CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors Friday for the first time provided details of sexual abuse allegations against J. Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the House, asserting that he molested at least four boys, as young as 14, when he worked as a high school wrestling coach decades ago.
Hastert, 74, is not charged with the abuse because of statutes of limitation, prosecutors said, but he was accused last year of illegally structuring bank withdrawals for money he was paying to one of his victims in an effort to hide the abuse. He pleaded guilty in October to the banking violation and suffered a stroke in November while awaiting sentencing, now set for this month.
According to a court filing by prosecutors late Friday laying out their sentencing considerations, Hastert, a popular coach in a small Illinois town in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, gave one boy a massage in the locker room, then performed an unspecified sex act on him. Another boy, Stephen Reinboldt, who died in 1995, was sexually abused by Hastert throughout high school in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his sister and others told the prosecutors. And prosecutors said Hastert had massaged another boy's groin area after asking the boy to stay in his hotel room during a wrestling camp.
A lawyer for Hastert did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
In the court filing, prosecutors said they believed Hastert should face as much as six months in prison when he is sentenced April 27.
Sometime after late 2014, as law enforcement authorities were investigating unusually large withdrawals from Hastert's bank account, Hastert told them that he had promised the large sums — $3.5 million — to the person who said he had been abused in the hotel room, known in court documents as Individual A. Hastert told the authorities that he was being extorted by Individual A.
The investigators concluded that no extortion was taking place and that Hastert was carrying out an agreed-to settlement for abuse.
In a court filing this week, Hastert requested probation and said he was "profoundly sorry" for past conduct, although he did not provide details about those actions.