The shadow villain of Spotlight, Bernard Law was one of America’s most ambitious and prominent cardinals—until his handling of the sex-abuse scandal caught up with him.
“Spotlight” is a gripping new film by Tom McCarthy on the Boston Globe’s investigation of how that archdiocese concealed child-molester priests. Set in 2001, the film serves as backstory to the Pulitzer Prize-winning series that began on Jan. 6, 2002—“Feast of the Epiphany,” as we learn in the intelligent script by McCarthy and Josh Singer.
Taking on the church in heavily Catholic Boston was no small order. Several of the reporters came from Catholic homes. Marty Baron, the Globe’s new editor, by way of the Miami Herald, suggested the investigation after reading a Globe columnist on a priest abuse case. Baron wanted to know more; he later became editor of The Washington Post.
Played by the bearded Liev Schreiber, Baron presents as a shy man, of few but forceful words, an outsider to tribal Boston, and a Jew, as a Catholic businessman says, sotto voce, to Michael Keaton in his edgy, pensive portrayal of “Spotlight” editor Walter “Robby” Robinson.
Robinson’s clutch of reporters worked months before the first article appeared, finding documents and tracking down victims of some 30 priests. The turning point in 2001 came when a court ruling against the church unsealed lawsuits that put clergy personnel/ documents into the public record. The Globe ultimately reported that the archdiocese had sheltered 249 predatory clerics going back several decades.
The Globe unmasked Cardinal Bernard Law, then Boston’s Archbishop, for shielding predators; he made Newsweek’s cover in March 2002. “Spotlight” ends two months before that, just as the newspaper series begins. A line onscreen at the end of the film says that Law resigned as archbishop in December 2002, and later became pastor in Rome of a historic basilica, Santa Maria Maggiore (note to reader: at a salary of $12,000 a month, according to The New York Times).
Law left Boston a figure of ridicule and disgrace, yet still a Prince of the Church, as cardinals are called. He has never given an interview in the 13 years since then. In researching a 2011 book on Vatican finances, and more recent reporting trips to Rome, I pieced together a picture of the cardinal in winter (he turns 84 next month) as he rebuilt a power base. His story echoes the wisdom of Heraclitus: character is fate.
The Globe series ignited a chain reaction of reports at the networks and daily newsrooms, not least at The New York Times, which owned the Globe then and competed hard on investigations of its own. For the church, the earthquake convulsed well into 2004; the impact continued on for years, as dioceses and religious orders settled thousands of victim lawsuits.
Early into “Spotlight,” Baron pays a courtesy call on Cardinal Law, played by a silver-haired Len Cariou with a suave patrician gravitas, saying that as a young monsignor in Mississippi in the 1960s, “I was close to the Evers brothers,” and that he wrote for the Jackson diocesan paper. In a dash of hubris the cardinal suggests common cause in a healthy press, and then gives editor Baron a copy of the thick Catholic Catechism. Schrieber’s facial twist registers irony as he takes the book, knowing that news will come of rules long broken by the church.
I let out an audible mmmm at that moment in the screening; my wife whispered, “Is something wrong?” I shook my head, no, thinking of Law: All that promise…
Globe reporters interviewed me in late 2001 and several times in 2002 because of a work I published in 1992—Lead Us Not Into Temptation, the first book to investigate the nationwide crisis of priest sex abuse. (The book actually has a cameo in the film; a survivor activist shows his copy to “Spotlight” reporters with other material he urges them to read.) The Globe reviewed the book favorably in 1992 during heavy national coverage of an ex-priest, James Porter, who left a trail of agony in Massachusetts towns going back many years, before taking a plea bargain and 20-year sentence for child sexual abuse. He died in prison six years later.
Cardinal Law was irate over the Porter coverage, blustering at one point, “We call down God’s power on the media, especially the Globe.”
The book took seven years, with endless photocopying and FedEx bills—this was pre-Internet—to obtain legal documents on far-flung bishops shielding sex offenders. But I was unable to get documents from New York, Boston, and Los Angeles: Church lawyers had a tight lid on cases. Other attorneys assumed that the victims took settlements in exchange for silence. Nine years later, Boston survivors came forth, with wrenching personal stories, after Judge Constance Sweeney, a Catholic, ruled that press freedom trumped church secrecy, unsealing lawsuits and giving victims the right to speak. The scene is a key moment in “Spotlight.”
Cardinal Law, the reporters’ ultimate target, is not a major character in the film; Baron tells his reporters to go after “the system,” not the man, though it goes unspoken that Law was the system.
The out-of-court settlements Law had approved, predicated on victims’ silence, put the survivors out of sight, out of mind.
I met Bernie Law, as priests in Mississippi called him, in Jackson, the state capitol, in the summer of 1971 while working as press secretary in Charles Evers’ quixotic campaign for governor. A week after graduation from Georgetown, I arrived as a volunteer, wrote a press release when they needed one, and got hired for $75 a week.
Law was vicar-general, the bishop’s top assistant. Evers, whose brother Medgar had been assassinated in 1963, respected Law for his editorials in the Catholic paper urging tolerance during the violent years. In a heavily Baptist state prone to racial demagogues, Law had been on the right side of history. By 1971 the riots and Klan violence had abated; but tensions were palpable, race relations still raw. I was curious about Law, and when I called, the monsignor invited me to dinner. When I parked my dented VW in the chancery parking lot, he said, “Let’s take my car.” It was larger and more comfortable.
He was 40, plump but energetic, a Harvard graduate with early silver hair, a cool mind and warm wit. I liked him immediately. He sang praises of the Italian restaurant where he had a reservation.
The owner gave him a lavish hello, and scowled at me. “Sorry, Monsignor, we can’t take him—the hair is too long.” Law frowned. I blushed. The hair stopped just shy of my shoulders, but this was Mississippi and the guy didn’t like suspected hippies. Law protested, without yelling, to no avail. I knew it wasn’t a moment to stand on constitutional rights and expect to eat lasagna.
Law was mortified as he drove to another restaurant, telling me somberly that backwards Mississippi really had made important strides. At dinner he brightened; we talked national politics, theology, and church changes since Vatican II.
As we left the restaurant, Law said: “How’d you like to meet the bishop?”
Imagine the psychological blow to a man who had once told friends that he hoped to be the first American pope.
Sure. Joseph Brunini, the bishop of Jackson, came from a family with a prominent law firm; he too had been a voice of moderation in the dark years. The bishop, 52, had a condo outside Jackson at the vast Ross Barnett Reservoir where people with sailboats had slips.
Barnett was the former governor known for inflammatory speeches and standing in the doorway at the University of Mississippi in 1962 to block James Meredith as the first black student. Meredith was escorted in by white federal marshals. “Which of you is James Meredith?” said Barnett to the only black man in eyesight. The campus soon exploded in a riot that left two people dead as federal troops secured Meredith’s place. The state named the big lake for the worst governor Mississippi ever had.
We sat on the deck of the condo, sipping Scotch as the insects sang outside. Brunini was an amiable man, a Georgetown graduate curious about my time there, the three of us trading thoughts about race relations and the church. I realized that Mississippi’s Catholic community amounted to a minority religion, a tiny social presence, quite different from the New Orleans of my upbringing. Brunini wished me well and made a point of blessing me as we left.
As Law and I drove back to the chancery, his demeanor changed. He was smiling, a man on a cloud. “Did you like the bishop?” he said. Yes, a very nice man. “Did you think he was—cool?” Uh, sure.
This man wants to be a bishop, I reported to myself with the brilliance of a 22-year old. As we pulled up to my car, he stuck out his hand. “Call me Bernie.”
Campaign work intensified; he made a trip to Rome and I didn’t see him again; we chatted a few times by phone.
As the years passed I followed news on him. He became a bishop in Missouri, and several years later, in 1984, vaulted to Boston, as archbishop, and soon a cardinal. I’ve known journalists to fume over people they wished they’d kept up with. I soon felt that about Law, wishing I’d sent notes, Christmas cards, anything to cultivate a relationship. The regret hit me in the mid-’80s as I reported on the prosecution of a pedophile priest in Lafayette, Louisiana. In a circuitous way, those events led to Law.
In January of 1986, the weekly Times of Acadiana ran my final piece, reconstructing how Bishop Gerard Frey had played musical chairs with seven priests who had abused children over several years. The paper ran an editorial calling for the Vatican to remove the bishop, for which it got hit with an advertisers’ boycott fomented by a retired judge, Edmund Reggie, and a prominent monsignor. The paper lost $20,000 before cooler heads prevailed. In July, the Vatican sent a new bishop.
In February of that year I shifted to work on the book, and flew to Washington, D.C. to interview Father Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer at the Vatican Embassy. Doyle, I learned, sent a shot across the bow as co-author of a 100-page report in the spring of 1985 on the pedophile cases before it became a crisis. The document went to every bishop in America. A classic whistle-blower, Doyle lost his job; he became an Air Force chaplain.
Doyle told me how he had given Cardinal Law a briefing on abuse cases in various states in 1984 before his work on the report. Law supported Doyle in the effort; he even contributed $1,000 to cover photocopy costs so the document could be sent to 150 bishops. Many years later, Law testified in a deposition in one of the Boston cases and said he could not recall details of that 1985 report, which became a “smoking gun” for advising bishops to remove predators and reach out to victims. Many bishops opted to recycle perpetrators after stints in psychiatric treatment facilities, and ignore victims until they filed lawsuits.
The next time I saw Law was 1993 in New Orleans where the bishops held their summer conference. Activists with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests were staging a protest. Law stepped off an elevator at the Hyatt Regency and nearly collided with me. “Your Eminence, it’s been a long time since Mississippi. Would you have time to talk?”
He shook his head grimly and moved on. I noticed he was much heavier.
In 1998, the artist Channing Thieme was preparing an exhibition called “Boston Faces,” portraits of a cross-section of Bostonians. She was not a Catholic, curious about a man as powerful as Law, and delighted when he agreed to sit for her at the cardinal’s mansion in Brighton. She found him a charming conversationalist in two drawing sessions. When she returned with the finished graphite portrait, Law was delighted. She said: “What’s the toughest part of your job?”
“Judgment—the decisions I must make,” Law replied. And, as if looking ahead to a bitter reckoning, he added: “That is the half of it. The other half is the judgment I must one day face myself.”
She was amazed at the statement. The words do not ring of false modesty.
Law in 1998 was the most powerful American churchman in Rome. Close to Pope John Paul and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Secretary of State, Law cultivated ties in the Roman Curia and served on major Vatican committees. Yet that artist’s question, as he gazed at his black-and-white image, seemingly unloosed an inner coil. He apparently felt guilty about something. Could it have been the scores of pedophiles he had sent to treatment tanks, some of them recycled, with little thought of their ravaged victims?
Power is the movement of money. The out-of-court settlements Law had approved, predicated on victims’ silence, put the survivors out of sight, out of mind.
Judgment stalked him in civil depositions as the media coverage wore on; reporters used his testimony to shatter the credibility of the man who had urged John Paul II to authorize the updated, very long Catholic Catechism, the one that the cardinal in the movie gives to the editor with his quiet, quizzical face.
Law resigned just before Christmas 2002, after a private meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome; he left Boston for sanctuary in a Maryland convent with nuns. Imagine the psychological blow to a man who had once told friends that he hoped to be the first American pope, a man whose support of migrants from the Dominican Republic entering Boston stood for the values of a church giving comfort and succor to the poor.
Nixon sought redemption after Watergate by writing books and holding dinners for selected journalists, a careful campaign to rehabilitate himself as a foreign policy sage.
Law turned to the one place where he had support—cardinals and bishops in the Roman Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy. “The curia is a brotherhood,” Cardinal Sodano once told The New York Times. Law had friends in the brotherhood after 17 years in Boston. A member of the Congregation for Bishops, he helped select new American bishops.
