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Scarfaceinthefall
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Help out, Aaron.
~ Rushman "directing" Aaron Stampler to have sex with his fellow altar boys in a homemade porn movie.

Archbishop Richard Rushman is the overarching antagonist of the 1993 novel Primal Fear and its 1996 film adaptation of the same name.

He was portrayed by the late Stanley Anderson, who also played Hotel Caretaker in the 1997 miniseries The Shining.

Biography[]

The Archbishop is first seen by organizing a spectacle for the elite of Chicago with his altar boys, notably John Shaughnessy. The next day, he rises up and takes a shower to prepare himself for the day. However, one of his boys, Aaron Stampler, breaks into his room. The Archbishop sees him just before Stampler cuts off his fingers and stabs him several times, killing him. He then mutilates Rushman's body, carving the Dewey Decimal reference number to a line in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter - "No man for any considerable period of time can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally becoming bewildered as to which may be the true." This was Stampler's way of calling Rushman a hypocrite.

Eventually, it is revealed that Rushman was a pedophile with a history of sexual abusing his altar boys, threatening to throw them out onto the street unless they did what he wanted. He filmed his abuse and hid the tapes in his home. The tape is eventually found by investigators working for Martin Vail, Stampler's defense attorney.

Vail also finds that Rushman had a foundation called the Rushman Foundation. Shaughnessy and several other businessmen invested large amounts of money with the foundation for a real estate development project that threatened to evict residents of the neighborhood and destroy their homes to replace them with luxury condos. Shaughnessy bought the silence of one of Rushman's victims in order to ensure that the project went forward. Rushman ultimately cancelled the project, however, angering his former investors; Vail brings this up during Stampler's trial in order to cast suspicion on Shaughnessy, which both creates reasonable doubt on Stampler's behalf and destroys Shaughnessy's reputation.

Vail tricks prosecutor Jane Venable into showing the jury a tape depicting Rushman abusing Stampler and his girlfriend Linda, which strengthens Vail's argument that Stampler suffers from multiple personality disorder as a result of the abuse, and that his alternate personality, "Roy," committed the murder. Stampler is found not guilty by reason of insanity and placed in a psychiatric hospital. After the verdict, however, Stampler reveals to Vail that he had faking the disorder the whole time, and had been perfectly sane while killing and mutilating Rushman, which he called "a f--kin' work of art".

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