Her eyes were wet and red. Two hours after she read Ordman Alley’s statement saying she and another woman were liars, she struggled to control her hurt and anger.

She is the woman who wrote a letter to Alley in 2005, asking the legendary Jonesport-Beals High School boys basketball coach to acknowledge her allegations: that he had a sexual relationship with her that started when she was 13 and a student in his math class.

“Why would I bother to write that man a letter confronting him with all his actions, for him to read, if it wasn’t the truth?” she said. “What would be the point?”

A second woman has accused Alley of fathering her child after they had sex when she was 16. Alley has denied both women’s allegations of having sex with him and said he took a paternity test that “scientifically proved that I was not the father” of the second woman’s child.

The two woman had no legal recourse when they met with attorney Rebecca Irving in her Machias office in 2005. By that time, the statute of limitations had run out on their allegations of sexual abuse, which they say took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Irving suggested they confront Alley by writing a letter. One of the two women did so. She didn’t ask for money or gifts or a public statement. She just wanted him to respond to her.

He did not respond to her letter, but Monday he addressed the allegations in a public statement issued through his Bangor attorney, Brett D. Baber.

“I unequivocally deny any of the sexual abuse allegations,” Alley said. “These allegations have been made by two individuals who have historically demonstrated their personal animosity toward me.”

She sent a copy of the same letter to the Maine Basketball Hall of Fame in April, upon learning that the group had plans to induct Alley into its inaugural class this summer. The hall’s board of directors later spoke with her and decided to rescind Alley’s induction. The Maine Sports Hall of Fame also received a copy of the letter and decided to remove Alley, who was inducted in that hall in 2003.

“These accusations are unfounded lies which have kept me out of my rightful place in the Maine Sports Hall of Fame and the Maine Basketball Hall of Fame,” Alley said in the statement.

Both of Alley’s accusers are now 58. He’s 72. The two women were not in the same grade at school. One says she was held back twice. Both say they were 13 when their relationships with Alley started and 16 when they ended. He was in his late 20s at the time.

The women spoke to the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram on the condition that they not be identified, on the advice of their attorney. As well, the newspaper does not identify victims of sex crimes – which these women allege they are – without their consent. The newspaper also did not disclose the nature of their allegations until Alley released the public statement acknowledging that such accusations had been leveled against him.

One of the women was an only child who grew up in a four-room house in Jonesport without running water. Her father was a lobsterman, like so many others Down East. Her mother, who died before the age of 40, put herself through what is now the University of Maine-Machias and worked in education.

The letter writer is the divorced mother of two adult children. The walls of her small home in Washington County are adorned with photographs of her grandchildren.

“I had a crush on him – all the girls did,” the woman said of Alley. “When he started paying attention to me it was a feather in my cap.”

When their relationship escalated, she did not know how to stop it. “Who would believe me? People would say I was coming on to him. How does a 13-year-old in that time know how to come on to men?

“I still feel shame and I shouldn’t.”

The relationship ended when she was 16. “How could I relate to a boy my age after that?” she said. “I had really wanted to save myself for a husband or someone special. Not do this.”

The second woman is married and still lives in the Jonesport area. She called the letter writer after reading Alley’s statement and her anger spilled out of the phone. She was on her way home, she said, and needed a hug from her husband.

The second woman gave birth to a daughter in 1973 and said Alley is the father – though Alley and his attorney said a paternity test proves he is not.

“I was asked who the father was and I named another boy,” she said of her actions at 16, when she was pregnant. “I was afraid of what my father would do. If I said it was Ordman, my father would have killed him.”

She said paternity tests were later administered to two men when her daughter was an adolescent, because she was seeking child support. One of those tested was Alley; the other was the “boy” she had identified to her father years earlier.

Requests for child support are made through what is now Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services. The DHHS has enforcement authority and Alley was required to take the test, according to Baber.

“The results conclusively determined that he was not the father,” Baber said. Alley concurred.

“In the early 1990s, the other individual made paternity claims against a number of men, including myself,” Alley said in his statement. “Notwithstanding the fact that there was no chance that I was the father, I submitted to a paternity test. This test scientifically proved that I was not the father.”

The woman said she received paperwork indicating with more than 99 percent certainty that the “boy” was not the father. She says she received a phone call telling her the results of Alley’s test were inconclusive. She questions the validity of his test.

She says the paternity tests were done in the mid-1980s. She was puzzled that Alley said he took the paternity test in the early ’90s – or nearly 20 years after the woman’s child was born. It’s not clear why there’s a discrepancy of 10 years between his timeline of the events and hers.

Irving said she had no information about the paternity tests administered decades ago.

“I believe these two women,” Irving said. “I think they’re incredibly courageous.”

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