Ex-House Speaker, settles suit over abuse claim before trial
Days before they were set to go to trial, lawyers in a 2016 hush-money lawsuit against former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert involving decades-old sexual abuse agreed to settle the case.
A Kendall County judge ruled last week that the man who sued Hastert, seeking the unpaid balance of an alleged 3.5-million-dollar pact, would be named publicly at the civil trial.
Jury selection had been scheduled to begin Monday in a Yorkville, Illinois courtroom.
Chief Judge Robert Pilmer had allowed the man’s breach-of-contract lawsuit to proceed under the pseudonym James Doe since it was filed in April 2016.
Hastert was a Yorkville High School teacher and state champion wrestling coach before entering politics in the early 1980s.
He rose to become the longest-serving Republican House speaker in U.S. history.
The plaintiff in the suit was a former Yorkville standout student-athlete who alleged Hastert sexually abused him one night at an out-of-state wrestling camp in the 1970s.
The student was 14 at the time of the incident.