The news of Law’s new job in Rome in the spring of 2004 came at the worst possible time for his successor, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Seán O’Malley. O’Malley had approved an $85 million settlement to 542 victims, only to take public criticism for a wave of church closures, consolidating parishes in a controversial plan to sell property after the huge deficit Law had left. O’Malley had already sold the cardinal’s mansion for $108 million to Boston College. All that, and John Paul rewarded Law with a cushy perch at one of Rome’s great basilicas.
“Many people in Rome would say that he paid the price in the form of his resignation and that there’s no reason that he shouldn’t make a contribution,” Vatican correspondent John L. Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter told Boston Magazine two years after Law assumed his position. (Allen now writes for Crux, an online branch of the Globe that covers the Catholic Church.)
After many years away from Mississippi, I went to Jackson in 2004 to promote a book, written with Gerald Renner. Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II explores the Vatican’s role in the abuse crisis. Before the evening lecture, I did several media interviews, and spent time with SNAP leaders Johnny Rainer and Kenneth Morrison.
Morrison was 39, an artist in Chicago who had grown up in Jackson. He was one of three sons of a physician, by then deceased. His mother came to the book event. The family had moved to Jackson from Boston in 1969 when Kenneth’s dad, Dr. Francis Morrison, an oncologist, took a teaching position at the state medical school. As Boston Catholics, the Morrisons found a friend in Bernie Law, the Harvard graduate. The Morrisons also befriended Father George Broussard who, as pedophiles will do, ingratiated himself with the family, slowly molesting the three young boys.
As we drove around Jackson that day, Kenneth, a strapping guy who did industrial art projects in Chicago, pointed to several church buildings where, he said, Broussard had forced sex on him as a boy of 5, 6, and 7 years old—“there, in that one, and that one, and that one.” As we drove past the chancery, his memories of being abused spilled into my thought field from 1971. The summer evening I pulled into the chancery parking lot to meet Bernie Law, matched the time period when little Kenneth was being preyed upon by Father Broussard nearby.
Morrison sued the Jackson diocese in 2003. The diocese faced lawsuits against seven other priests, several dating back to Law’s tenure there.
Law was the bishop’s right hand when Dr. Morrison reported what Broussard had done to the chancery. As Morrison would later allege, Broussard began receiving “treatment,” while staying at another parish. Law was close to the Morrisons, and to Broussard. Knowing what he knew, what should Law have done?
“The sexual molestation of minors wasn’t even on my radar screen,” Law testified in a deposition in the Morrison case. “It wasn’t the issue that it is today… it didn’t come up.”
But the diocese did investigate, as William Houck, who succeeded Brunini as bishop, stated under oath: “Broussard said he subsequently admitted the accusations to Bernard Law and to Bishop (Joseph) Brunini, and attended confession with Bernard Law.”
Law had moved to Rome when the Jackson diocese agreed to an out-of-court settlement with Kenneth Morrison.
In late 2012, I spent five weeks in Rome for GlobalPost, reporting on the Vatican investigation of liberal American nuns—the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
Cardinal Law was a catalyst in sparking that investigation, as I reported, though he played no direct role in the interrogations, meetings, and correspondence that the sisters had with Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The C.D.F. is housed in the majestic palazzo where in 1616 the Inquisition punished Galileo for his position that the earth revolves around the sun.
After leaving Boston in humiliation, Law found a fraternal womb in the Curia; but after the blows to his stature and ego, he wanted other people to “face judgment”—an outsized projection of his own faults in the desire to bring those liberal nuns to heel. The man who suggested the new catechism wanted obedience to authority, of which he himself had little.
Levada, it is worth adding, had been archbishop of San Francisco, and up to his chest in litigation over pedophile priests, when the newly elected Pope Benedict tossed him a ladder in 2005 as if from a celestial helicopter, lifting him up and away from the muck in the city by the bay to beautiful Rome and great status as theologian-in-chief.
Levada refused to be interviewed. I called Law, hoping against hope that he might agree to talk. A priest took the call at Santa Maria Maggiore, let his cold silence register for a number of seconds, and stated: “The cardinal does not give interviews. There are no exceptions.”
Pope Francis would later oversee the termination of the proceedings against the nuns, and make a point of meeting with several of the leaders of American sisters for a reconciliation with news photographers present.
“Law is a presence on the embassy social circuit,” a Western diplomat in Rome told me in 2012. “He’s a cardinal, an official of the Curia, so he’s on the invitation lists. He’s sociable and mingles easily.”
The Holy See assumes a decorum among journalists who cover the Vatican. Many reporters who work in the press room off St. Peter’s Square have broken stories critical of church officialdom—Nicole Winfield of AP and Philip Pullella of Reuters prominent among them; but you don’t see journalists in packs ambushing church officials as if they were Chicago or Louisiana politicians heading into criminal court. Pope Benedict was reeling from the Vati-Leaks scandal in late 2012 when I attended a reception for a group of newly-invested cardinals.
It was a rare chance to get inside the Apostolic Palace, which is closed to the public save for ceremonial occasions. The large reception parlors have elegant tapestries adorning the walls. The papal apartments and pope’s office on the top floor were off-limits. In one parlor a sizeable crowd of people who had come from Nigeria waited in a receiving line to greet their new cardinal, Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja. Many of the Nigerian women wept as they hugged him. The rich colors of Yoruba design on the dresses and dashikis of men were emblazoned with the new cardinal’s photograph. The vibrant festivity of the multicultural pageant in the life of the church reminded me of The Canterbury Tales.
Across the crowded Rome I saw the bloated, hulking figure of Cardinal Law, flanked by two priests, make his way past a receiving line toward two Italians in the red hat of cardinals. I moved that way, camera in hand. A priest at Law’s elbow saw me and glared, stationing himself closer to the cardinal to prevent a clear angle. I stood there for several minutes, without shooting, and then turned away, thinking of Kenneth Morrison.
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2015-11-01 14:22:212015-11-01 14:22:21Jason Berry, The Shadow Behind ‘Spotlight’: How Predator Priests Derailed Boston’s Would-Be Pope, Cardinal Bernard Law, The Daily Beast
On the day before a judge would determine Darren L. Paden’s fate, almost no one would say a word.
Not in the tiny, one gas station town of Dearborn they wouldn’t.
Fewer than 500 people live in this Platte County hamlet of crisscrossing family lines and where church ties and friendships date back generations.
At the Café, the older women who gather at the back of the restaurant kept their thoughts to themselves about how one of their own, Paden, 52 — the former chief of the volunteer fire department, a father of seven, known as a good man throughout town — had been charged in 2013 with repeatedly sexually abusing a child for at least a decade. In August, he pleaded guilty.
At the library, questions about how the case split the town were greeted with polite reticence. At the fertilizer store, no comment.
“In a small community, everybody’s family,” offered one Café customer, not willing to give her name or much else, except a polite smile. “It hurts everyone.”
But at about 11:30 a.m. Friday, that reserve broke somewhat inside a Platte County courtroom when Circuit Court Presiding Judge James Van Amburg sentenced Paden to 50 years in prison on two counts of first-degree statutory sodomy for abusing the girl at least 200 to 300 times over a decade, starting before she turned 5 years old. Paden’s adult son, Anthony L. Paden, 25, also has been charged with abuse, but his case remains pending.
Onlookers packed the courtroom. Paden’s father, Jim Paden, wiped away tears with a handkerchief at the sight of his son in handcuffs and clad in an orange jail garb.
“I’m begging for your mercy,” Jim Paden pleaded with the judge prior to sentencing. “I would like to hold and hug him before I die.”
The victim wiped away tears when the sentence was announced. Paden showed no emotion and did not speak. His family members hugged each other and sobbed, but still declined comment after the sentence.
For two years, tension over the case has frayed allegiances in Dearborn.
On one side there has been Paden, backed by a contingent of supporters that has included family, church elders, the former bank president and other prominent residents.
On the other side was the victim, now 18, who said this week that although she has received some strong words of support, she largely has been ostracized and even been declared a liar by some in the community where she also has lived her entire life. All she did was tell — and much of the community turned its back on her.
“I know there are a lot of people who support me,” she said this week in a personal interview in Platte City. But what she has experienced most is the chill from “the people who refuse to believe me…”
“I called a lady about a house she was renting,” the victim continued, “and I told her my name, and she said, ‘What’s your name again?’ and I told her and she said ‘I don’t want to rent to you’ and then hung up on me.”
Some townspeople have shunned or turned away from her.
“Before this, there were people who would come up and talk to me and have conversations with me,” she said. “Now they won’t even look at me or talk to me.”
Her mother believes her, the victim said.
In a prepared statement, Platte County Prosecutor Eric Zahnd called the lack of support for the victim “deeply troubling,” especially considering that Paden confessed within a couple of hours of being questioned. It “breaks my heart,” he said.
“There are certainly a few good people in the community who have offered their support to this young victim. It is shocking, however, that many continue to support a defendant whose guilt was never truly in doubt. If it takes a village to raise a child, what is a child to do when the village turns its back and supports a confessed child molester?”
Since September, about 16 letters have been filed with the court by Paden’s relatives, church members and friends of Darren Paden’s parents, who are held in high regard in the community. Jim Paden, and his wife, Esther, have a farm in the community.
All the letters asked the judge to show leniency.
“I did that (wrote a letter) in support of his family because they are pretty devastated over this whole thing,” said Sheila Goodlet, an aunt to Darren Paden and sister to Jim Paden. “I just wanted there to be some hope in a hopeless situation.… I also want the judge to be aware that Darren has had a lot of good, positive things in his life, too.”
Nearly every letter talked about Paden’s work with the Air National Guard and fire department.
“He went overseas during the Gulf War and served in mobile hospitals to help wounded soldiers,” wrote his uncle, Stephen Goodlet.
Paden’s great-aunt, Dixie Wilson, talked of her great-nephew’s service as a junior deacon at the local New Market Christian Church. “I could go on and on,” she wrote, “but would just be repeating that he is a good man!”
In a telephone interview, Wilson asserted, “My opinion is, most people don’t believe it happened.
“Are you for a child molester? Absolutely not,” said Wilson, 82. “But I don’t think we’re talking about a child molester.”
She and other parishioners at the New Market Christian Church, she said, have held prayer circles on his account.
Letter writers recalled how Paden saved his father’s life when a cow nearly stomped him to death in a field, after the elder Paden came between the cow and her calf.
“Darren is one of the most admirable people I know,” friend Adele Brightwell wrote. “…He holds fast to his morals…”
Former bank president Jerry Hagg wrote of Paden’s contribution to the community.
New Market Church trustee Gene Blankenship wrote that “Only God, Darren and (the victim) know what truly happened. I feel Darren may have admitted to things he did not do after hours of interrogation and all the pressure to admit guilt.”
Others, like supporter Darla Hall Emmedorfer, appealed to the judge to take Darren’s good deeds into consideration in deciding the severity of his sentence.
“I truly believe that Darren has already suffered extensively for his actions by being kept away from his young children and his home life, and by not being able to provide for this family,” Emmendorfer wrote. “Because of the significant difficulties that will face his innocent family, I would ask you, Judge Van Amburg, to grant Darren a sentence of probation or at least the lowest possible sentence.”
At the sentencing, Paden’s defense attorney, John P. O’Connor, called eight witnesses, including Paden’s ex-wife, a niece, a son, a daughter and both parents. Each pleaded for leniency.
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Myles Perry displayed a large photo of the victim when she was 5 years old and said the defendant “unleashed a monster that has devoured every beautiful thing in her life,” and robbed her of the will to live.
Van Amburg delivered the sentence without comment.
