Before pronouncing Perlitz's sentence, Arterton listened for nearly seven hours to the story of Project Pierre Toussaint.
It was a program of hope for Haitian street boys. It started in a parking lot in Cap-Haitien, the country's second-largest city, whose streets are filled with at least 10,000 abandoned children begging daily for food, clothing and medicine and money and sleeping in courtyards, on roofs, in woods. It grew into an intake center, an enclosed residential school on 10 acres of land and group homes for promising high school students. It was funded with millions of dollars raised by wealthy Fairfield and Westchester county Catholics.
The program began crumbling in 2007 when students went public with accounts of being abused by Perlitz. When funding dried up, the program shut down during the summer of 2009.
On Tuesday, six former students, all victims of Perlitz's abuse wrote the chapter on courage by describing their years of sexual abuse to the judge. The boys, speaking in their native Creole, which was translated to the judge, related how they would be invited to Perlitz's home, sometimes on their birthday or just before a holiday, sometimes after school on Friday afternoons and sometime when they became disruptive in school.
There the nightmarish acts would occur. Some would awaken to his abusing him, others would be asked to perform sex with him, and some would consent to demands for fondling and for being fondled. To resist could mean expulsion from the program, they said.
Just how many were abused is unknown. The prosecution said they could document 16 but believe there were more.
One boy told how he and others would hear Perlitz's footsteps in their dormitory room and feign sleeping or look for a hiding place "so he wouldn't sleep with us."
"He never made love to us, he made hate," he said.
That boy's descriptive story of being sexually abused over five years struck an emotional chord with Cyrus Sibert, the Haitian journalist, the first to report on the scandal in 2007.
