that. But once that finished, that’s when he’d put on the porn, S&M type stuff. He had a great big stack of tapes in his house. He’d get us all sitting round watching it while he sat there stroking the back of your neck or putting his arm around your shoulder and stroking your chest and nipples. Or he’d give you a little tickle.[17]
The boys were too young to realize they were all being groomed as abuse victims. While most of them would sleep in bunkbeds at Bennell’s house, the predator would select his favorites to join him in his room where rape and sodomy were on his wickedly twisted agenda.
A complainant who estimated being abused 100 times during Bennell’s Manchester City years provided testimony to the police on the monster’s bedroom assaults:
He was very clever – it was always lights off, music blaring out. I learned how to shut down. When it happened I could literally shut down my emotions. All I know is every time I was abused, part of me closed down. When the tears came out my face, I shut my body down. He’d abuse me and I’d have tears rolling down my cheeks. He didn’t give a shit. That hurt. It didn’t stop him.[18]
While on a tour to a training camp in North Wales, victims were taken to a large house in the middle of nowhere that they called “the Haunted House.”[19] Another grooming tactic Bennell regularly utilized was to force the boys to watch horror films to obviously frighten them, availing opportunity for the sicko to initiate physical contact and predatorily move in closer for “the kill.” Bennell would also mysteriously knock on their doors at night to scare them. To terrorize the lot of them, the demented sodomizer even resorted to placing a sheep’s head in the bed of one of the boys.
While coaching and scouting talent at Manchester City from 1975 to 1982, a club director described Bennell as a “star maker.”[20] A demo of the star maker’s power was evidenced when a boy arrived to see the coach about joining City and was brutally sodomized that night. After “the worst day of my life,” when the boy threatened to report Bennell the next morning, the “star maker” smugly replied:
It wouldn’t matter. Nobody would believe you. I’ve got people playing professional football now that I’ve done these things to – you’re nothing.[21]
Even prior to Andy Woodward’s abuse from 1984 to 1988, there was Ian Ackley who Bennell preyed on as his “main target” while at Manchester City, abusing Ian “hundreds of times” from 1979 to 1983. Note Bennell’s chosen favorite victim switched at the same time the coach moved from working for Manchester to Crewe. In 1997 Ian Ackley was even featured divulging his horror story about sexual predator Bennell on the Channel 4 documentary Dispatches.[22] Despite boldly speaking out 20 years ahead of Andy Woodward, apparently no one was listening or watching as the British Football Association and the rest of the world seemingly ignored this first whistleblower’s painfully shocking truth. Also from the 1997 doc we learn the fact that over two decades ago, before a national audience Charlton first team Coach Les Reed had already recognized there was a major pedophilia problem in the sport and was expressing his dire concerns way back when:
The FA needs to come out of the towers at Lancaster Gate and really investigate what is going on.[23]
An FA spokesman asked to respond to Reed’s statement back in January 1997 stated:
The FA has been a prime mover among sporting governing bodies to get an effective screening process which aids child protection.[24]
Now more than two decades later with the biggest pedo-epidemic in United Kingdom’s sporting history blown up in its face, the UK Football Association is still desperately floundering, still vowing to change things around, only making yet more feeble broken promises. Again, if the FA was actually doing its job protecting children all along as it claimed in 1997, we wouldn’t be where we’re at right now. All these years later, FA’s history only shows a complete lack of protecting child athletes, and if anything, it has incriminatingly demonstrated even more convincing evidence of a worldwide pedophilia network.
Britain’s #1 sexual predator in football possessed nunchucks, a dangerous martial arts weapon with which he forced his victims to hold a newspaper up that he would use to violently tear in half as an overt demonstration delivering intimidation and bodily threat should any victim dare report his crimes.[25] If any boy resisted or complained, the coach would customarily bench the player or kick him off the team entirely, thereby throwing away the dream to reach the higher level. These all too familiar tactics echoed by pedo-coaches in other sport scandals were drummed into the fearful heads of their victims:
I can ruin your football tomorrow. Keep quiet or you’re finished.[26]
Barry Bennell once admitted to police that his ideal target of a victim was 13 years of age because in his own words they were:
Pedigree footballers who were athletes and good-looking.[27]
Though he’s on record having abused youth as young as 8 or 9, his preference was for older boys up to 15. Again in a police interview:
Nine-year-olds scared me because they were still attached to the [mothers’] apron strings. [28]
At will, the charismatic, larger-than-life soccer ace was able to get away with sexually assaulting his many victims hundreds of times, taking full advantage of both his sterling reputation as a first class talent spotter and the fact that he was spotting boys far less prone to reporting abuse than girls, much less rough and tough footballers entertaining big dreams in the manly sport where young players rarely admit to the submissive victimization of sodomy.