It was only because of a middle school presentation that educated students on “inappropriate touch” and the signs and symptoms of sexual abuse that the victim understood what was happening to her and came forward.
At sentencing, the young woman, with quavering voice and tears in her eyes, read a lengthy statement recounting what she described as the “horror” of the abuse, but also its consequences, including thoughts of suicide and cutting herself during high school.
“I know many people think, ‘There is no way he could do this,’ or ‘He was too good of a man to have done something like this,’ ” she said. “Nobody knows what happens behind closed doors.”
The last two years, she said, created such stress and depression that she left work for three months.
“I couldn’t face the world,” she said. “And I couldn’t face this town that made me feel like I was unwanted by everyone.”
Near the end of her statement, she raised a question regarding those who supported Paden, believing him and not her.
“To say you support someone who had done this sort of thing makes me wonder how some would react if a son/daughter told you they were a victim of these behaviors,” she said. “Would you sign a petition then? Would you write letters of support?”
The horror of what happened will affect her the rest of her life, she testified.
“Never will I stop having flashbacks and nightmares, and never will I be able to have a normal relationship with anyone, because I am too far from being normal again.”
Wilson, Paden’s great-aunt, said that no matter the outcome of the sentencing hearing, she believed her community would not remain divided.
“Our community is one that we deeply believe in God and we’re not going to buckle under anything,” Wilson said. “We’re not going to let it destroy all of us. We’re going to keep doing our good works and doing what we believe and rely on each other.”
She reiterated of the crime, “I don’t believe it happened,” she said. “But, if it did, I feel sorry for the girl.”
Full article here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article41940072.html
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2015-11-01 14:17:162015-11-01 14:17:16Glenn E. Rice & Eric Adler, Favored son’s decade-long sexual abuse of girl divides small Missouri town, Kansas City Star
A secretive Roman Catholic society with chapters across South America and in the U.S. has revealed under pressure that a Vatican investigator is looking into allegations that its founder sexually molested young recruits.
The scandal at the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, has close parallels to other recent cases of charismatic Catholic leaders in Latin America being accused of sex abuse — as well as the church dragging its feet on investigating claims and trying to keep scandals quiet.
This week, Sodalitium’s general secretary disclosed the Vatican investigation after two journalists published a book detailing the accusations against founder Luis Fernando Figari, 68.
Co-author Pedro Salinas, a former society member, has been publicly accusing Figari since 2010 of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. According to the book, three men lodged complaints the following year with a Peruvian church tribunal alleging Figari sexually abused them when they were minors.
There is no indication the tribunal did anything with the case, including notifying prosecutors. Nor is it known when the Vatican was advised.
Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, the conservative archbishop of Lima with jurisdiction over the tribunal, was quoted as telling the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio this week that case is “regrettable and painful” and claiming “we have acted with absolute transparency and rapidity.”
No criminal probe was opened in Peru until after the mid-October publication of “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.” Prosecutors, though, say the statute of limitations has almost certainly run out as the alleged crimes occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.
Founded in 1971, Sodalitium has a presence in schools and churches and runs retreat facilities with communities in Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Italy and the United States. Its members are mostly lay Catholics but also include clergy, including two bishops in Peru.
After the book’s release, the society issued three successive press releases as a public clamor for greater accountability and transparency intensified.
First, the society revealed that Figari, who is not a priest, has been living in relative isolation at a Sodalitium community in Rome since 2010 and has been out of public life and governance of the society since then. At the time of his departure as general secretary, Sodalitium said only that Figari was stepping down for health reasons.
It added that the society’s current leader, Alessandro Moroni, decided in 2014 to intensify the regime of “prayer and retreat” being followed by Figari
The statement also noted Figari wasn’t alone in being accused: The book says the society’s No. 2, the late German Doig, was accused of sexually assaulting a minor. He died in 2001. A decade later, after the allegations against him first surfaced, the society said his candidacy for beatification had been canceled.
In a second statement Oct. 21, the society said the book’s allegations were “plausible” and needed to be thoroughly investigated. It said it created a committee to hear complaints from other possible victims and asked forgiveness, calling the accusations against Figari “cause for deep grief and shame.”
It said Figari insists he is innocent, though it notes he hasn’t said so publicly.
This week, the third release disclosed that the Vatican had on April 22 named a local bishop to investigate the society. Figari departed Lima three days later for Europe, according to local published reports.
The book’s co-author, Paola Ugaz, said she and Salinas wrote in January to the Vatican office in charge of apostolic church societies detailing the allegations against Figari. They never got an answer, she said. But the official to whom they wrote, Archbishop Jose Rodriguez Carballo, signed the April 22 decree.
The scandal is similar to one in Chile involving the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a charismatic priest who in 2011 was sentenced by the church to a lifetime of penance and prayer for sexually abusing young people. The local archbishop sat on allegations against Karadima for years, refusing to believe them, and only passed them on to the Vatican after the scandal exploded globally in 2010.
The case also has parallels to a scandal at the Legion of Christ, which was headed by the late Mexican priest Marcial Maciel. The Vatican under St. Pope Paul II ignored decades of credible abuse allegations against Maciel and discredited his victims. Only in 2006 did it act, giving him the same sentence as Karadima.
The Peruvian bishop assigned to the Figari probe, the Rev. Fortunato Pablo Urcey of Chota, is ordered by the decree to “verify the true authenticity of accusations” past and new against Figari and file a full report.
But Urcey, the secretary general of Peru’s council of churches, said in a radio interview this week that he didn’t consider himself an investigator as much as a supporter of Sodalitium.
In an interview with RPP radio, he said he had no plans to interview the ex-members who filed the complaints or to read the book.
“I like the designation ‘visitor’ better than ‘investigator’ because I’m not an investigator,” he said, recalling his official title as an “apostolic visitor.” Three times during the interview, Urcey said he would do all he could to “save the charism of this congregation,” a reference to the spirituality that makes it unique.
Urcey did not return phone messages left by The Associated Press. Efforts to reach a spokesman for the Lima ecclesiastic tribunal also were unsuccessful. The body’s deliberations are secret.
The society’s current leader, Moroni, said in an interview with the newspaper El Comercio this week that he contacted the tribunal about the accusations against Figari more than two years ago.
Tribunal officials responded that “they are an independent body and they didn’t have to give us any kind of information until they reached a decision,” he said.
In an article published Friday, Salinas, the co-author, urged that Moroni be removed, calling him complicit in a culture of abuse that Ugaz said included Figari’s burning of his flesh with a candle flame for about a minute in front of fellow initiates.
A Peruvian non-governmental organization, the Institute for Defense of the Rights of Minors, asked prosecutors last week to investigate Cipriani, Lima’s archbishop and an Opus Dei member, for obstruction of justice.
Its president, Daniel Vega, said none of the men who filed complaints against Figari with the tribunal were ever contacted by it afterward.
“There is a recurring conduct of the cardinal and his entire team of covering up crimes and not informing the criminal justice system.”
Full article: http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2015/10/31/peru-catholic-society-admits-sex-abuse-probe-against-founder?page=2
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2015-11-01 14:12:372015-11-01 14:12:37Frank Bajak, Peru-based Catholic society admits founder under investigation for sex abuse after book expose, Associated Press
“My childhood was very difficult,” Sarah* says, in a matter-of-fact way. Now in her mid-20s, she has a quiet voice, but speaks with a forceful elegance.
“I just knew that when my mother hit me and when she screamed at me, I couldn’t tell anyone. For anybody to know would be the scariest thing.
“We weren’t allowed to go to the toilet. We weren’t allowed to sleep, or we had to sleep in the way she wanted us to. We’d go to bed and she’d decide she wanted some food made for her in the middle of the night, so she’d wake up. But we had to be dressed in a certain way.”
Sarah and her siblings would dress in socks, dresses, dressing gowns; layer upon layer, so that they appeared “modest”.
“She’d wake us up, just as we’d fallen asleep, make us get her food, and then go back to bed. Ten minutes later, she’d wake us up because she wanted a glass of water.”
At the age of 10, Sarah gave up on the idea of ever having a normal childhood.
“I knew what that looked like, though,” she says. “I’d go to friends’ houses and see how their mothers would feed them, how they would look at them and give them hugs.”
None of the children were exempt from abuse, but Sarah and her youngest brother suffered most. They were also the darkest-skinned and looked more like their mother.
“She used to tell us all the time how ugly we were,” says Sarah, “and how she wished we would die.”
The children “self-diagnosed” their mother as having borderline personality disorder.
“There was no love, there were no hugs, there was no encouragement. It was basically trying to survive.”
Sarah says her mother routinely hit her until she turned 16 and was “very smart about it”, hitting her in places covered by her clothes – places even an observant teacher wouldn’t notice.
“A teacher with the right knowledge would be able to see that we looked… haunted,” Sarah says.
That teacher was Malka Leifer.
“I would say it took her about two years to work her magic,” Sarah says.
Malka Leifer was principal of the ultra-Orthodox Adass Israel School in Elsternwick, Melbourne from 2002 to 2008, a pillar of her tight-knit community. At 48, Leifer was, according to parents of former students, recruited specifically because of her ultra-Orthodox beliefs.
At the time of her appointment, she was widely regarded within the community to be its second-holiest member, behind spiritual leader Rabbi Avrohom Zvi Beck.
A scholar of Biblical texts, Jewish law and Hasidic philosophy, Leifer is a mother of eight. But evidence given earlier this year in a civil case in the Victorian Supreme Court portrayed her as a calculating, predatory paedophile.
“She knew exactly when to do it,” alleges Sarah.
“It was all planned. Slowly, when she set herself up in the community and had their love and respect, at the point when such a thing would never enter their minds, that’s when she started.”
Sarah claims she was systematically abused by Leifer for years, along with “seven or eight” other female students.
“I don’t know how I could explain how charming she was,” says Sarah.
“The community absolutely respected and loved her. They basically treated her like God.”
“The way she played her game was… she’d start by calling you out of class, in the middle of a lesson, and would sit with you and ask you how you were doing, how you were feeling. When I finally, eventually opened up to her and told her that things were really bad, that’s when she made her move.”
Sarah says she heard whispers about Leifer’s relationships with other students, but was not equipped to comprehend the implications behind the rumours.
“I heard little things, but I didn’t really understand. All I knew was that at school if she likes you… that’s what you should aim for.”
Adass Israel is a strain of Hasidism, a movement which was founded in the 18th century by Jewish mystics and quickly became a populist alternative to traditional Judaism. The Hasidim, or “pious ones,” are an ultra-Orthodox movement with a focus on self-preservation.
After generations of persecution, many Hasidic Jews today are second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors, who take quite literally the Lord’s order to “be fruitful and multiply”, to replenish a devastated population. Today, Australia has the second-highest population of Holocaust survivors per capita in the world.
The insularity of the movement is, in part, born of the caution that comes of a history shaped by adversity. It’s also the product of a rich cultural heritage and religious strength that has allowed it, and others like it throughout the diaspora, to flourish and bring new prosperity – both to itself, and to its adopted home of Melbourne. That same insularity has also allowed it to harbour dark secrets. Growing up in the Adass community, Sarah tells me, is to grow up in a culture of humiliation and shame, particularly centred around the body.
Sexual education exists only in the form of a special lesson administered by a community member – with a strict focus on procreation – after a young man or woman is already engaged.
Sarah recalls reading Enid Blyton books at school, where every third or fourth paragraph would be missing a word. Sarah read the whole of The Magic Faraway Tree without knowing the names of two main characters: Dick and Fanny.
“We wouldn’t have even known what ‘Dick’ was supposed to mean, because we didn’t know what a dick was,” she tells me. “Their crossing it out only made us more inquisitive, but biology wasn’t even a subject.”
