"When I read it, I started to cry," said the woman, now 59 and a mother of two who lives in Chester County. "I just felt overwhelmed. The fact that I wasn't the only one made me feel stronger."
Conlin, 77, retired from the Daily News on Tuesday just hours before The Inquirer posted a story about allegations that he had abused three women and a man decades ago when they were children. Two other women came forward on Wednesday and said that Conlin had assaulted them, too, also in the 1970s when they were children living in the Whitman Square section of Washington Township, Gloucester County.
Among his accusers are his niece, Kelley Blanchet, who said he assaulted her in her Margate home when she was 7 years old. The other accusers were neighbors and childhood friends of Conlin's children. They say he molested them in his Whitman Square home. One, Linda Stella, told the Philadelphia Daily News Wednesday that Conlin repeatedly assaulted her when she was a child.
The woman who spoke out Friday said Conlin, a family friend, assaulted her twice while he was visiting the Jersey Shore, where her family had a home.
The first time he touched her, she said, was on a surfboard as he paddled out to sea with her in tow. She was lying prone on the front of the surfboard and he was behind her when he reached his hand inside her bathing suit.
"I was like totally freaked out," said the woman, who asked not to be identified. "I said, 'Don't touch me.' " The Inquirer does not identify people who say they are victims of sex crimes unless they give permission to use their names.
Another time, she said, she was showering in her bathing suit after a day at the beach when Conlin reached in and touched her genitals and put a finger inside of her.
"I was just horrified," the woman recalled. She said the assaults ended after she told a lifeguard what had happened and he promised to make it stop.
