Show Topic Today: Clandestine Clergy: Politics and Policies on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

Guest is Attorney Mitchell Garabedian – the attorney who litigated many of the first child sexual-abuse cases in the nation – representing survivors of the clergy abuse taking place in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, and later around that nation.

Discussion focuses on the serial predators, the “clandestine clergy” cloaked in the cloth, hiding their true nature behind religion and the church – using it as a pretense  to “prey” upon vulnerable children and their unsuspecting parents. How these child predators make their way into the family circle, becoming trusted confidants and revered family members – while exploiting these children for their own personal gratification.

Also discussed, the Pulitzer Prize Winning, Boston Globe ‘Spotlight’ team, and how they were invested in breaking the story using many of the filings and reports as a roadmap to further discovery.

Additional discussion on the newly released 2020 – 461 page “Report” ordered by Pope Francis on the newly defrocked Cardinal, Theodore McCarrick  formerly of Washington D.C. What it admits as fact, and what it does not.

Since the 1990’s, Attorney Garabedian’s work, with the help of survivors and investigative journalists – helped bring many of these abusers to the public’s attention and to justice – while raising recognition of a systemic problem in the Catholic Church.

Investigation into many of Attorney Garabedian’s client accounts of clergy child sexual abuse, appear in the (2015) award-winning movies “Spotlight,” and in (2005) “Our Fathers.”

Publications:

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Read all about the Secret Files of the Catholic Church & the 'Coverup' in our Publication: Clandestine Clergy. Learn how the Boston Archdiocese pedophile cases were broken wide-open through the sheer grit, determination, and discovery by Attorney Mitchell Garabedian. Learn about the recent 2020 Report by the Vatican on the issues of clergy abuse of children, and what if anything the Church intends to do going forward. And how other churches and 'trusted' institutions have reportedly engaged in sexual abuse of children in the very same way. A stunning interview, that every parent of young children should see!