Outside school, a few of Sarah’s classmates had read different books without their parents’ consent and they shared with friends what they had learned.
“We knew that a penis goes into a vagina when you get married,” she recalls. “And I remember a friend saying, ‘There’s no fucking way I’m letting that near me’.”
Sarah grimaces. “I also said that I was never going to let that happen.”
Without sex education, Sarah had no defence against sexual predators.
“I’ve always wanted to share my story,” Sarah tells me on a particularly bleak morning, over three cups of strawberry tea. But it has taken her seven years to feel comfortable doing so.
I ask about her earliest memory.
“When people ask me my memories of my childhood, the good things don’t come to my mind,” she says. “I try not to dwell on that too much. The main good thing about my childhood was having my siblings. If I didn’t have them, I probably wouldn’t be alive.”
She talks about being eight years old.
“We used to go on family holidays and we couldn’t go to the beach because it wasn’t modest enough. Or we’d walk down the street in summer and everyone else would be in shorts and singlets, and we’d be wearing long dresses and tights.
“I remember thinking even at that age that I didn’t want to be different, I just wanted to be the same as everyone else,” she says.
Sarah’s entire universe was contained in one suburb: “We went to Carnegie once, and that felt like going to the end of the world.”
Her parents had moved to Australia fleeing disapproval of their marriage, and soon started a family. “Then they decided to become religious, and they went all the way to the extreme,” Sarah says.
“I think a lot of that shift has to do with my mother’s extreme nature,” Sarah says. “She needed to grab onto something and when she encountered someone from our community who was really kind to her, she decided they were the type of people she wanted to be around.”
Sarah believes her mother’s urge to fit in prompted her to join the community.
“Only if you become so extreme can you become one of them,” she says.
“There’s no middle ground. You’re either extreme or you aren’t part of the community.”
When Sabbath begins on Friday evenings, what is already the quietest neighbourhood in Eastern Melbourne becomes almost eerily silent. Restaurants close down, cars are parked in driveways where they remain for the next 24 hours, and families gather indoors to feast and to pray, shutting out the white noise of contemporary life even more resolutely.
Without the internet, television, media or movies, she says, “you don’t have much to talk about.” Sarah characterises the community as “a world of nothing”.
“What do they talk about? Who has the nicest car. Who has the nicest house. Who has the nicest clothes. I find all that stuff really trivial.”
“It sounds very… strict,” I offer.
Sarah corrects me. “It was a cult.”
The Adass community is the most insular of the Haredi or ultra-Orthodox spectrum of Jews. Melbourne’s Jewish communities have long dominated the Eastern suburbs of St Kilda East, Balaclava and Caulfield; the Adass community is confined to a small grid bordered by Brighton, Orrong, Balaclava and Glenhuntly Roads.
The concept of an eruv encircles this boundary: all buildings within are ritually integrated into a private domain where residents may carry objects that are otherwise forbidden to be held on the Sabbath: prams, house keys, tissues, medicine and babies.
They have their own telephone directory, schools, ambulance service, synagogue, shops, cemetery, bathhouses, security patrols and rabbinical court system.
Male “Adassniks” have long, dark beards and wear black silk coats that reach their knees over white pantaloons and stockings. Twin sideburn ringlets curl down beneath enormous mink fur hats. Female members of the community wear thick tights, long skirts and loose blouses. Married women wear wigs, in keeping with the law that their heads must be covered for modesty’s sake.
Adass Israel School is responsible for the education of 600 students from preschool to year 12. The girls’ and boys’ campuses are strictly segregated, separated by a two-minute walk and gated security. The VCE curriculum that is the benchmark for university entry is not offered: boys leave around the age of 16 to pursue religious education, while girls complete a vocational certificate – if they aren’t married off beforehand.
Mornings are dedicated to Jewish history and scripture. Three hours in the afternoons are spent studying maths and science.
“I was very under-stimulated and very under-challenged,” Sarah says. “Kids would play up because they didn’t care about secular subjects, because their parents kept instilling ‘this is not important, you don’t need to know this,’ because you get married and then that’s it. You won’t ever get a degree because you don’t need one.”
The only boys with whom Sarah had contact growing up were in her immediate family: “We didn’t have cousins here, and even if we did have cousins, we wouldn’t have been allowed to talk to them.”
Much of the wealth within the community of 2000 Adass Jews comes from inheritance, Sarah tells me.
“Most of the elderly in the community came to Australia after World War Two and set up textile and manufacturing businesses. The rest of the community is bred from these heads of the community – cousins marry first cousins and second cousins – and everyone is basically related.”
“It’s very feudal,” Sarah explains. “Heads of the community lay down the network to support all their kids and grandchildren, so most of the community is living off their parents’ or grandparents’ money, or working in their businesses. One person would own the meat, so his children and grandchildren would own all the meat. Another would own the fish.”
Malka Leifer became principal at Adass Israel School when Sarah was in Year Seven. The current principal, Professor Israel Herszberg, declined to be interviewed for this story.
Leifer had eight school-aged children — seven sons and a daughter. “It was really cool that we had her mother as principal,” Sarah says. Leifer taught Year 10 and up, so although Sarah didn’t have much to do with her yet, her older sisters “didn’t stop talking about her”.
The students’ attitude towards Leifer was a potent mix of fear and respect. To be greeted “hello” by Leifer, says Sarah, was “just amazing”. Intensely charismatic, Leifer spent her first two years at the school ingratiating herself to the community and, according to Sarah, didn’t touch a student during this time.
“You just wanted her to like you,” says Sarah. “You really, really wanted her attention . You wanted her to give your time.”
“She was very intelligent, she had a very good way with words. She was very good at listening, so you really thought… she was giving you all the time in the world and that she really cared about you.”
“I see it like a chess game,” says Sarah.
Sarah alleges Leifer began abusing her during Year 12, by which time there were only about half a dozen other girls in her class.
Her teacher’s game, says Sarah, involved “a really long, emotional ride” as much as anything else. She recalls Leifer acting like a teenaged girl herself towards the students who had fallen out of her favour: “She’d drop you, and not speak to you for a week.”
The time that this happened to Sarah was one of the longest and loneliest weeks of her life: “After that time, I’d be hanging out for her attention. It was like being in a relationship.”
“This is where I’m saying it’s calculated. She didn’t pick the girls who came from stable homes: she picked the girls who were vulnerable who she knew, when she eventually abused them, wouldn’t go home and tell their mothers.”
Having taught Sarah’s older sisters, Leifer already suspected what sort of home environment she came from. It began when Sarah was called out of class in the middle of a lesson one day. Leifer asked her how she was feeling, and continued to foster this closeness for some time.
“She got me at my weakest point, and got me to open up and be vulnerable. Then, she set out to make me believe that she was going to be the one to save me. And of course, at the time, I did. I wanted to, because I just wanted to get out of that situation, and she was the one offering that kind of support.”
Today, Sarah identifies Leifer’s manipulations as textbook “grooming”: a series of private meetings, a period of growing closeness and trust, lavish praise alternating with sharp rebukes, and, finally, demands for sexual acts.
“It was very slow,” says Sarah. “Once she got my trust, she’d start sitting across the table from me, but then the next time she’d come and sit next to me. It was painstakingly slow. It would be a hand on the leg, or a hand on the shoulder until, eventually…”
Sarah pauses, admitting that even now it’s hard for her to talk about. Instead, she offers to share some of what she’s written, saying it’s easier to get the words out on a page.
Sarah’s journals do not directly document the sexual abuse she suffered; rather, an entry titled “Dear Teacher” contains line after line in which a young woman struggles to understand how she had allowed herself to be so vulnerable: “I came to you hoping to find a mother figure, I came hoping I could learn how to trust again, I came to you believing that you would help me. You portrayed warmth, understanding and love, all of which I was yearning for.”
Elsewhere, she writes: “I felt so special and wanted, and my vulnerable mind did not stop to think why: why me, out of everyone?”
In May this year, another former student of Leifer’s brought a civil suit in the Supreme Court of Melbourne against Leifer and Adass Israel School, suing the school for damages stemming from the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of the former principal. Over the course of the two-week trial, the court heard evidence that the abuse began in 2002, when the victim was 15 years old, and occurred up to three times a week.
In a damning judgment, Justice Jack Rush said that “the students were vulnerable and Leifer was able to conduct herself with unrestrained power and control within the school.”
Evidence was given from former teachers and students alike about Leifer’s intense charisma, and how this allowed her “to rule the school with an iron rod.”
Like Sarah, the plaintiff in this case felt incapable of asserting herself against Leifer. The court heard that: “She was very, very,very powerful – she had a very powerful personality that everyone looked up to. I saw the way that she reacted to people that attempted to cross her… and I could see the way that she reacted to that and I was scared.”
“I vividly remember the first time that she touched me on the skin. I was in Year 11 at the time, and she took me out of school and took me to her house. Someone else drove us there because she didn’t drive. I recall her being very scared that her husband would come home sometime during the day and find us there. I remember her locking the doors… She created an atmosphere in which she said she was very close to me and that she loved me.”
The court heard that Leifer then asked her to lie on a couch and began rubbing her hands over her, above her clothing at first, then underneath her jumper.
“I recall thinking that it was very weird at the time, but didn’t say anything. I remember wondering if she realised what she was doing. Then she got me to roll over and was touching me on my stomach and over my bra.”
The sexual assaults continued at Leifer’s home, at school camps, then over and over at the school, in different classrooms and offices where Leifer could draw the blinds closed.
The plaintiff told the court that she believed other teachers at the school were well aware that Leifer was spending a great deal of one-on-one time with students: “She always had teachers coming to ask her things, and if she would just disappear for a couple of hours they would have been aware that she wasn’t on school grounds.”
When the plaintiff was in Year 11, the two senior girls’ classes were taken on a two-day holiday to a house in Emerald, Victoria. On the journey home, another teacher, Mindel Weisner, told the court that she saw Leifer in a van with a Year 11 student sitting on her lap and thought it was “very strange”.
When asked in court why she had not reported it, Weisner’s response was simple: “I didn’t have anybody to turn to. Mrs Leifer was the principal.”
On the same trip, the plaintiff was abused by Leifer for hours. She told the court: “The class was doing some sort of group activity and she asked me to come and help her put her child to bed, or she wanted to talk to me while she put her child to bed.”
“Her child was in the pram and she was rocking the baby, who continued screaming, and she told me that she wanted to show me what it was like to kiss me. So she kissed me on the mouth, which I didn’t know was something that could be done. I didn’t have any understanding of what that was. I thought it was disgusting.”
Leifer often pulled the plaintiff onto her lap and held her like one of her own children, muttering how much she loved her and how beautiful she was.
“She would pull me onto her lap and kind of rock me or hug me,” the plaintiff said. “She kept telling me that she loved me and this was her way of showing me how close she felt to me, and that I should consider her like a mother who loved me, and that I was special.”
Hours later, when the plaintiff left the room and went to rejoin her fellow students, a parent from the school who was assisting with the trip commented on the relationship between the plaintiff and Leifer.
“She mentioned that she saw that Mrs Leifer and I were very close,” the plaintiff said. “And she said it in almost a jealous tone, as if it was something she really, that she looked up to.”
Sarah tells a similar story and believes she was doomed, as much by her troubled family life as by the community she was raised in.
“Without any sort of sex education, when someone that you trust tells you that this is the right thing, even when your body was telling you that it wasn’t the right thing and that nobody should touch parts of you that you don’t want them to, but if they’re telling you that it’s a good thing…” Sarah trails off.
“She used to say it was good for me, and to trust her, that I’d enjoy it. Without any other knowledge, what was I to fall back on? I had to believe her.”
Sarah thinks back to the first question I asked her: to recall a happy moment from her youth. She now has an answer: “I ran away once,” she tells me, “for just a few hours.”
