A former Boston College High School student on Thursday testified about being sexually assaulted by a Jesuit priest on the Dorchester campus numerous times in 2008 and 2009.
The former student, a transgender woman, said the alleged abuse happened after school in private meetings with the priest, Kevin White. The student, who was in White’s scripture class, was 15 at the time.
“It didn’t register as anything wrong,” she said on the stand on the first day of testimony in White’s rape trial in Suffolk Superior Court. “I thought an adult was paying attention to me, and I didn’t really have a lot of that in my life up until that point.”
Assistant District Attorney Laura Montgomery said White’s accuser was “the perfect victim” as a gay student at an all-boys Catholic school.
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“The defendant was in a position of trust and authority,” she said in an opening argument. “[White’s accuser] was a vulnerable victim. He believed the attention that the defendant was showing him was positive.”
In his opening argument, White’s lawyer, Douglas S. Brooks, disputed the credibility of White’s accuser and said her version of events was unreliable and inconsistent.
“There’s no testimony or documents corroborating what she now says,” Brooks said. “Her inconsistencies go to the very core of her allegations and the very core of the prime charge here itself.”
She first disclosed her allegations in a 2020 Instagram post and then sent a letter to high school officials the following year, Brooks said.
She testified that she did not report the alleged assaults to school authorities, her parents, or her friends before 2020, because White told her “not to tell anybody,” and because she did not think at the time that she had been abused.
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“I didn’t think I would need to tell anybody,” she said. “I didn’t think anything that had been done to me was wrong.”
The USA East Province of Jesuits removed White, 63, of Weston, from public ministry and placed him under supervision after it learned of the allegations last year.
The student began taking White’s scripture class in 2008, and White soon took an interest, she testified. He put his hand on the teenager’s back and asked about the teenager’s parents and home life, she said.
White began inviting the student to a classroom after school, where he allegedly assaulted the student multiple times before he left the school in February 2009.
Brooks disputed that the meetings between White and his accuser ever took place, saying that White was a cross-country coach in the fall of 2008 and would have been busy at the track after school.
Brooks also said the room opposite the one where the assaults allegedly took place was a “very active” faculty lounge that would have been bustling after class let out.
“This is a very, very busy area,” Brooks said. “This alleged sex happened in a busy and crowded area where there was absolutely no privacy.”
“The evidence will compel a finding of not guilty,” he added.
In a statement last year, BC High President Grace Cotter Regan said the school was not made aware of any allegation of abuse while White was teaching there.
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“BC High is committed to providing a safe and secure environment for our students, faculty, and staff and ensuring their spiritual, mental, and physical well-being,” she said.
In 2002, during the Globe’s Spotlight Team investigation into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, White wrote an opinion piece in The Globe in praise of clerical celibacy that expressed “horror at the sin of priests preying upon children.”
“Celibates urge us to trust that God’s promise of love and grace makes us rich enough and wanting for nothing more,” White wrote in the essay, published March 6, 2002. “Celibates stake everything on God, convinced that God is worth a life.”
White waived his right to a jury trial, so Judge James Budreau will decide his innocence and hand down a sentence.
Truman Dickerson can be reached at truman.dickerson@globe.com.