It's ugly, but if somebody told me one of my closest friends - who I saw daily during long, long work days - was raping children, I'd have a hard time believing it.

Doesn't excuse it. But as an answer to your specific question (which I share) it may work.

There's a story about John Paul II not believing the accusations of sex abuse in the church because, growing up in communist Poland, the state's political enemies were often accused of being pedophiles in order to discredit them. It's awful, and certainly doesn't fix anything, but it explains one of the many weird questions that kind of hangs around things like this: what employee is so valuable that even raping children isn't sufficient reason to fire them?