“I was going to take the train to Geelong. I didn’t make it in the end, but I felt so free. At the same time, I knew that it was going to be the worst punishment when I came back – and I had to go back.
“There was no thought that just maybe I could go and tell somebody, because there was nobody to tell. The community didn’t condone that – you couldn’t speak out against anyone else. That would make everyone look down on me.”
“But for those few hours of feeling free,” she says, “it was probably the best feeling in the world.”
Like many victims, Sarah felt that everything she was experiencing had to be kept secret. But at the same time, secrecy was breaking down as other communities came under scrutiny for their treatment of sexual abuse.
Over the last five years, former students of ultra-Orthodox schools around Australia have begun to speak out. A full week of evidence from former students of ultra-Orthodox schools was heard at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse in Melbourne in February this year.
Prominent Jewish victims’ advocate Manny Waks, who was the subject of last year’s Walkley award-winning documentary Code of Silence, is just one former victim who has spoken out against the community’s tendency to “brush these stories underneath the carpet”.
“In many cases the police can’t deal with it because victims are too intimidated to come forward,” Waks says.
“We’re aware of around 25 alleged paedophiles within the Jewish community in Australia,”says Waks. “Around 15 of those are within the Yeshivah Centre in Melbourne.”
This code of silence, Waks says, is the Jewish concept of mesirah, a prohibition against turning over another Jew to civil authorities.
“It’s a principle that was invoked mainly in centuries where anti-Semitism was rife in Eastern Europe,” Waks says. “The concern was that if a Jewish person was going to report another Jew for a crime they had committed, the entire community would essentially be held accountable for that and the level of anti-Semitism would be increased.”
According to the 12th century Torah scholar Maimonides, a Jew who informs on another is a “wicked man” who has “blasphemed against the law of Moses.” Informants are known as “mosers” and rabbinical rulings today still invoke this principle. Exceptions can be made to mesirah, but they are rare, as approval needs to come from the rabbi before any alleged crimes can be taken to civil authorities.
But in Sarah’s case, her rabbi was Leifer’s husband.
The civil case brought in 2015 heard evidence on how the allegations came to light. In August 2007, Hannah Bromberg, a teacher at Adass Israel School, received a phone call from a Melbourne psychologist, Ms Ruthie Casen, who asked her, “Is it possible at all that Mrs Leifer has crossed any boundaries with the girls?”
Bromberg decided to visit Leifer in person. “I said to her: Mrs Leifer, someone asked me a question about some of your interactions with the girls and I think you need to know that not everybody is entirely comfortable with that,” she told the court.
Leifer thanked her friend for visiting and said she had actually already talked about the issue with the Vaad HaChinuch, the rabbinical umbrella.
“She told me that she had actually had a chat with them about it and all was in order, all was good,” Bromberg told the court. “I didn’t do any more at that point.”
Unwilling to believe that Leifer was capable of what had been alleged, Bromberg was apparently satisifed with this response.
The following year, Bromberg received another worrying telephone call, in which she was told “there seems to be some substance to these allegations”. The court heard that the same psychologist, Ms Casen, told Bromberg that a former student of Leifer’s had divulged to her therapist in Israel what had allegedly taken place between her and Leifer.
The court heard that Bromberg, who knew the student, telephoned her herself and believed that “clearly sexualised behaviour” had taken place and “important boundaries had been crossed”. Again, Bromberg took these allegations directly to Leifer, who again reassured her that she had already discussed them with the Vaad HaChinuch and had received advice.
Bromberg gave evidence that unsatisfied with this explanation, she made an appointment to see two rabbis from the Vaad HaChinuch, Rabbi Wurzberger and Rabbi Beck. The sabbath was rapidly approaching and the meeting was postponed, but the court heard that the rabbi’s wife, Mrs Wurzberger, told Bromberg over the phone that, “she knew what [Bromberg] was calling about and was literally feeling sick… I’ve heard a little about this before,” and said that she believed the allegations to be true.
Bromberg told the court that in the following week, on Wednesday, 5 March 2008, she attended a meeting at the home of the late Izzy Herzog, a respected Adass community member. Several members of the school board were in attendance, along with a barrister and a psychologist.
The civil case against the school heard that the school had become aware of at least eight separate allegations of sexual misconduct involving girls at the school. Those gathered at the meeting called Leifer on a speakerphone and put the allegations to her. Leifer angrily denied them and said: “You have destroyed my reputation. I’m not going to stand for this”.
Leifer was told that she would be stood down as principal immediately.
Several hours into the meeting, Mark Ernst, a member of the school board, called his wife, Dassi Ernst, who worked as a travel agent at Breakaway Travel. He asked her to book tickets for Leifer, her husband and their eight children on the next flight to Israel, saying that they needed to travel “urgently”.
The current principal of Adass Israel School, Professor Israel Herszberg, gave evidence that Leifer borrowed a great deal of money from members of the community before her departure: “She borrowed money on whatever pretences she had, and very large sums of money to my knowledge”. In the weeks that followed, outraged parents told The Age that they believed Leifer had borrowed $100,000 from a family in the community before leaving Australia.
At 1:20am, on Thursday, 6 March 2008, Leifer, along with four of her children, boarded a flight to Hong Kong, then Israel. The tickets were paid for by an Adass community member and a company associated with the president of the board. At one stage of his evidence, Ernst said he “could not recall” the motivation for asking Leifer to leave the country.
Manny Waks acknowledges that there has been denial in many sectors, “not necessarily out of malice, but more so out of ignorance”. Around the time he went public with his story of the abuse he suffered at Yeshivah College, another ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in St Kilda, Waks says: “I was approached by a senior member of the Jewish community, who said to me that ‘I was shocked, because I knew it happened in the Catholic Church amongst the Gentiles, but in our own community…’”.
This is, according to Waks, a representative view within the ultra-Orthodox communities.
“There was also obviously the issue of cover-ups too,” he says, “where some knew it was happening but definitely preferred to deny it and move on, so that our community would come across as untarnished and perfect. That somehow we don’t have these issues, but others do.”
Waks believes that The Australian Jewish News “got it right when they described the Australian Orthodox rabbinate as being ‘rotten to the core’”.
“Of course, this does not mean that each and every Orthodox rabbi is rotten; there are many good rabbis,” he says. “But the rabbinate as a whole has dealt with this issue in a disgraceful manner.”
In mid-2014, The Age newspaper reported concerns from a member of Leifer’s new community in Immanuel, Israel. Leifer’s husband works as a rabbi at a local synagogue, and the unidentified source told The Age that Leifer often took children from the synagogue to her home for after-school tutoring. The Age reported that this caused alarm for members of the community who knew accusations had been levelled against her in Australia. However, there has been no record of any investigations or charges against Leifer in Israel.
Extradition proceedings finally commenced in September 2014, when Leifer was placed under house arrest in Israel, but in the year that has passed, there still has not been an initial hearing. On July 15 this year, Leifer’s lawyers successfully argued for yet another delay, on the basis that she is suffering from “psychosis and stress”.
Lawyer Yehuda Fried said: “The Israeli law confirms that anyone in a psychotic state cannot be subject to legal proceedings”, telling reporters he was willing to spend years fighting the extradition and would appeal to the Israeli High Court if necessary.
Attorney-General George Brandis’s department has confirmed that if returned to Australia, Leifer will face prosecution for 74 sexual assault offences against her students in her time at Adass Israel School.
In the separate civil proceedings brought by the former 14-year-old student against the school, in what has been described as a landmark ruling, Justice Jack Rush found Adass Israel School to be directly and vicariously liable for Leifer’s conduct and awarded the plaintiff more than $1.27 million in damages, including $100,000 exemplary damages against the school, and $150,000 against Leifer.
In his judgment, Justice Rush said: “In considering the merits of the case against Leifer, I consider her conduct warrants punishment; in awarding exemplary damages against Leifer I have particular regards to deterrence, both deterrence to Leifer but also importantly to others in like positions of authority and trust minded to act in a similar manner.”
Justice Rush said he believed the school had acted in such a “deplorable” fashion that “amounts to disgraceful and contumelious behaviour demonstrating a complete disregard for Leifer’s victims”. He also commented on the school’s apparent “disdain for due process of criminal investigation in this state,” and said it had likely acted in such a way protect the reputation of the Adass community.
“The conduct of [the school]… in facilitating the urgent departure was likely motivated by a desire to conceal her wrongdoing and isolate the conduct and its consequences to within the Adass community.”
Solicitors for the plaintiff have confirmed that they have been engaged by another former student of Leifer’s.
Meanwhile, the wider Jewish community has rallied around victims of child sexual abuse. Leifer “must be returned to Australia to face justice”, says Executive Director of Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Peter Wertheim.
“The case illustrates yet again the devastating long-term effects of child abuse on survivors and how those effects have been compounded by institutional attempts to cover up, minimise or fail to acknowledge instances of abuse,” he says.
The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies started a child protection task force focused “on educating the Jewish community on all factors relating to this issue.”
“Sixty community leaders participated in our initial seminar, prioritising prevention policies and procedures and the obligation to report to police,” chief executive Vic Alhadeff says.
In 2011, Sarah finally filed a report with the police. Earlier that year, with the help of a friend she had made outside the Adass community, she completely cut ties with her parents – and with the only way of life she’d ever known.
Previously, Sarah had seen that the only other way to escape her life was to be married, and begged her older sister to help arrange a match for her. Sarah met her husband-to-be only three times before they were married, in supervised half-hour visits where they would discuss “what role religion would have in our lives, and what kind of wife I would be”.
Following the wedding, the young couple moved overseas, as Sarah’s husband continued his religious studies. Five weeks after the wedding, Sarah was raped outside her house, near a building site.
“I didn’t actually tell my husband straight away,” she says, “and when I did, the next day, he got really, really angry. He blamed me, saying the way that I was dressed caused the rape.”
Sarah was wearing the traditional attire of a newly-married woman: a long skirt, long top, a wig to cover her hair, and no makeup. “Everything was completely covered, you couldn’t see a thing,” she says.
“My husband took me to five or six rabbis, and without making eye contact with me, they made me sit next to my husband and told me that I should have dressed more modestly, and that my husband should tell his wife that she needed to wear clothes that were two sizes too big for me, and that if I had, this wouldn’t have happened.”
The anger Sarah felt at this moment, she says, is indescribable.
“I’d just been raped,” she spits. “Instead of understanding me, my husband had taken me to people to tell me that it was my fault, and what I was doing wrong.”
The marriage deteriorated quickly and was never consummated. Sarah moved back to Melbourne and this, she says, “is when I realised I didn’t give a shit about what anyone in the community thought about me”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sarah’s religious views have changed drastically over the past decade.
“Honestly,” she says, “I don’t know if I believe in God now, because after everything that has happened to me, I don’t know that there can be a God.”
“When I was young and growing up, I used to lie in bed and pray to God. I would pray, ‘Please make my Mum die,’ and he didn’t listen. Even back then, I used to question. Faith wasn’t something that I held on to. I hold onto people, and I hold on to my support network.”
A female friend from a less Orthodox community helped Sarah to put her old life behind her. The pair moved in together, and soon Sarah had a whole new network of friends. She describes her social interactions as painfully awkward at first.
“I was like a baby,” she laughs. Sarah got a secretarial job and was soon supporting herself. It was the first time she felt valued as a person.
“I always knew I wasn’t dumb,” she says, “I’ve got two very smart parents. But not having any opportunity to develop intellectually was very difficult.”
Today, she’s at university and hopes to be able to help young people who are suffering from abuse.
“Now I don’t have anything to do with the community, which is just the best thing,” she says. Sarah doesn’t often smile, but when she says this, a hint of a grin creeps in.
