Published February 16, 2011

http://cdn.wbur.org/media/special/2011/hubbub_0216_scott-brown-sexual-abuse

Sen. Scott Brown, in a “60 Minutes” interview scheduled to air Sunday, said he was sexually abused multiple times by a camp counselor when he was 10 years old.

Nothing was fully consummated, so to speak, but it was certainly back then very traumatic. He said, ‘If you tell anybody, you know, I’ll kill you. I will make sure that no one believes you.’ And that’s the biggest thing. When people find people like me at that young, vulnerable age, who are basically lost, the thing that they have over you is they make you believe that no one will believe you.

Brown said he never reported the abuse and has not told anyone — that is, until he told Lesley Stahl of CBS News. “That’s what happens when you’re a victim,” he said in the video. “You’re embarrassed. You’re hurt.”

Brown also said he was physically and psychologically abused by his mother’s many husbands.

The junior Massachusetts senator is scheduled to go on tour to promote his new memoir, “Against All Odds,” which goes on sale Monday, Feb. 21.

Update: The Globe obtained a copy of Brown’s book. The details are graphic:

Brown said the counselor who fondled him was in his mid-20s.

“I can remember how he looked, every inch of him: his long sandy, light brown hair; his long, full mustache; the beads he wore; the tie-died T-shirts and the cutoff jeans, which gave him the look of a hippie,” Brown writes in the book, “Against All Odds.”

Brown said the abuse occurred when he went to the camp infirmary, not feeling well. The counselor followed him into the bathroom, according to Brown’s account.

“I was standing there with my pants down and he came right up next to me and asked me if I needed help, and then he reached out his hand,” Brown writes, continuing with a graphic description of the encounter. Brown said he screamed and ran outside. The counselor told Brown later, “that if I told anybody, ever, he’d hurt me badly,” Brown writes.

Brown said he continued to see the counselor at camp for years after he was abused.