By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
Randy Ball spent decades bound up in faith, fantasy, denial, and fear before he was ready to confront the childhood sexual abuse he suffered from Fr. Karl Dowd at Camp Fatima.
Even after the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled last month that his lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester came too late, Ball is not done fighting.
“I don’t want to give up,” Ball, now 59, told InDepthNH.org. “A part of me would like to tell them to eff off and live my life, but I’m not going to let them off that easy.”
Ball hopes his story will help others, and he hopes he can lobby for changes to New Hampshire law making it easier for victims of childhood sexual abuse to seek justice. But it took Ball a long time to be able to fight for that hope. He had to lose God first, and shed the life he built following the plans of a God who wanted Dowd to abuse him.
“I felt that everything … Whatever happened to me in the past was because He wanted it to happen. So, I mean, how can you argue with that? If you think about it. I can’t sue somebody if God wanted it to happen. What a smack in the face to God would it be if I decided to,” Ball said.
Ball was three when his father, a Vietnam Era veteran, committed suicide. That left his mother, Florence, to raise Randy and his three older siblings, a sister and two brothers, on a partial pension. Florence threw herself into selling Avon and Tupperware to make up the income, but the family still struggled.
“We never had a lot, that’s for sure,” Ball said.
When he was eight, the Catholic parish where Ball’s family attended Mass gave them a scholarship so the children could all spend a week at the diocesan-run summer camps, Camp Fatima and Camp Bernadette.
“That was the year my whole world changed,” Ball said.
No one in the family knew that the diocesan camp director, Dowd, had a troubling past. Dowd was promoted by the diocese in 1971 to be the camp’s director after he allegedly abused a 16-year-old boy at St. Bernard Parish in Keene.
Ball was separated from siblings while at the camp, and witnessed a week of abusive games led by the counselors. Every day the counselors would play “Strip the Counselor,” in which one counselor was chased, and then stripped, and then assaulted, Ball said. On the last day of camp, the game was changed to “Strip the Camper,” he said.
Wanting no part of the game, Ball hid but was found by a man he did not know who told him he could hide from the game in a nearby cabin. Ball ran for safety inside the cabin only to be followed in by Dowd, he said. That’s when Dowd sexually abused the child. Dowd told Ball that his assault was “part of God’s plan.”
Ball didn’t tell anyone about the abuse when he got home from the camp. But soon, older males began abusing Ball, even selling him to their friends. Ball hated the abuse, but didn’t say anything to anyone. It was all part of God’s plan.
The abuse went on for years, and in his early teens Ball had started to believe he needed to keep it secret to protect his mother. She would be devastated if she knew, and he was determined that could not happen.
“I wasn’t gonna let her find out, period,” Ball said.
But she did find out, at least something, when Ball was 13. Ball was consumed with fear that all his secrets would soon come out, and fear that his mother would be emotionally damaged. That’s when he created his fantasy world.
“I stopped reality and said, ‘I’m gonna create a fantasy world to live in because I can’t stand reality anymore. I just can’t do it,’” Ball said.
Ball describes his fantasy world operating like a television soap opera he could control. When things got too intense, Ball mentally slipped into the world he created. People around him thought he was deep in thought, or spiritually intense. But Ball was debilitatingly oblivious to the world around him, caught up in an imaginary story playing in his head.
Ball’s mother never knew the full story of his abuse. And that was just fine with Ball. He coped by using his fantasy world and his new faith.
Ball had stopped attending Catholic services and switched to a Pentecostal Church shortly after the Camp Fatima experience. His mother eventually followed him into the Pentecostal faith and Ball became a minister at the age of 18. Mother and son went south as he continued his theological studies in Florida. They even went together on his occasional evangelical missions to the Choctaw Reservation. Ball’s world became his faith, and his close relationship with his mother.
“It literally was my whole life,” Ball said.
But that life was about as real as his fantasy world. Ball never told his mother about the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. And he never told her something else, that he’s gay. Ball never told anyone that, as a matter of fact, even though he knew that about himself since childhood. It was another secret he kept for decades to spare his mother. But also, he thought being a gay Pentecostal minister was not part of God’s plan.
In his last year of college, Ball’s mother got sick with cancer. He was her caretaker as she suffered through her last year, until she finally passed. Her death was a release for her from all her pain, and it was the start of Ball’s release from his.
“All of a sudden, I had no secrets anymore. I didn’t have to make sure she didn’t find out anything,” Ball said. “So, when she passed away, it was just like the whole world changed for me.”
Ball stopped pursuing his ministry and drifted back to New England, hoping to reconnect with his family. But the time apart left too wide a gap, and he decided to go south again to finish school. At 30, he went back to college, this time to Mississippi State University. This time he was alone, with no one to hide from.
“That’s when I came out fully and just said to myself, ‘I’m gay, I have to deal with this,’” Ball said.
Within about a year, Ball met John Thomas, another student who is gay and the two fell in love. Their relationship grew, and they eventually married. But Ball still had trouble dealing with reality. His fantasy world called whenever his trauma threatened to get close, leaving it difficult for Ball to function and hold down a job.
Therapy and treatment helped, as did being able to live a life according to his own plan. It took years to get to the point that Ball let go of his old faith. He no longer believes in the God of his abuser.
And once he was free from the life he built on top of all his secrets, Ball decided he wanted justice. He began contacting a lawyer about five years ago and brought his lawsuit against the Diocese of Manchester in 2023.
Under New Hampshire’s old statute of limitations, Ball’s deadline to seek justice ended in 1986, when he turned 20. That’s when Ball was living a lie as a minister, ashamed of his sexuality and hiding the truth of abuse to spare his mother.
In recognition that many survivors need more time to come to terms with their abuse, the New Hampshire legislature changed the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse in 2020, specifically to give people like Ball the time they might need.
The Supreme Court ruled last month, however, that the 2020 law change does not apply to Ball, or other survivors whose statute of limitations already expired under the old law. According to the Court, the state constitution prohibits the retroactive application of new laws.
“It basically felt like a kick in the teeth,” Ball said of the ruling.
Aside from his own personal disappointment, Ball said the ruling will only hurt other survivors. Instead of being able to come into the light and seek justice, the ruling forces survivors to keep their wounds hidden.
“It’s sort of been well known for a while. It can take decades for survivors to be able to come forward and tell their story. This is sort of a get out of jail free card for abusive institutions,” Ball said.
Ball and his husband are already planning to contact New Hampshire lawmakers and make a lobbying push to get the statutes changed. It’s not about his own lawsuit, but about the other people potentially hurt by the ruling, and about forcing the Church to make actual reforms.
“I don’t care if I get a penny, I don’t care if I ever get recognition. I want one day to just look back and that Church have to say, ‘You know what? Yeah, I remember his name. He really got us. He made us smarten up,’” Ball said. “I could go to my deathbed knowing that I did what was right.”