* Sarah is not her real name.
Malka Leifer’s extradition is still pending. She is yet to face criminal charges for any allegations in Australia.
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2015-10-29 04:14:512015-10-29 04:14:51Michaela McGuire, Charismatic school principal Malka Leifer was adored within a strict Jewish sect in Melbourne’s east. Despite whispers of inappropriate acts with students, it was years before her dark secrets were exposed., SBS
Posts from Amy and Vicky Act for 10_28_2015
Amy and Vicky Act Update
Contents:
Academics Both Left and Right Endorse Congressional Action to Fix the Supreme Court’s Decision in Paroline
Academics Both Left and Right Endorse Congressional Action to Fix the Supreme Court’s Decision in Paroline
Oct 27, 2015 11:47 pm | Child Victims
Seldom has an issue—any issue—garnered such bi-partisan support as the Amy and Vicky Act which passed the Senate in February 98–0. Unfortunately the bill remains stalled in the House Judiciary Committee despite a March hearing and bi-partisan vows of quick Congressional action.
Perhaps most surprising of all is that the AVA has near universal support (except from child pornography defendants) from both Republicans and Democrats, and liberal and conservative academics.
Consider this piece from one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America, Professor Richard L. Hasen, at the University of California Irvine School of Law:
Today the Supreme Court decided a statutory interpretation case, Paroline v. U.S. with no easy answer, an unusual cross-ideological divide among the Justices, an interpretation offered by the majority which Adam Liptak rightfully describes as “a new and vague legal standard,” and a Chief Justice in his dissenting opinion begging Congress to fix the problem (“The statute as written allows no recovery; we ought to say so, and give Congress a chance to fix it.”). Even though Congress rarely overrides [the Supreme Court] these days, I predict an override in this case, and probably relatively quickly….
But thinking about this from the point of view of Legislation, this seems the ideal case for a Congressional override. As I’ve noted in a recent law review article, Congress now rarely overrides the Court, and when it does, there tend to be partisan overrides (as when Republicans overrode the Supreme Court in cutting back habeas for detainees in Hamdan or when Democrats overrode the Supreme Court in allowing more employment remedies in Ledbetter). I attribute the decline of bipartisan overrides to increasing political polarization in Congress….
But even in an era of intense partisanship, as we are in right now, there is room sometimes for biparisanship, and this looks like the perfect opportunity for two reasons. First, everyone hates child pornographers and wants to look tough on crime. Unless Congress is satisfied with the vague standard of the majority, it could look good for all of Congress to get tougher than the Court was willing to be on child pornographers—particularly when the Court’s ruling means that many victims are undercompensated….
Second, though related to the first point, taking a stand in favor of fixing the statute won’t be seen as going up against the Supreme Court. If all the conservatives were on one side and all the liberals on the other in a 5‐4 decision, then an override of a Supreme Court statutory case looks like an attack on one wing of the Court. Here, you have a case with a cross-ideological majority throwing up its hands as to an administrable rule, and three of four dissenters asking Congress to step in.
In an era where Congress can do so little thanks to ideological polarization, a new Amy Act looks to be a no-brainer.
Similarly, this piece in The Federalist Society’s journal Engage, calls on Congress to fix the statute that three conservative justices in Paroline found “impossible:”
In the end, Congress will have to fix the statute it wrote. Well intentioned guidance by the Supreme Court is simply no substitute for the hard work of legislating. And in the meantime, busy trial courts will work with what they have, and do their best to dispense justice under difficult circumstances, and in often heartbreaking cases. Congress, however, appears to believe that Amy deserves better.
Finally, Professor Marci Hamilton, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, best sums up the need for Congressional action in the wake of the Paroline decision:
This is a hard case, in part because we are still not very good at dealing with the evils of the Internet. As Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion and Justice Sotomayor’s dissent agreed, it just cannot be that a victim should have to prove that she knew the identity of the posessors and traders in her images when the distribution network is the Internet. That is an impossible task. And, without question, she was harmed by Paroline, even if she did not know about him.
But it is even more of a hard case, because Congress’s language is not clear, and the system it laid out does not comport with anything we have seen before. There is a simple two-part fix, if you parse Justice Kennedy’s and Justice Sotomayor’s views closely enough: (1) Congress should enact a federal rule of contribution among child pornography defendants and (2) replace “proximate cause” with “aggregate causation.” That would make it possible for the many Amys of our world to obtain restitution from even one perpetrator in the marketplace and obtain full restitution. The best part of this solution is that it would then incentivize the one defendant forced to pay it all to identify others as contributors. Let the defendants go after their many contacts in the market for contribution. That reduces the restitution, even if levied against a single person, from an excessive personal fine, and puts the burden of parsing out blame on the bad guys, not the victims who never asked to be on the Internet in the first place.
The AVA incorporates both of Professor Hamilton’s suggestions with a federal rule of contribution among child pornography defendants and by replacing proximate cause with aggregate causation.
Most of these articles were written over 18 months ago. The Congressional “hard work of legislating” which seemed like such a bi-partisan “no-brainer” back in 2014 to fix a “system [which] does not comport with anything we have seen before” remains tragically elusive.
It’s time for the House to get moving to finally pass the AVA! With 38 Republican co-sponsors and 35 Democrat co-sponsors, the AVA completely lacks “ideological polarization.” And maybe that’s the problem. But with an election approaching in just 12 months “it could look good for all of Congress to get tougher than the Court was willing to be on child pornographers—particularly when the Court’s ruling means that many victims are undercompensated.”
Contact House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte [R-VA] and ask him to vote S.295/H.R. 595 out of the House Judiciary Committee for a swift vote by the full House.
It’s time for the House to pass the AVA. Child pornography victims have waited long enough!
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Recent Posts
U.K. Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety Recommends Restitution for Child Pornography Victims
House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee Hearing on the AVA: Child Exploitation Restitution Following the Paroline v. United States Decision
House Judiciary Subcommittee Announces Hearing on the AVA
Senate Passes the AVA 98-0!!
United States Leading the Way Worldwide in Victim Compensation with the AVA
About the AVA – S.295 / H.R.595
A federal statute (18 U.S.C. §2259) requires that, in child sexual exploitation cases, a defendant must pay restitution for “the full amount of the victim’s losses.” That works for crimes in which a defendant directly causes specific harm to a victim, but child pornography crimes are different. A child pornography victim is harmed by the initial abuse, then harmed by the distribution and possession of images of that abuse.
The Supreme Court has recognized that victims are harmed by the ongoing “trade” and “the continuing traffic” in child sex abuse images. “In a sense,” the Court said, “every viewing of child pornography is a repetition of the victim’s abuse.” On the Internet, that abuse never ends.
Each step in the child pornography process—production, distribution, and possession—increases the harm to a victim but makes it more difficult to identify those responsible. Victims of this kind of crime are especially in need of restitution to help put their lives back together. Meeting that challenge is the purpose of the Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Restitution Improvement Act of 2015.
“Amy” and “Vicky” are the victims in two of the most widely-distributed child pornography series in the world. On April 23, 2014, in Paroline v. United States, which reviewed Amy’s case, the Supreme Court found that the existing restitution statute is not suited for cases like theirs because it requires proving the impossible: how one person’s possession of particular images concretely harmed an individual victim. That standard puts the burden on victims to forever chase defendants and recover next to nothing.
The Amy and Vicky Act creates an effective, balanced mandatory restitution process for victims of child pornography that responds to the Supreme Court’s decision in Paroline v. United States. It does three things that reflect the nature of these crimes.
First, it considers the total harm to the victim, including from persons who may not yet have been identified.
Second, it requires real and timely restitution.
Third, it allows defendants who have contributed to the same victim’s harm to spread the restitution cost among themselves.
A victim’s losses include medical services, therapy, rehabilitation, transportation, child care, and lost income
If a victim was harmed by a single defendant, the defendant must pay full restitution for all her losses
If a victim was harmed by multiple individuals, including those not yet identified, a judge can impose restitution on an individual defendant in two ways depending on the circumstances of the case
the defendant must pay “the full amount of the victim’s losses” or, if less than the full amount,
at least $250,000 for production, $150,000 for distribution, or $25,000 for possession
Federal law already provides a mechanism for creating a restitution payment schedule
Multiple defendants who have harmed the same victim and have paid at least those minimum amounts are jointly and severally liable and may sue each other for contribution to equalize the restitution cost (the Supreme Court said in Paroline that this is important)
Those who continue a victim’s abuse should not be able to hide in the crowd; there should be no safety in numbers. Victims should not be abused again by putting the burden on them to prove the impossible. Instead, the Amy and Vicky Act creates a practical process, based on the unique kind of harm from child pornography, that both puts the burden on defendants where it belongs and provides actual and timely restitution for victims.
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Prosecutors from seven counties have joined the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse in an effort to root out sexual abuse by members of the clergy by improving how those allegations are reported and investigated.
The agreement puts on paper what has been in practice for 12 years, Broome County District Attorney Gerald Mollen said during a Wednesday news conference in his office. But now, he said, this designates the Diocese as a mandated reporter of any allegations regarding sexual abuse.
“The overall goal is that no child ever again would be abused by anyone, even in the clergy,” Mollen said. “It’s a combination of holding the offender accountable and giving closure to the victim.”
Bishop Robert Cunningham said this does not mean names of clergy members whom the Diocese found credible evidence of abuse would be disclosed, but that information is being shared with prosecutors.
Allegations of sexual abuse by priests date back decades but exploded into a crisis for the church in the USA more than 10 years ago after media reports detailing a litany of abuses and coverups by American bishops.
Cunningham acknowledged the church has not always done a good job handling abuse allegations in the past, but described this agreement as a means to help change that perception.
“It’s no secret that people are unhappy with the Diocese,” Cunningham said. “A priest or any other adult who abuses a child is wrong.”
According to the agreement, the Diocese will immediately contact a county district attorney’s office when a Diocesan official has learned or has reason to suspect a member of the clergy or person under the auspices of the Diocese has sexually abused a minor.
The agreement also prohibits the Diocese from conducting an independent investigation prior to reporting it to law enforcement, beyond conducting a preliminary inquiry to determine whether the allegation is a possible sex crime. If there is a question about the allegation being a criminal matter, the Diocese will be required to consult with a district attorney.
Among the seven prosecutors to sign the agreement is Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick, who said Wednesday this is a “huge step forward” in shedding light on these types of allegations.
This protocol will be carried out regardless of how old the allegations are, or whether the suspected perpetrator is active in the Diocese, the document states.
“The age of the allegation is irrelevant,” Fitzpatrick said. “If it’s beyond the statute of limitations, the matter will still be referred to the district attorney’s office.”
Once the Diocese reports the allegation, they will be required to coordinate with the prosecutors to ensure any criminal investigation is not compromised, the agreement states.
In addition to Cunningham, Mollen and Fitzpatrick, the agreement was also signed by Madison County District Attorney William Gabor, Chenango County District Attorney Joseph McBride, Oneida County District Attorney Scott McNamara, Oswego County District Attorney Gregory Oakes and Cortland County District Attorney Mark Suben.
Full article: http://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/public-safety/2015/10/28/diocese-das-team-up-hold-priests-accountable-sex-abuse-cases/74736618/
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Jason Berry, The Shadow Behind ‘Spotlight’: How Predator Priests Derailed Boston’s Would-Be Pope, Cardinal Bernard Law, The Daily Beast
/in Massachusetts /by SOL ReformThe shadow villain of Spotlight, Bernard Law was one of America’s most ambitious and prominent cardinals—until his handling of the sex-abuse scandal caught up with him.