Moreover, amongst the players and club personnel, it was widely known that Barry Bennell was a child molester. Rumors of Barry Bennell’s twisted sexual appetite were widely circulating by the late 1970s and early 1980s, amongst both Manchester City club personnel where he coached for 7 years from 1978 to 1985 and later at Crewe from 1985 to 1992.[29] But in the world of jocks, to be labeled an abuse victim is tantamount to being branded “gay” or a “weak sissy boy.” It was no secret around the junior league clubs, the pervert coach’s players were taunted as members of “the paedophile club.”[30] Amongst the players not abused, it became an insider’s secret joke, but fearing loss of their dream to go pro, pedophilia was virtually never spoken of beyond the locker room. Another reason why the abuse went on for so long, like in every pedo-scandal, upon reporting abuse, victims are never believed and are only subject to rejection, ridicule and more abuse.
One Manchester City employee admitted:
Suspicions about him [Bennell] were aired on many an occasion.[31]
A former Manchester City youth coach, Steve Fleet, risked losing his job in the late 1970s when he vehemently complained to the City executives that Barry Bennell was placing young boys in their organization at grave risk.[32] Yet knowing Bennell was a hardcore sexual predator, Manchester was relieved to off the pedophile to rival Crewe Alexandra, of course not saying a word about his criminal habit as a liability.
Police documents show that Manchester’s senior staff, among them chief scout Ken Barnes, have been “quite evasive” and hard put explaining why Bennell left their organization, other than citing “irregularities.” It was Barnes who defended Bennell, calling him a “star maker” when Steve Fleet sternly warned the directors at City about his deviant proclivities. Then in the 1997 Channel 4 documentary Dispatches, Ken Barnes even made light of Bennell’s criminality that at the time had him sitting in a US prison, joking:
What do you call them? Piddyphiles, is it?[33]
Soon enough Barry Bennell was Crewe Alexandra’s problem. And in the role of Manchester’s Steve Fleet at Crewe was Hamilton Smith, managing director from 1986 to 1990 who maintains that in the late 1980s, he directly warned Crewe’s executive board about Bennell’s criminal activities but was completely ignored.[34] Like Manchester, all the higher-ups at Crewe also claim they never had a clue Bennell was a pedophile. Obstinate in their denial right to the bitter end, as recently as March 2018, Crewe released a 925 word statement reneging on its earlier promise to conduct a thorough internal investigation to determine if Crewe had engaged in a cover-up to protect both itself and Bennell.[35] In early March the organization had announced that it would forego launching the earlier promised internal review, citing its feeble excuse that the Cheshire Police (not unlike Alice’s Cheshire cat) had allegedly concluded that no one at Crewe ever knew that a pedophile employee was in their midst (where have we heard that before?).
Moreover, the deceitful pedo enabling League Two club even made the bogus claim that the current Crewe president John Bowler, a board member since 1979, denied any recollection that Hamilton Smith reported complaints about the child rapist to him, his board or longtime Crewe football director Dario Gradi.[36] Smith’s response promptly called John Bowler out as a “lying bastard.”[37]
In the wake of Woodward’s bombshell and subsequent additional charges filed in November 2016 against Bennell, the FA banned Dario Gradi as longtime Crewe manager for allegedly allowing Bennell to rape boys at will during the seven years under his watch. The Crewe manager and onetime Chelsea assistant manager was also accused of attempting to “smooth over” a victim’s sexual abuse complaint back in 1975 at the hands of now deceased pedophile Chelsea scout Ted Heath[38] (note identical namesake of the child raping UK prime minister[39]). Gradi met with 14-year old pro prospect Eamonn Manners and his father at their home to hear Eamonn explain the sexually inappropriate, unwanted advances Chelsea’s scout “Eddie” Heath had heaped on him a few days earlier.[40] Gradi brushed it all off, pretending Eamonn had misunderstood Heath’s “good” intentions:
Dario said that Eddie loved the boys and the club, which was his life, and had simply got carried away and gone too far.[41]
With still a CYA Cheshire cat smile on his face, assistant coach Gradi left Eamonn’s home and nothing was ever done to stop the serial predator from sexually abusing countless other boys over the next 8 years until Health’s death in 1983. Eamonn Manners was expected to turn pro but instead, feeling unprotected and unsafe knowing his child molester lurking about wasn’t going anywhere, after several months the disempowered, unheard 15-year old gave up his close at hand achievable dream to play professional football and left the Chelsea team confused, perplexed and angry.
