Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who led the U.S. House longer than any other speaker from his party and then went to prison in a hush-money case, has died at 84. The county coroner confirmed on Monday, October 5, that he died at his home over the weekend of natural causes. Hastert went to prison because he broke banking law to hide secret payments to a man he had molested years earlier, when the man was a boy on the high school wrestling team Hastert coached.
Story Snapshot
- Dennis Hastert died at his Illinois home over the weekend at age 84.
- Kendall County Coroner Jacquie Purcell said the death was from natural causes.
- Hastert was House speaker from 1999 to 2007, longer than any Republican in history.
- He served 13 months in federal prison after admitting he molested boys he coached.
Longest-Serving GOP Speaker Dies at Home
Jacquie Purcell, the elected coroner of Kendall County, Illinois, confirmed the death. A coroner is the county official who rules on how a person died. Purcell said Hastert died of natural causes. He is survived by his wife, Jean, whom he married in 1973, and their two sons.
Hastert represented Illinois’s 14th Congressional District from 1987 to 2007. He became speaker, the top job in the House and second in line to the presidency after the vice president, in January 1999. The job opened up when Bob Livingston, the Louisiana Republican chosen to be the next speaker, stepped down before taking it. Hastert held the gavel for eight years, through most of President George W. Bush’s time in office, until Democrats won the House and Nancy Pelosi took over in 2007.
His name is still used in Congress. Under the “Hastert Rule,” a speaker does not bring a bill to a vote unless most members of his own party support it.
Why He Went to Prison
Before politics, Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach at Yorkville High School in Illinois. At least four former students said he abused them between 1965 and 1981. He could not be charged with the abuse itself because the statute of limitations, the legal deadline for bringing a charge, had long passed.
Prosecutors said he agreed to pay one of those former students $3.5 million in hush money, which is money paid to keep a person quiet. The FBI and IRS began looking at his cash withdrawals in 2013. He was charged in 2015 with structuring, which means taking cash out of the bank in small amounts so the bank does not have to report it, and with lying to the FBI. He pleaded guilty that year.
In 2016, U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin, the federal judge in Chicago who handled the case, sentenced him to 15 months in prison, fined him $250,000 and ordered him into a treatment program for offenders. “The defendant is a serial child molester,” Durkin said in court. “Nothing is more stunning than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘Speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.” Hastert admitted the abuse. He served 13 months and was released in 2017.
What It Means for Those Who Remember Him
For eight years, Hastert was the steady, plain-spoken coach from small-town Illinois who ran the House for the Republican Party. Many conservatives trusted him because of that image. The court case showed the image was false, and that the boys who trusted him as a coach paid the price.
That is why the obituaries lead with the prison term and not the bills he passed. The lesson holds for either party: a title is not character, and a man who harms children should answer for it no matter how high he has climbed. The men who came forward spoke up decades after the abuse. His death ends his story, but it does not erase theirs.
Sources:
mediaite.com, apnews.com, bloomberg.com, rmb.reuters.com, cbsnews.com, chicagotribune.com, thehill.com