“Spotlight” is a gripping new film by Tom McCarthy on the Boston Globe’s investigation of how that archdiocese concealed child-molester priests. Set in 2001, the film serves as backstory to the Pulitzer Prize-winning series that began on Jan. 6, 2002—“Feast of the Epiphany,” as we learn in the intelligent script by McCarthy and Josh Singer.
Taking on the church in heavily Catholic Boston was no small order. Several of the reporters came from Catholic homes. Marty Baron, the Globe’s new editor, by way of the Miami Herald, suggested the investigation after reading a Globe columnist on a priest abuse case. Baron wanted to know more; he later became editor of The Washington Post.
Played by the bearded Liev Schreiber, Baron presents as a shy man, of few but forceful words, an outsider to tribal Boston, and a Jew, as a Catholic businessman says, sotto voce, to Michael Keaton in his edgy, pensive portrayal of “Spotlight” editor Walter “Robby” Robinson.
Robinson’s clutch of reporters worked months before the first article appeared, finding documents and tracking down victims of some 30 priests. The turning point in 2001 came when a court ruling against the church unsealed lawsuits that put clergy personnel/ documents into the public record. The Globe ultimately reported that the archdiocese had sheltered 249 predatory clerics going back several decades.
The Globe unmasked Cardinal Bernard Law, then Boston’s Archbishop, for shielding predators; he made Newsweek’s cover in March 2002. “Spotlight” ends two months before that, just as the newspaper series begins. A line onscreen at the end of the film says that Law resigned as archbishop in December 2002, and later became pastor in Rome of a historic basilica, Santa Maria Maggiore (note to reader: at a salary of $12,000 a month, according to The New York Times).
Law left Boston a figure of ridicule and disgrace, yet still a Prince of the Church, as cardinals are called. He has never given an interview in the 13 years since then. In researching a 2011 book on Vatican finances, and more recent reporting trips to Rome, I pieced together a picture of the cardinal in winter (he turns 84 next month) as he rebuilt a power base. His story echoes the wisdom of Heraclitus: character is fate.
The Globe series ignited a chain reaction of reports at the networks and daily newsrooms, not least at The New York Times, which owned the Globe then and competed hard on investigations of its own. For the church, the earthquake convulsed well into 2004; the impact continued on for years, as dioceses and religious orders settled thousands of victim lawsuits.
Early into “Spotlight,” Baron pays a courtesy call on Cardinal Law, played by a silver-haired Len Cariou with a suave patrician gravitas, saying that as a young monsignor in Mississippi in the 1960s, “I was close to the Evers brothers,” and that he wrote for the Jackson diocesan paper. In a dash of hubris the cardinal suggests common cause in a healthy press, and then gives editor Baron a copy of the thick Catholic Catechism. Schrieber’s facial twist registers irony as he takes the book, knowing that news will come of rules long broken by the church.
I let out an audible mmmm at that moment in the screening; my wife whispered, “Is something wrong?” I shook my head, no, thinking of Law: All that promise…
Globe reporters interviewed me in late 2001 and several times in 2002 because of a work I published in 1992—Lead Us Not Into Temptation, the first book to investigate the nationwide crisis of priest sex abuse. (The book actually has a cameo in the film; a survivor activist shows his copy to “Spotlight” reporters with other material he urges them to read.) The Globe reviewed the book favorably in 1992 during heavy national coverage of an ex-priest, James Porter, who left a trail of agony in Massachusetts towns going back many years, before taking a plea bargain and 20-year sentence for child sexual abuse. He died in prison six years later.
Cardinal Law was irate over the Porter coverage, blustering at one point, “We call down God’s power on the media, especially the Globe.”
The book took seven years, with endless photocopying and FedEx bills—this was pre-Internet—to obtain legal documents on far-flung bishops shielding sex offenders. But I was unable to get documents from New York, Boston, and Los Angeles: Church lawyers had a tight lid on cases. Other attorneys assumed that the victims took settlements in exchange for silence. Nine years later, Boston survivors came forth, with wrenching personal stories, after Judge Constance Sweeney, a Catholic, ruled that press freedom trumped church secrecy, unsealing lawsuits and giving victims the right to speak. The scene is a key moment in “Spotlight.”
Cardinal Law, the reporters’ ultimate target, is not a major character in the film; Baron tells his reporters to go after “the system,” not the man, though it goes unspoken that Law was the system.
The out-of-court settlements Law had approved, predicated on victims’ silence, put the survivors out of sight, out of mind.
I met Bernie Law, as priests in Mississippi called him, in Jackson, the state capitol, in the summer of 1971 while working as press secretary in Charles Evers’ quixotic campaign for governor. A week after graduation from Georgetown, I arrived as a volunteer, wrote a press release when they needed one, and got hired for $75 a week.
Law was vicar-general, the bishop’s top assistant. Evers, whose brother Medgar had been assassinated in 1963, respected Law for his editorials in the Catholic paper urging tolerance during the violent years. In a heavily Baptist state prone to racial demagogues, Law had been on the right side of history. By 1971 the riots and Klan violence had abated; but tensions were palpable, race relations still raw. I was curious about Law, and when I called, the monsignor invited me to dinner. When I parked my dented VW in the chancery parking lot, he said, “Let’s take my car.” It was larger and more comfortable.
He was 40, plump but energetic, a Harvard graduate with early silver hair, a cool mind and warm wit. I liked him immediately. He sang praises of the Italian restaurant where he had a reservation.
The owner gave him a lavish hello, and scowled at me. “Sorry, Monsignor, we can’t take him—the hair is too long.” Law frowned. I blushed. The hair stopped just shy of my shoulders, but this was Mississippi and the guy didn’t like suspected hippies. Law protested, without yelling, to no avail. I knew it wasn’t a moment to stand on constitutional rights and expect to eat lasagna.
Law was mortified as he drove to another restaurant, telling me somberly that backwards Mississippi really had made important strides. At dinner he brightened; we talked national politics, theology, and church changes since Vatican II.
As we left the restaurant, Law said: “How’d you like to meet the bishop?”
Imagine the psychological blow to a man who had once told friends that he hoped to be the first American pope.
Sure. Joseph Brunini, the bishop of Jackson, came from a family with a prominent law firm; he too had been a voice of moderation in the dark years. The bishop, 52, had a condo outside Jackson at the vast Ross Barnett Reservoir where people with sailboats had slips.
Barnett was the former governor known for inflammatory speeches and standing in the doorway at the University of Mississippi in 1962 to block James Meredith as the first black student. Meredith was escorted in by white federal marshals. “Which of you is James Meredith?” said Barnett to the only black man in eyesight. The campus soon exploded in a riot that left two people dead as federal troops secured Meredith’s place. The state named the big lake for the worst governor Mississippi ever had.
We sat on the deck of the condo, sipping Scotch as the insects sang outside. Brunini was an amiable man, a Georgetown graduate curious about my time there, the three of us trading thoughts about race relations and the church. I realized that Mississippi’s Catholic community amounted to a minority religion, a tiny social presence, quite different from the New Orleans of my upbringing. Brunini wished me well and made a point of blessing me as we left.
As Law and I drove back to the chancery, his demeanor changed. He was smiling, a man on a cloud. “Did you like the bishop?” he said. Yes, a very nice man. “Did you think he was—cool?” Uh, sure.
This man wants to be a bishop, I reported to myself with the brilliance of a 22-year old. As we pulled up to my car, he stuck out his hand. “Call me Bernie.”
Campaign work intensified; he made a trip to Rome and I didn’t see him again; we chatted a few times by phone.
As the years passed I followed news on him. He became a bishop in Missouri, and several years later, in 1984, vaulted to Boston, as archbishop, and soon a cardinal. I’ve known journalists to fume over people they wished they’d kept up with. I soon felt that about Law, wishing I’d sent notes, Christmas cards, anything to cultivate a relationship. The regret hit me in the mid-’80s as I reported on the prosecution of a pedophile priest in Lafayette, Louisiana. In a circuitous way, those events led to Law.
In January of 1986, the weekly Times of Acadiana ran my final piece, reconstructing how Bishop Gerard Frey had played musical chairs with seven priests who had abused children over several years. The paper ran an editorial calling for the Vatican to remove the bishop, for which it got hit with an advertisers’ boycott fomented by a retired judge, Edmund Reggie, and a prominent monsignor. The paper lost $20,000 before cooler heads prevailed. In July, the Vatican sent a new bishop.
In February of that year I shifted to work on the book, and flew to Washington, D.C. to interview Father Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer at the Vatican Embassy. Doyle, I learned, sent a shot across the bow as co-author of a 100-page report in the spring of 1985 on the pedophile cases before it became a crisis. The document went to every bishop in America. A classic whistle-blower, Doyle lost his job; he became an Air Force chaplain.
Doyle told me how he had given Cardinal Law a briefing on abuse cases in various states in 1984 before his work on the report. Law supported Doyle in the effort; he even contributed $1,000 to cover photocopy costs so the document could be sent to 150 bishops. Many years later, Law testified in a deposition in one of the Boston cases and said he could not recall details of that 1985 report, which became a “smoking gun” for advising bishops to remove predators and reach out to victims. Many bishops opted to recycle perpetrators after stints in psychiatric treatment facilities, and ignore victims until they filed lawsuits.
The next time I saw Law was 1993 in New Orleans where the bishops held their summer conference. Activists with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests were staging a protest. Law stepped off an elevator at the Hyatt Regency and nearly collided with me. “Your Eminence, it’s been a long time since Mississippi. Would you have time to talk?”
He shook his head grimly and moved on. I noticed he was much heavier.
In 1998, the artist Channing Thieme was preparing an exhibition called “Boston Faces,” portraits of a cross-section of Bostonians. She was not a Catholic, curious about a man as powerful as Law, and delighted when he agreed to sit for her at the cardinal’s mansion in Brighton. She found him a charming conversationalist in two drawing sessions. When she returned with the finished graphite portrait, Law was delighted. She said: “What’s the toughest part of your job?”
“Judgment—the decisions I must make,” Law replied. And, as if looking ahead to a bitter reckoning, he added: “That is the half of it. The other half is the judgment I must one day face myself.”
She was amazed at the statement. The words do not ring of false modesty.
Law in 1998 was the most powerful American churchman in Rome. Close to Pope John Paul and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Secretary of State, Law cultivated ties in the Roman Curia and served on major Vatican committees. Yet that artist’s question, as he gazed at his black-and-white image, seemingly unloosed an inner coil. He apparently felt guilty about something. Could it have been the scores of pedophiles he had sent to treatment tanks, some of them recycled, with little thought of their ravaged victims?
Power is the movement of money. The out-of-court settlements Law had approved, predicated on victims’ silence, put the survivors out of sight, out of mind.
Judgment stalked him in civil depositions as the media coverage wore on; reporters used his testimony to shatter the credibility of the man who had urged John Paul II to authorize the updated, very long Catholic Catechism, the one that the cardinal in the movie gives to the editor with his quiet, quizzical face.
Law resigned just before Christmas 2002, after a private meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome; he left Boston for sanctuary in a Maryland convent with nuns. Imagine the psychological blow to a man who had once told friends that he hoped to be the first American pope, a man whose support of migrants from the Dominican Republic entering Boston stood for the values of a church giving comfort and succor to the poor.
Nixon sought redemption after Watergate by writing books and holding dinners for selected journalists, a careful campaign to rehabilitate himself as a foreign policy sage.
Law turned to the one place where he had support—cardinals and bishops in the Roman Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy. “The curia is a brotherhood,” Cardinal Sodano once told The New York Times. Law had friends in the brotherhood after 17 years in Boston. A member of the Congregation for Bishops, he helped select new American bishops.