After Andy Woodward’s November 2016 confession to The Guardian, 57-year old Eamonn decided to forego his confidentiality rights in order to tell his revealing story to the Daily Mail, how Gradi swept knowledge of his scout’s serial pedophilia under the carpet, just as he did for Bennell at Crewe several years later. In fact, Dario Gradi has spent his entire football career as a pedophile enabler. But then with it common knowledge throughout the Premier League clubs that coaches, scouts and football officials were rampantly molesting its underage players, it was every enabler’s systemic duty to simply look the other way, just as at Penn State, USA Swimming, USA Gymnastics, USA Taekwondo, USA Skating, USA Volleyball, in fact all worldwide Olympic sports where big money and big power rule.
Gradi even wrote a letter on Bennell’s behalf to the Florida court in 1994 attempting to reduce the convicted pedophile’s four year prison sentence, all the while knowing Bennell was a guilty pedophile.[42] Gradi even openly knew and allowed Bennell to have boys stay with him overnight at Bennell’s home.[43] As if Gradi’s despicably scandalous behavior isn’t incriminating enough, additionally it’s been reported to BBC that an employee at Crewe Alexandra was ordered in 2001 to remove child pornography from Gradi’s home computer.[44] Now you know why a complicit UK Football Association exercising damage control, without explanation suspended Gradi as too heavy a liability burden once the scandal broke in late 2016 and has yet to explain its reasons. But they’re rather obvious.
Prior to Eamonn Manners’ sexual abuse disclosure, his onetime Chelsea teammate Gary Johnson who went pro also went public with his story. Two weeks after the Woodward interview, the 57-year old former Chelsea first teamer waived his anonymity to talk to the Daily Mail, revealing that one of the richest football organizations in the world paid him £50,000 as hush money to stay quiet over the Heath abuse[45]… just like USA Gymnastics did with Makayla Maroney. Made to sign a non-disclosure statement accepting Chelsea’s non-liability as part of the deal, once Andy Woodward broke the pedo-scandal wide open, Gary defied Chelsea’s agreement and reported that the team’s chief scout Ted Heath sexually assaulted him starting at age 13 three or four times a week totaling hundreds of times in the 1970s. Not wanting the negative publicity generated if Chelsea challenged Johnson on his breaking the confidentiality agreement, again just like US Gymnastics, it opted to back down once he went public. In 2014 Gary Johnson even went to the Metropolitan Police to report the abuse only to be told to go back to Chelsea. But when he did, he was given the customary runaround:
What makes me so angry is that I went to Chelsea to say I had been abused and they basically said, ‘prove it.’ It made me feel like they thought I was faking it, that’s how it felt anyway.[46]
Virtually every elite team in the Premier League, just as virtually every police department in the United Kingdom, has a long running shady history of shielding its legions of serial pedophiles in high places from all accountability. Yet another linkage of the pedophilia child sex ring is the fact that this particular pedophile in question – Chelsea chief scout pedophile Eddie Heath, actually trained the other Premier League pedophile scout Barry Bennell… the ever-familiar, more “birds of a feather” theme.[47]
After victims of Bennell along with Crewe’s member in parliament already blasted Crewe Alexandra for its refusal to look into its criminal past (as if its investigation would have been objective), under increasing pressure, the Crewe football organization continues ignoring its complicit role in covering up its widespread abuse for decades. In March 2018 UK parliament member and chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee, Damian Collins, joined this growing chorus condemning Crewe’s refusal to examine its cover-up role, calling it “totally unacceptable,” and engendering a complete “lack of trust.”[48] Collins has subsequently emphasized the double importance of the UK Football Association to leave no stone unturned in its ongoing inquiry into Crewe and the other city clubs over their overt obstruction of justice and complete mishandling of years of rampant pedophilia within its ranks that’s led directly to this current epidemic crisis, including revealing specific reasons for Dario Gradi’s recent suspension 15 months after he was prohibited from all football activity back in November 2016.
Yet recently in March 2018 after his 14 month exile, Dario Gradi resurfaced, granted an invitation to attend a testimonial for a fellow Crewe Alexandra colleague, and received a standing ovation,[49] sending the blatantly clear message that Crewe deceitfully protecting its own criminality is highly lauded. Hard to say which is more shameful and disgraced, the pedo-enabling organization or its pedo-enabling former manager.
