Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned from Congress after he was confronted with sexually explicit computer messages he had sent to male teenage pages on Capitol Hill, has been in a psychiatric hospital in Arizona for more than three weeks, his lawyers said Wednesday.
The unusual announcement, which came in the form of a two-sentence fax to NBC News, said only that Foley “has been an inpatient at Sierra-Tucson, located in Tucson, Arizona, since October 1, 2006.”
The fax included no indication of what Foley was being treated for, but the hospital promotes itself on its Web site as “internationally known and respected as a leader in the treatment of addictions and behavioral disorders.”
Two days after he resigned on Sept. 29, Foley’s attorneys said he had been abused by a Catholic priest as a child and would be seeking treatment for alcoholism.
There was also no indication why Foley’s attorneys, David Roth, William Taylor III and Gerald F. Richman, chose to make the announcement Wednesday.
An official for the hospital — which has also reportedly treated singer Whitney Houston, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, actress Julie Andrews and actors Robert Downey Jr., Michael Douglas, Martin Lawrence and Patrick Swayze — would not comment.
