Child Molestation | featured news

After more than three decades in prison, a man in Florida was set free Thursday after a DNA test showed he did not kidnap and rape a 9-year-old boy in 1974.

Pope Benedict shares the "outrage, betrayal and shame" felt by the Irish people over a government report that said Church leaders covered up widespread sexual abuse of children for 30 years, the Vatican said on Friday.

A retired Associated Press bureau chief has killed himself after being charged with molesting two boys over a five-year period. John Edward Woodfield Sr., 80, was found dead in his home on Saturday from a single gunshot, according to Lt. Jim Eyler of the Harford County Sheriff's Office. The medical examiner's office ruled the death a suicide.
Woodfield, who retired in 1991 as bureau chief in Baltimore, had been charged the day before with sexual abuse of a minor and other charges.

For years, a man regularly confined his adolescent stepson to a bedroom rigged with an alarm, molested him several times a week and often denied him food and water, police said.

Vanity Fair scribe Maureen Orth covered Michael Jackson in depth when he was alive, and Friday morning during a lengthy segment on "Morning Joe" she talked about his death and in some of the frankest terms heard since the news of his passing.

Orth said, among other things, that his isolation was partially self-imposed and helped him play with boys, that his fame and money got him off of child molestation charges, that he suffered a crippling drug habit and that the publicity-seeking Jackson would have wanted to die as he did.

In the latest issue of Essence magazine, Latifah says the abuse occurred over a period of time, and at the hands of a teenager charged with watching her.

Josef Fritzl was sentenced to life in a psychiatric institution on Thursday for locking up and raping his daughter over 24 years, fathering seven children with her, and causing the death of an infant son.

An Austrian man who fathered seven children with a daughter he locked in a cellar pleaded guilty Monday to rape and incest but denied murder in connection with the death of a newborn boy who died underground.

A former Everglades High School wrestling coach convicted of molesting a teenage girl was sentenced to 30 years in prison today, and prayed God would forgive the victim for ruining his life.

Under investigation is Jeffrey Claude Bartleson, 52, who was arrested Jan. 29 and then re-arrested Wednesday after a campaign worker in the McCain office told police she believed Bartleson molested one of her sons.