#CatholicChurch #childsexualabuse  #MitchellGarabedian

hello and welcome to the legal edition i'm your host attorney mary kay elloian our show topic today clandestine clergy politics and policies of sexual abuse in the catholic church our guest is attorney mitchell garabedian he is the attorney who litigated many of the first church-related child sexual abuse cases in boston and the nation representing survivors of sexual abuse by priests in the catholic church his work with the help of survivors and investigative journalists uncovered institutional child abuse as portrayed in the award-winning movies spotlight and our fathers let's welcome attorney mitchell garabedian welcome attorney garabedian thank you for having mary kay now tell us uh you have been representing victims of sexual abuse and one of the cases made famous was the the gagan case took place here in boston massachusetts and the archdiocese of boston tell us a little bit about that case and and about the uh the follow up the uh the movie that was made in 1994 a woman came to me who i've been representing for general matter she's a very nice woman and she had children ages approximately 12 10 and 8 years old and she lived in a housing project outside of boston and she said you know you know my children for a few years they're good kids but all of a sudden that changed one was washing his hands every day till they bled the older boy was beating up his younger brothers instead of just horsing around and one was taking two hour showers and she said something's very very strange can you just at least talk to them and i spoke to them and we discovered that uh it was a fatherless family the father was not around it was divorce and she lived in the housing projects i mentioned before with other mothers who had children but father's families and we discovered that father gagan a priest by the name of father gagan was visiting her family and putting these children to sleep every night as he called it but meanwhile he was molesting them and before i knew it other mothers in the housing project and her relatives contacted me with the same sort of stories so i started to file lawsuits and started to notify the church and it grew from there and before i knew it i had 86 victims on my hand the father john jay gagan in a very short period and we began litigation in the 90s and we fought for years to get what's known as the secret files that's under canon law they're called secret files or secret archives that's where the worst information is kept about a pedophile and we were able to obtain the secret files in boston after three and a half years of litigation which shu showed that bernard cardinal law knew that father gagan was sexually abusing children and reassigning and he received we assigned him to saint julius parish and wesson but didn't wander parishioners with father where father gagan continued to molest so that's how it started in boston i was standing on the shoulders of courageous victims and survivors and that's what i do every day but my practice in sexual abuse really began in about 1994. and the movie there was a movie made uh that went through this whole gig case and used your case files as the uh is the evidence to uh pursue this case yes that movie was a labor of love by the actors and originally the expectations were it was going to be a strong movie but no one expected it at least at the outset although the potential is always there to win academy award for best picture which it did a pulitzer prize i believe uh well the boston globe want a pulitzer prize the spotlight team and and the movie has had a great effect on many victims i constantly get calls from around the world from victims of survivors saying i watch the movie can you represent me i'm ready to now come forward because of the work of activists and lawyers in the media like yourself we're making the public aware that they have to watch their children when in the present when their children are in the custody of priests or any other adult whether it be a boy scout leader whether you're private school teacher whether it be the neighbor whether it be the babysitter you have to keep an eye on on these these adults and on your children uh the catholic church and these institutions aren't changing very much at all they're saying the right things but they're not doing the right things they're not implementing uh programs that will protect children most of their programs are voluntarily it's voluntary in other words if the parish wants to institute the program they can if they don't they don't have to and even pope francis himself has laid out these grand statements but there's no teeth to anything he's saying there's there's nothing in place to help children be safe it's just a bunch of words but again the change is coming from the outside outside the catholic church i think for too long people have given deference to the church have given them you know the benefit of the doubt have implicitly trusted them because you know they are held everyone believes to a higher standard you know they report to god but it appears that in your in your filings and in the cases that you've litigated that was just a facade to gain the trust and to be able to manipulate not only the parents but the children yeah for decades the catholic church has been able to hide behind the first amendment freedom of religion and establishment clause establish a religion for decades up until about the 19 early 1990s you really could not in most states and even in some states that still can't pierce the those those uh first amendment rights but recently in the 1990s and that's recent in my business um the churches the the courts are starting to say in a lot of states you can't touch religious belief you want to believe that a picture on the wall or a feather is something you want to to to consider god that's your business if you want to stand on your head on a chair on the altar that's your business but when your conduct is illegal that becomes the civil authorities business that's been taken out of the protection of the church what i mean by that is the sexual abuse has gone on and on and on for so long because they could always hide behind freedom of religion in in government intervention but now the government is saying no when it's wrongful conduct when it's illegal conduct the government can now get involved now did one of your cases actually sort of pierce that corporate veil so to speak was it the game that's the primary argument of the catholic church and of the parishes and of the pedophile priests when you go to court they say you can't get involved in our