SEN. SCOTT BROWN REVEALS HE WAS SEXUALLY ABUSED AS A CHILD SEVERAL TIMES BY A CAMP COUNSELOR - "60 MINUTES" SUNDAY

Massachusetts Lawmaker Talks of Physical Abuse at Home, Too, in a House he Says He'd Like to Buy Just "to Burn Down."

Sen. Scott Brown reveals he was sexually abused as a child several times by a camp counselor in a 60 MINUTES interview with Lesley Stahl. The Massachusetts Republican also talks to Stahl about physical abuse suffered at the hands of stepfathers, in one case saying he would like to have purchased the house where it occurred just so he could "burn it down." The interview will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Feb. 20 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Brown says even his mother doesn't know about the sexual abuse. "That's what happens when you're a victim. You're embarrassed. You're hurt," he tells Stahl. Brown spoke of being touched and forced to touch the counselor. "Fortunately, nothing was ever fully consummated, so to speak, but it was certainly, back then, very traumatic."

The counselor, he says, came for him more than once. "As predators do," says Brown. "He said 'If you tell anybody... I'll kill you. I will make sure that nobody believes you.'" Being physically abused at home and the victim of seven broken homes made Brown even more susceptible to such a predator. "When people find people like me at that young vulnerable age, who are basically lost, the thing that they have over you is, they make you believe that no one will believe you." Watch an excerpt.

Brown, who came to national prominence by winning the democratic seat held by Ted Kennedy in a watershed political moment, details these abuses and other childhood traumas in an upcoming book, "Against All Odds." Some of the abuse detailed in the book will be revelations to his wife and mother. The senator says writing was an act of catharsis for him. He tells Stahl of another cathartic act he wished he could have done in Wakefield, Mass., when a house he lived in with an abusive stepfather came up for sale.

"I actually called the realtor and went in and took the tour and relived kind of where everything was... to make sure I wasn't ... dreaming. As I left, I said, 'Man, I wish I had the money. I'd just buy this thing and burn it down.'"

Such a childhood, he says, prepared him well for the bare-knuckle politics he is encountering in Washington. "When I'm getting the crap beat out of me outside, in the political spectrum," he tells Stahl, "I'm like, 'Psst. This is nothing. Bring it on. Let's go. Next!"