Thursday, September 28, 2006 - 3:00 pm

Nielsen: It's raining boys.

Things have been looking up for accused child molester Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, the 36-year-old Christian conservative activist and lawyer with close ties to Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Scott Baugh, head of the Orange County Republican Party. Police say Nielsen took a 14-year-old Westminster boy as his sex partner in 2003 and maintained a huge cache of man-boy pornography.

But prosecutors have allowed their case against Nielsen, once an intern in the district attorney’s office, to stall for 40 months.

Ironically, those delays have provoked new sex-crime allegations. Saying he fears a subversion of justice, a northern Virginia man claims that Nielsen repeatedly molested him when he was an adolescent.

“For two years, when I was 13 and 14 years old, Jeff sexually abused me while he worked in Washington for Rohrabacher as a legislative aide,” the 25-year-old married man told the Weekly in a recent interview. “There was never any penetration, but other than that? Everything. He wrapped it all up as normal, as love.”

Paul S. Meyer, Nielsen’s Costa Mesa-based defense attorney, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Virginia man, who asked to remain anonymous, said Nielsen worked in his church’s youth ministry and that his parents rented Nielsen a basement room in their home sometime in 1994 or 1995.

“Jeff took an immediate liking to me,” he said. “When he moved into our house, [the sex] started right away. I know this might sound weird, but at the time he was a mentor and he assured me the messing around was normal. I believed him. I was in the seventh grade at the time. It was brainwashing.”

He says Nielsen orchestrated a “boyfriend-girlfriend type” relationship that included occasional public kissing, hand holding and sex.

“Jeff called it ‘our thing,’ and one time we were near Tyson’s Corner [Virginia], he stopped at a gas station so we could have sex in the bathroom,” the man said. “A guy walked in and caught me with my pants down and Jeff on his knees. We made some excuse about an injured knee or something. The guy said, ‘Oh!’ and quickly left.”

There was also jealousy when the boy expressed an interest in girls, according to the victim.

“[Nielsen] was very controlling and emotional,” he said. “After sex, he’d sometimes say, ‘You know you are gay, right?’ But I wasn’t. I’ve been married now for three years and have a great relationship with my wife. I am very much heterosexual.”

The abuse stopped, according to the man, when Nielsen moved back to California to attend USC law school after receiving a personal recommendation from Congressman Rohrabacher.