business because of our constitutional rights our first amendment rights and and but when you're able to build a case to show that incrementally there's something wrong here that that you know the the supervisor was turning his back and the pedophile priest was abusing a child that attitude has changed for the better it was actually too much power too much protection given to the church a man came to me a few years ago he was 87 years old he was sexually abused in 1937 by a catholic priest and he said to me i asked him well did you tell anybody which is a common question and he said you kidding me if you told anybody in 1937 you were sexually abused by a priest you would have been murdered and he was serious it was a different era it was a different era yeah yeah now so uh gagan was the first case that you litigated in boston that again the spotlight team uh had picked up uh there was also another movie called our fathers was that also based on the gagan case as well yeah ted danson portrayed me it was a showtime movie it was well done it was in 2005. i played around the country for i don't know three or four years on showtime it was very very well done uh and and it once again it portrayed my activity my my advocacy in in the gagan cases and once again i was able to stand on the shoulders of courageous victims who come forward it takes a lot of courage for victims to come forward it takes some decades that man who was 87 held on to that that knowledge of being sexually abused for 81 years before he came to me it was it just takes a man called me recently is 90 years old it just it just haunts people and they don't want a lot of individuals don't want to come forward until everybody in their life has passed away who would be hurt by the news now what about the statute of limitations on these types of cases the statute limitations have been a major impediment in these cases but in the past few years i'd say five years they're beginning to loosen up quite a bit in many states a statute limitations is a deadline as to when you can file your suit as you know file a civil complaint but the statute limitations in new york was so bad i believe was you had to file a suit before age 23 that it was done away with with a new law in new york which actually allowed allows right now a look back window for people who were outside the statute limitations to file a lawsuit before august 14th and anyone who's been abused well it extends also the statute in other ways to someone into their 50s so um why is that important because if people get into a car accident and they have three years to sue you know then they're not they don't feel that embarrassment and shame this lack of self-esteem which is all unnecessary that a sexual abuse victim would feel even with harvey weinstein victims you're seeing it they just came forward now uh recently within the past few years because there's this unnecessary self problems with self-esteem and self-respect and self-worth so that and when you couple it with religion like god doesn't want me to come forward or god is punishing me that it will punish me if i come forward then the person is really reticent to come forward and they also believe as i mentioned earlier they're going to hurt their relatives if they come forward they'll hit them hurt their mom or dad hurt their mom or dad so because of your work though has the statute of limitations actually changed to so that victims have more time to come forward oh yeah because of the work of victim advocacy groups the work of lawyers like myself the the statute of limitations in many states new jersey on new york arizona connecticut many states has been expect massachusetts has been expanded vermont has been expanded and we're still working on many states and the expansion of stature limitations and you know in our system victims look for validation for their claims that they really need to be told and shown that the abuse was not their fault there isn't any victim who would not give all the money back in the world for not having been sexually abused but the way they have to attain validation in our system is through a civil civil award so that's very important and some of those have been held criminally responsible as well isn't that right oh yes i mean um in negating cases one of my clients uh was the complaining of prosecution in middlesex county of gaga and gagan received a jail sentence maximum jail sense of nine to ten years and if as we all know he was murdered in jail by someone who had in fact been molested himself reportedly yes yeah kind of some poetic justice in a way perhaps well many victims feel cheated because he did not serve his full jail sentence other victims feel as though it is poetic justice it's all over the place in terms of opinions okay now let's talk about the hierarchy tell us how the hierarchy that you had in been involved with uh in the in the initial litigation had treated uh your aims at discovery and tell us later um how you see it today well the the lawyers of the catholic church fought me tooth and nail using first amendment grounds saying these claims are a fraud that a catholic priest would never do this and we litigated for three and a half years and they tried to bankrupt me uh they weren't going to do it but but they were trying to drain my my finances they were trying to drain me work-wise and i was working seven days a week 24 hours a day not literally 24 hours a day but i'd say i was working 16-hour days and i was just working and working and my staff was working very hard and we were litigating this was not going to be forgotten by me we were not going to give up on this we were going to keep moving forward at first i thought when i reported the gagging cases i thought well maybe you know this is a bad priest and they should know about it and and they'll do something about it a bad apple bad apple that's a bad apple thank you and and then when i notified them they were so aloof about it it was like oh yeah okay we'll do something about it then they we started litigating and it became obvious that this was not a bad apple that they i'm saying to myself why don't why didn't they want to take this priest out of our circulation circulation why didn't they just want to you know protect children why didn't they want to stop children from being sexually abused in a wholesale fashion and i mean this guy was sexually you didn't even have to be a catholic boy if you were a boy and you were in his car you were going to be sexually abused so he didn't discriminate what he didn't discriminate no he didn't discriminate um one one man called me he was the bully in the