Once Crewe board member Hamilton Smith warned the club that Bennell was a hardened pedophile, the organization decided to maintain Bennell’s employment as long as the child rapist ceased his sleepovers and was not left alone with his players,[50] conditions the repeat offender never obviously complied with. Crewe lied when claiming Bennell departed for “football reasons” in 1992 when in fact he was two days away from parents filing a formal complaint against him, corroborated by the sicko himself admitting he left Crewe over a complaint.[51] The bottom line is Bennell was hired by club after club in city after city – Manchester City, Crewe, Stoke City, Leeds United,[52] Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and Cheshire, followed all the while by his not-so-secret reputation as the pedophile with the voracious boy toy appetite.[53]
The truth that Bennell’s “nine lives” as a serial child rapist was connected to a larger pedophilia network explains why he was allowed to repeatedly prey on boys for over four decades before ultimately issued his death sentence earlier this year. Similar to Coach Sandusky and Olympic organization scandals, there is clear evidence that Barry Bennell shared victims with other pedophiles within a child sex ring network.[54]
According to the Mirror, Bennell and Manchester based coach and scout Frank Roper and other pedophiles in the soccer world swapped their victims as part of the larger pedo-network.[55] 47-year old Jason Dunford maintains that within an hour after he was dropped from Bennell’s squad, his brand new coach-to-be Frank Roper was literally knocking at his door to arrange his turn at molesting the 13-year old boy. After fighting off Bennell’s advances at a holiday camp in Wales and then catching the pedo-coach prowling a boys’ caravan at a tournament, smelling trouble, Bennell swiftly kicked Jason off his team but not before contacting his pedo-buddy Frank Roper who coached a rival squad affiliated with the Blackpool Football Club and has since been posthumously accused of abusing 31 boys.[56] Jason asserts that:
Within an hour of that decision he [Roper] had hit the doorbell and the form was there; in those days your parents had to sign a form.[57]
Confirming that Bennell was working with other pedophiles like Roper from other Premier League clubs, Dunford’s steadfast claim that his abusers were part of a larger child sex ring has also been backed up by other victims, coaches and football officials.[58]
In addition to sodomizing Jason Dunford, Frank Roper sexually abused another English football star, the now 53-year old Paul Stewart, who like Woodward has stated that Roper sexually assaulted him on a daily basis from age 11 to 15.[59] A week and a half after Andy’s November 2016 bombshell, England’s former striker and midfielder Paul Stewart emerged from the shadows to reveal to the world his torture endured on the way to professional stardom, keeping his dark secret to himself for over 40 years. As is common for perpetrators to use death threats, Roper threatened to kill Paul’s father, mother and two brothers if he ever breathed a word. To normalize the abuse, his deviant coach told Paul that an opposing coach Barry Bennell was also “doing” his players. The 1991 FA Cup winner with the Tottenham Hotspurs turned to alcohol, cocaine and other drugs to later cope with the chronic effects, breaking down emotionally when he admitted the abuse stopped him from even hugging his wife of 29 years or telling his two daughters and son that he loved them. Again, being raped as a child is a lifelong curse. Paul Stewart lamented:
I want to be able to show affection that has been the worst aspect of it, them not being able to get close to me.[60]
Incidentally in 2003 another Roper victim reported his abuse to Liverpool police but no action was taken and two years later, like both pedophile Heaths, Roper also left this earth without paying for his woeful sins.[61] And just like the Chelsea police with Gary Johnson, this non-response may well be more evidence of police once again protecting the larger pedophilia network as foxes guarding the henhouse. To CYA, Liverpool Police have since reopened a supposed internal investigation of its own oversighted “negligence.”
Still another longtime youth coach whose name keeps coming up since November 2016 in too many abuse victims’ reported incidents is 65-year old Southampton coach Bob Higgins, subsequently charged with 50 counts of indecent sexual assault of minors from 1971 to 1996.[62] At least two dozen of his former players have accused him of sexual assault, one testifying it was a regular twice a week occurrence. Complainants have testified that they were molested in Higgins’ home, his car, on ferries, at tournaments and camps. Accusers at Higgins’ current criminal trial at Salisbury Crown Court have named four teammates who enjoyed successful professional careers, one being Alan Shearer, former captain of England’s national team.[63] These favorites called “Bob’s boys” were allegedly close to Coach Higgins, some staying overnight at the accused pedophile’s residence, though none of the four former pros have yet to publicly comment on just how intimate their relationship with their former coach was.
So far since the Woodward bombshell, at least ten coaches have been charged with historical sexual abuse, one has since died and seven are either convicted as offending pedophiles, or currently on trial or awaiting sentencing. As one of 17 ongoing city police investigations into this epidemic in early December 2016 just two weeks after the Woodward revelations, Manchester police already identified ten suspects based on reported abuse from 35 victims in its jurisdiction alone.[64]
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