UPDATE: Another woman has come forward to say that Bill Conlin, the Hall of Fame baseball writer and former Philadelphia Daily News columnist, sexually assaulted her when she was a child. The woman, who asked not to be identified, said Conlin repeatedly abused her when she was about 7 and lived in the Whitman Square section of Washington Township, Gloucester County. She was a childhood friend of Conlin’s son, Peter, and often spent time at his house nearby. It was there, she said, that Conlin molested her. She is the fifth person to tell The Inquirer that Conlin assaulted her. MORE
DEADSPIN: He was calling me from his condo in Largo, Fla.—the condo he would occasionally mention to big-time his readers—and he sounded desperate. Conlin knew the Inquirer‘s Nancy Phillips was working on a story, and he had an idea of what it would say. He laid out for me a muddled timeline involving his niece (one of his accusers) and a decades-old family vendetta that, Conlin believed, had precipitated the story. It was as if he was piecing together Phillips’s story as we spoke. I had a hard time following along. He’d give me specific details about what happened in Margate, N.J., then veer into florid tangents (a Conlin staple in both print and conversation) about the neighborhood’s kids and their families there. He was going to get a lawyer, he said, but he also didn’t want to be silent. He wanted to defend himself and he wanted to know if he could possibly do it on Deadspin if and when the story came out. There, he reasoned, he could reveal his true feelings, without fear of insulting any dead-tree readership with profanity. Besides, he said, he might not have another outlet once the story hit anyway. MORE
BOB FORD: I don’t know the Bill Conlin who was described in The Inquirer as an alleged serial molester of young children, but I know too much now about the crime and the secrecy that goes along with it to disbelieve with any certainty he exists. I never met that man, but I have known for 30 years the bombastic, funny, ridiculously talented Philadelphia Daily News sportswriter who I thought was Bill Conlin. I have worked with him, traveled with him, drunk with him, played tennis with him, and stood under a thousand spring training suns talking mostly about baseball but eventually about everything else. Everything but this. MORE
PHILLY POST: Unlike some Phillips projects, the Conlin piece came together quickly, in about five weeks. Prompted by the Penn State child sex-abuse scandal, Kelley Blanchet, a niece of Conlin’s and one of his alleged victims, confided her story to Amy Rosenberg, her friend and an Inquirer reporter. Since Rosenberg had a conflict of interest, she asked Blanchet if she could contact Phillips. “It was pretty straight-forward reporting,” says Phillips. “I almost don’t consider it investigative. It wasn’t document intensive. I didn’t have to research deeds, mortgages. It was just talking to people, and going from there. It wasn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t put this among my top accomplishments as a reporter.” MORE
PREVIOUSLY: BREAKING: Legendary Daily News Sports Scribe Bill Conlin Resigns Amidst Child Molestation Allegations