neighborhood this guy when he was a kid he was a big brute he was a bully and he used to protect the kids against gagan he'd see the children get into gagan's car over in dorchester here and he tell the kids if i ever see you get into gage's car again i'm going to beat the life out of you now he never did but he scared him to these kids to death so they never got in the car because he says i knew what gagan was doing to these kids had he experienced it himself personally or just no but he no he was an older guy but he he would tell he was like you know seven or eight years older than his kids but he would tell these kids don't you ever get in the gagan's car again because gagan was big father gagan was big on buying these kids ice cream and he'd take him on to the ice cream store in his car and when they were in his car he'd be fondling them now was it mostly boys that he was mostly boys some girls but mostly boys i was reading the the recent report just put out in november 2020 by uh the current pope uh francis and i couldn't believe what i was reading there's about 461 pages that was put out and pretty much uh they're saying that the catholic church the hierarchy they really didn't know what was really going on this was more of a low level thing uh is that is that your reading of it nothing could be farther from the truth there have been so many reports of the vatican there have been so many reports the cardinals to bishops to archbishops by mothers by fathers by victims nothing could be fathered from the truth you know the the pope is the head of a big pr machine a public relations machine they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on public relations each year and they're concerned about their image because that translates into how much money they're going to receive so their mantra is always deny deny deny if we had only known we would have done something about it we're really the victims here and it's unfortunate and so so their position is so far from the truth you're dealing with an entity that is allowed to wholesale sexual abuse of children for decades and centuries okay they're criminals the acts of abuse are criminal and in the negligent supervision is criminal it's immoral and it's criminal i read in this report that mothers and and some anonymous people have actually written letters stating the abuse and nothing was done and numerous there was numerous entries in there about different higher-ups that were told maybe not at the level of rome but other higher-ups that were knowledgeable about what was gone i mean uh the carrick would take some of these people to some island he would taken them to some beach house and then he was flying all over the world with some of these people how could they not have known based upon all that had been going on for for decades well that that's the whole point it was an open secret and in the report bishop hughes bishop ramsey all these bishops they knew what were told about the abuse these were big shots in the church even as i mentioned well i may not have mentioned earlier but a mother wrote to the vatican and she wrote to bishops and she sent all these people she went to the library and got all their names and addresses and talked about her children being abused they knew they just don't want to admit it the report said that there was no letters none of those letters were in any of their archives do you believe that that's because they pro well first of all they may be in their archives but if they're not in the archives it's because they purposely took them out of the archive so they can say they're not there that's how they function you know people will say to me they'll come out to me and they'll be shocked that uh a catholic priest has stolen like 300 000 from a parish or 20 000 from a parish or something and they're absolutely shocked and i i look at them i say how can you be shocked in molesting children i mean they're committing criminal acts and they're allowing the unless these are children why would you be surprised if they stole money they're stealing these children's souls that's right i mean the lesser crime is stealing money and so how can you be shocked it's the culture in the church as we're speaking right now children are being molested by catholic priests as we're speaking right now the the victims victims usually can't come forward until they're like 35 40 45 years old the the emotions will not let them come forward for the most part victims are starting to come forward now and reporting to me beings having been sexually abused in the 90s in the late 80s and the 90s now and they're starting to just come forward in in small amounts but in 10 years a lot more victims from that time period will come forward so when the catholic church says we've we've stopped all abuse because of our programs which are never in place because of our investigations which are just paid they pay their own investigators they're biased it's not to be believed that there's no evidence of that the only way to stop this is to call the police that's who you call you don't call the paid hired guns by the church who investigate these claims you don't call the parish priest who's going to cover it up you don't call the bishop who's going to cover it up you don't call the vatican you call the police whether it be the fbi the state police or the local police call the police and recently there was a report in utah it was just recent that the church out there had set up a hotline for victims to call and that hotline went right to the lawyer's office that represented the church it wasn't the police it wasn't a victim's advocate line it was a law a line directly to their own attorneys this was out in utah and the lawyer is probably part of the cover-up he's probably going to try and smother these cases he's probably going to try to bring those people in have them speak the priests the victims or their parents and say you know you have to protect the reputation of the church here because it is religion yeah it was the church of latter-day saints that this report was on just you know it's the same approach cover it up spin control victim should be calling the police just call the police don't call the lawyers for any church just call the police now let's go back again in time to discern which which in the hierarchy who in the hierarchy had knowledge and did nothing about it cardinal bernard law he was the cardinal of the boston archdiocese i believe and he knew you know and we were able to show he knew because after three and a half years of litigation we were able to obtain the secret files which showed that cardinal