Gentry Fry kept a painful secret for more than 40 years.
But in 2022, he decided to break his silence about how he was raped by a then medical student when he was a child.
And just over a year ago, that decision led to Georgia doctor Thomas Wyatt being extradited to Miami and sentenced to prison for felony child rape.
“I feel such a passion to reach out to other victims like myself, because I’ve been through the gauntlet,” Fry said. “I went through an investigation into how far childhood PTSD can take an adult if left untreated.”
Last week, Wyatt pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges as part of a plea deal.
That guilty plea was initiated by Fry and other victims who decided to come forward last summer.
“At that point, anyone with half a heart would have done what I did,” he said. “I don’t feel like a hero at all. I feel like I did what any decent person would do.”
Wyatt was a medical student at the time of the crime and lived in the Miami-Dade neighborhood where Fry grew up in the 1980s.
Fry said Wyatt raped and molested him and some of his neighborhood friends when they were young children.
He decided to come forward with his story last year after finding a disturbing online review left by one of Wyatt’s patients that said: “I didn’t trust him with my son, he was inappropriate.”
“1980 was when I was abused and that review was in 2016,” he said. “That’s the 36 years he’s been there.”
As part of the deal, Wyatt will spend two years on community supervision, which is essentially house arrest. He will then spend the next 15 years on probation.
Fry said it wasn’t the justice he had planned – but it was justice nonetheless.
“I feel like it’s justice for the grown Gentry, for the 50-year-old Gentry standing here. It’s justice because I understand why the plea deal had to happen the way it did,” he said. “But the little eight-year-old boy in me, the kid in that photo, doesn’t think justice has been served.”
As part of the plea deal, Wyatt must register as a sex offender, surrender his medical license and is no longer allowed to practice medicine in the United States.
NBC 6 reached out to the attorney general’s office for comment, but did not hear back.
