Abuse Allegations Probed At Boys Town

A former priest at Boys Town, the fabled home for wayward youths, on Monday denied accusations that he sexually abused boys.

Former Boys Town pupil James Duffy alleged in a lawsuit last month that the Rev. James Kelly and a counselor, the late Michael Wolf, repeatedly molested him in the late 1970s.

The suit named neither Kelly nor Wolf as defendants, instead naming Boys Town and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha.

On Sunday, the Omaha World-Herald reported that four other men have made sex abuse allegations against Kelly and Wolf. None has sued.

Addressing the lawsuit and the other allegations, Kelly said: "I definitely deny it."

"The stuff that is coming out now, they are coming out of the woodwork," Kelly said in a telephone interview from his home in Carson City, Nev.

He said he's considering a defamation of character lawsuit: "Somebody said I should be proactive, and I'm thinking about it."

James Martin Davis, the attorney hired by Boys Town to lead an investigation into Duffy's allegations, said the home will probe the new allegations as well.

"I'm concerned with the validity of all these allegations," he said.

One of the men who lodged the new complaints, 35-year-old Wayne Garsky of Oakland, Calif., told The Associated Press on Monday night that he was at Boys Town in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

"I was 12 years old, dude, and I was put in a place I thought was safe and it wasn't safe," Garsky said.

Kelly was accused of sexual misconduct in 1983 and 1984 in New York, but two investigations by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany found the allegations not credible.

Both Wolf and Kelly left Boys Town in 1983. The school's name was changed to Girls and Boys Town in 2000.

The home was made famous by the Oscar-winning 1938 Spencer Tracy movie "Boys Town."