law knew that father gagan was sexually abusing children in the past yet he transferred him to saint julius the parish in western and he was abusing children there we were able to show that because a victim from saint julius and weston came forward and reported being abused and he abused gagan even abused after um sexually abused even after saint julius and weston in his retirement home over by the mass general not too far from here that's unbelievable that's unbelievable even in retirement home yeah even often it's not about sex it's about control for the pedophile often it's about control so even in the retirement home he was sexually he was sexually abusing children he received maximum sentence in his criminal case the judge could not given him more than nine to ten years but he did receive that and of course then then he was uh he was killed in prison um so who was the afterburner law who who was the next one that came about cardinal o'malley came in and keep in mind after cardinal law resigned he was given a promotion to her in a prestigious bill basilica in rome by the pope he wasn't taken out of action he wasn't taken out of ministry but cardinal law after all of this proof was set forward publicly stated publicly about his knowledge he was he was given a promotion so this new this new report what does it really accomplish then if it's just uh you know the same old same old um what is it what's the point the point was to sp basically blame uh church officials in the past not church officials today even though mccarrick was getting promotions in the 2000s after all of it was known about his sexual abuse of adults and minors he was still getting promotions within the church in early 2000s he was promoted to cardinal the point the point i believe the spin control of the church was oh let's let's blame everybody in the past all the church officials we can't that were involved in this in the past but no one in the present so that we can we can properly market this and advertise this now mccarrick he was also meeting with dignitaries presidents he was flying all over the world he he was very political mccarrick was very very political and he was a huge fundraise i'm talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that's why they came and kept them in positions of power even though it was sexually abusing children as i mentioned earlier the church is really interested in money that's that's their language that's their currency so mccarrick was really a fundraising machine for the church and that's why they kept them in place huge fundraising influential powerful person for the catholic church one of the most influential powerful people in the church worldwide not just in in the united states worldwide very he would deal with uh china for instance many many foreign countries what is the status of any litigation against mccarrick at this point well we're in the process of of of serving interrogatories obtaining documents um taking depositions and it's going to be a long haul but we're in it for the long haul litigation always takes a long time but it it's extended because of the kovitz situation which is you know tampered things down a little bit ironically the the report kind of kind as i as i said before kind of states that well pope francis really didn't know much about well please you know you didn't read reports you don't have reports about mccarrick you don't keep your ears open did you just drop from the sky and become pope or were you within the ranks for years and hear about mccarrick it's sort of it's insulting to victims so it was i think so pope benedict too also had promoted him i believe i think he promoted him the most from what i recall yeah anything else you'd like to share um with the people that are watching how they can protect their children whether it's from the church from institutional exploitation what suggestions do you have to help parents keep their children safe watch your children in the first place don't trust them when they're with any adults whether those adults are in positions of power or not look for signs of affection that that are not of the ordinary nature by a stranger by these priests by by these teachers boy scout leaders when you when your child is going to go on a trip an overnight trip you may want to give that with it with an adult you may want to give that some extra thought because what kind of supervision is involved and what's the what's this person's reputation in the community um because the damage to the child is everlasting the pain doesn't go away for these victims they're only trying to to manage it and and the pain is everlasting and when you couple it with religion where the priest is threatening a child is and i'd really like to thank victims for allowing me to do this work because without their courage without their strengths without their trust i can't stand on their shoulders advocates can't stand on their shoulders they're the heart and soul of this movement and unfortunately some of the victims have passed on because of suicide except really speaking for those that have have no voice anymore as well as the survivors that's right i mean and suicide is all too common whether it be through drugs or just just committing suicide in an awful way i once had one mother come and see me and she said um my son committed suicide and he used to hang around with this priest and i saw and she used to he used to hang around with these three other boys so i tracked all these three other boys down and i found that they all had committed suicide all four of them so you know it's just endless i i've seen more and you see a lot of victims transferring the emotional pain they'll put cigarette butts out on their arms dogs slice their arms they'll cut themselves they'll pull their hair out of their head or they'll just lose it out of stress the damage is just awful it's just awful but i'd like to thank victims and survivors for doing the work they do and thank you for doing the work that you do to help make this safer world for everyone thank you for your questions and and thank you for having me on i appreciate it thank you i want to thank our guest attorney mitchell garabedian for sharing information and opinions on sexual assault and abuse in the catholic church i also want to thank you our viewers for tuning in for more information on today's topic and our guest visit us online at thelegaledition.com and remember this information is for general educational purposes it is not legal or professional advice and now you can download our podcasts and subscribe online find us on facebook youtube instagram and twitter you