The news of Law’s new job in Rome in the spring of 2004 came at the worst possible time for his successor, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Seán O’Malley. O’Malley had approved an $85 million settlement to 542 victims, only to take public criticism for a wave of church closures, consolidating parishes in a controversial plan to sell property after the huge deficit Law had left. O’Malley had already sold the cardinal’s mansion for $108 million to Boston College. All that, and John Paul rewarded Law with a cushy perch at one of Rome’s great basilicas.
“Many people in Rome would say that he paid the price in the form of his resignation and that there’s no reason that he shouldn’t make a contribution,” Vatican correspondent John L. Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter told Boston Magazine two years after Law assumed his position. (Allen now writes for Crux, an online branch of the Globe that covers the Catholic Church.)
After many years away from Mississippi, I went to Jackson in 2004 to promote a book, written with Gerald Renner. Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II explores the Vatican’s role in the abuse crisis. Before the evening lecture, I did several media interviews, and spent time with SNAP leaders Johnny Rainer and Kenneth Morrison.
Morrison was 39, an artist in Chicago who had grown up in Jackson. He was one of three sons of a physician, by then deceased. His mother came to the book event. The family had moved to Jackson from Boston in 1969 when Kenneth’s dad, Dr. Francis Morrison, an oncologist, took a teaching position at the state medical school. As Boston Catholics, the Morrisons found a friend in Bernie Law, the Harvard graduate. The Morrisons also befriended Father George Broussard who, as pedophiles will do, ingratiated himself with the family, slowly molesting the three young boys.
As we drove around Jackson that day, Kenneth, a strapping guy who did industrial art projects in Chicago, pointed to several church buildings where, he said, Broussard had forced sex on him as a boy of 5, 6, and 7 years old—“there, in that one, and that one, and that one.” As we drove past the chancery, his memories of being abused spilled into my thought field from 1971. The summer evening I pulled into the chancery parking lot to meet Bernie Law, matched the time period when little Kenneth was being preyed upon by Father Broussard nearby.
Morrison sued the Jackson diocese in 2003. The diocese faced lawsuits against seven other priests, several dating back to Law’s tenure there.
Law was the bishop’s right hand when Dr. Morrison reported what Broussard had done to the chancery. As Morrison would later allege, Broussard began receiving “treatment,” while staying at another parish. Law was close to the Morrisons, and to Broussard. Knowing what he knew, what should Law have done?
“The sexual molestation of minors wasn’t even on my radar screen,” Law testified in a deposition in the Morrison case. “It wasn’t the issue that it is today… it didn’t come up.”
But the diocese did investigate, as William Houck, who succeeded Brunini as bishop, stated under oath: “Broussard said he subsequently admitted the accusations to Bernard Law and to Bishop (Joseph) Brunini, and attended confession with Bernard Law.”
Law had moved to Rome when the Jackson diocese agreed to an out-of-court settlement with Kenneth Morrison.
In late 2012, I spent five weeks in Rome for GlobalPost, reporting on the Vatican investigation of liberal American nuns—the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
Cardinal Law was a catalyst in sparking that investigation, as I reported, though he played no direct role in the interrogations, meetings, and correspondence that the sisters had with Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The C.D.F. is housed in the majestic palazzo where in 1616 the Inquisition punished Galileo for his position that the earth revolves around the sun.
After leaving Boston in humiliation, Law found a fraternal womb in the Curia; but after the blows to his stature and ego, he wanted other people to “face judgment”—an outsized projection of his own faults in the desire to bring those liberal nuns to heel. The man who suggested the new catechism wanted obedience to authority, of which he himself had little.
Levada, it is worth adding, had been archbishop of San Francisco, and up to his chest in litigation over pedophile priests, when the newly elected Pope Benedict tossed him a ladder in 2005 as if from a celestial helicopter, lifting him up and away from the muck in the city by the bay to beautiful Rome and great status as theologian-in-chief.
Levada refused to be interviewed. I called Law, hoping against hope that he might agree to talk. A priest took the call at Santa Maria Maggiore, let his cold silence register for a number of seconds, and stated: “The cardinal does not give interviews. There are no exceptions.”
Pope Francis would later oversee the termination of the proceedings against the nuns, and make a point of meeting with several of the leaders of American sisters for a reconciliation with news photographers present.
“Law is a presence on the embassy social circuit,” a Western diplomat in Rome told me in 2012. “He’s a cardinal, an official of the Curia, so he’s on the invitation lists. He’s sociable and mingles easily.”
The Holy See assumes a decorum among journalists who cover the Vatican. Many reporters who work in the press room off St. Peter’s Square have broken stories critical of church officialdom—Nicole Winfield of AP and Philip Pullella of Reuters prominent among them; but you don’t see journalists in packs ambushing church officials as if they were Chicago or Louisiana politicians heading into criminal court. Pope Benedict was reeling from the Vati-Leaks scandal in late 2012 when I attended a reception for a group of newly-invested cardinals.
It was a rare chance to get inside the Apostolic Palace, which is closed to the public save for ceremonial occasions. The large reception parlors have elegant tapestries adorning the walls. The papal apartments and pope’s office on the top floor were off-limits. In one parlor a sizeable crowd of people who had come from Nigeria waited in a receiving line to greet their new cardinal, Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja. Many of the Nigerian women wept as they hugged him. The rich colors of Yoruba design on the dresses and dashikis of men were emblazoned with the new cardinal’s photograph. The vibrant festivity of the multicultural pageant in the life of the church reminded me of The Canterbury Tales.
Across the crowded Rome I saw the bloated, hulking figure of Cardinal Law, flanked by two priests, make his way past a receiving line toward two Italians in the red hat of cardinals. I moved that way, camera in hand. A priest at Law’s elbow saw me and glared, stationing himself closer to the cardinal to prevent a clear angle. I stood there for several minutes, without shooting, and then turned away, thinking of Kenneth Morrison.
Glenn E. Rice & Eric Adler, Favored son’s decade-long sexual abuse of girl divides small Missouri town, Kansas City Star
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformOn the day before a judge would determine Darren L. Paden’s fate, almost no one would say a word.
Not in the tiny, one gas station town of Dearborn they wouldn’t.
Fewer than 500 people live in this Platte County hamlet of crisscrossing family lines and where church ties and friendships date back generations.
At the Café, the older women who gather at the back of the restaurant kept their thoughts to themselves about how one of their own, Paden, 52 — the former chief of the volunteer fire department, a father of seven, known as a good man throughout town — had been charged in 2013 with repeatedly sexually abusing a child for at least a decade. In August, he pleaded guilty.
At the library, questions about how the case split the town were greeted with polite reticence. At the fertilizer store, no comment.
“In a small community, everybody’s family,” offered one Café customer, not willing to give her name or much else, except a polite smile. “It hurts everyone.”
But at about 11:30 a.m. Friday, that reserve broke somewhat inside a Platte County courtroom when Circuit Court Presiding Judge James Van Amburg sentenced Paden to 50 years in prison on two counts of first-degree statutory sodomy for abusing the girl at least 200 to 300 times over a decade, starting before she turned 5 years old. Paden’s adult son, Anthony L. Paden, 25, also has been charged with abuse, but his case remains pending.
Onlookers packed the courtroom. Paden’s father, Jim Paden, wiped away tears with a handkerchief at the sight of his son in handcuffs and clad in an orange jail garb.
“I’m begging for your mercy,” Jim Paden pleaded with the judge prior to sentencing. “I would like to hold and hug him before I die.”
The victim wiped away tears when the sentence was announced. Paden showed no emotion and did not speak. His family members hugged each other and sobbed, but still declined comment after the sentence.
For two years, tension over the case has frayed allegiances in Dearborn.
On one side there has been Paden, backed by a contingent of supporters that has included family, church elders, the former bank president and other prominent residents.
On the other side was the victim, now 18, who said this week that although she has received some strong words of support, she largely has been ostracized and even been declared a liar by some in the community where she also has lived her entire life. All she did was tell — and much of the community turned its back on her.
“I know there are a lot of people who support me,” she said this week in a personal interview in Platte City. But what she has experienced most is the chill from “the people who refuse to believe me…”
“I called a lady about a house she was renting,” the victim continued, “and I told her my name, and she said, ‘What’s your name again?’ and I told her and she said ‘I don’t want to rent to you’ and then hung up on me.”
Some townspeople have shunned or turned away from her.
“Before this, there were people who would come up and talk to me and have conversations with me,” she said. “Now they won’t even look at me or talk to me.”
Her mother believes her, the victim said.
In a prepared statement, Platte County Prosecutor Eric Zahnd called the lack of support for the victim “deeply troubling,” especially considering that Paden confessed within a couple of hours of being questioned. It “breaks my heart,” he said.
“There are certainly a few good people in the community who have offered their support to this young victim. It is shocking, however, that many continue to support a defendant whose guilt was never truly in doubt. If it takes a village to raise a child, what is a child to do when the village turns its back and supports a confessed child molester?”
Since September, about 16 letters have been filed with the court by Paden’s relatives, church members and friends of Darren Paden’s parents, who are held in high regard in the community. Jim Paden, and his wife, Esther, have a farm in the community.
All the letters asked the judge to show leniency.
“I did that (wrote a letter) in support of his family because they are pretty devastated over this whole thing,” said Sheila Goodlet, an aunt to Darren Paden and sister to Jim Paden. “I just wanted there to be some hope in a hopeless situation.… I also want the judge to be aware that Darren has had a lot of good, positive things in his life, too.”
Nearly every letter talked about Paden’s work with the Air National Guard and fire department.
“He went overseas during the Gulf War and served in mobile hospitals to help wounded soldiers,” wrote his uncle, Stephen Goodlet.
Paden’s great-aunt, Dixie Wilson, talked of her great-nephew’s service as a junior deacon at the local New Market Christian Church. “I could go on and on,” she wrote, “but would just be repeating that he is a good man!”
In a telephone interview, Wilson asserted, “My opinion is, most people don’t believe it happened.
“Are you for a child molester? Absolutely not,” said Wilson, 82. “But I don’t think we’re talking about a child molester.”
She and other parishioners at the New Market Christian Church, she said, have held prayer circles on his account.
Letter writers recalled how Paden saved his father’s life when a cow nearly stomped him to death in a field, after the elder Paden came between the cow and her calf.
“Darren is one of the most admirable people I know,” friend Adele Brightwell wrote. “…He holds fast to his morals…”
Former bank president Jerry Hagg wrote of Paden’s contribution to the community.
New Market Church trustee Gene Blankenship wrote that “Only God, Darren and (the victim) know what truly happened. I feel Darren may have admitted to things he did not do after hours of interrogation and all the pressure to admit guilt.”
Others, like supporter Darla Hall Emmedorfer, appealed to the judge to take Darren’s good deeds into consideration in deciding the severity of his sentence.
“I truly believe that Darren has already suffered extensively for his actions by being kept away from his young children and his home life, and by not being able to provide for this family,” Emmendorfer wrote. “Because of the significant difficulties that will face his innocent family, I would ask you, Judge Van Amburg, to grant Darren a sentence of probation or at least the lowest possible sentence.”
At the sentencing, Paden’s defense attorney, John P. O’Connor, called eight witnesses, including Paden’s ex-wife, a niece, a son, a daughter and both parents. Each pleaded for leniency.
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Myles Perry displayed a large photo of the victim when she was 5 years old and said the defendant “unleashed a monster that has devoured every beautiful thing in her life,” and robbed her of the will to live.
Van Amburg delivered the sentence without comment.
It was only because of a middle school presentation that educated students on “inappropriate touch” and the signs and symptoms of sexual abuse that the victim understood what was happening to her and came forward.
At sentencing, the young woman, with quavering voice and tears in her eyes, read a lengthy statement recounting what she described as the “horror” of the abuse, but also its consequences, including thoughts of suicide and cutting herself during high school.
“I know many people think, ‘There is no way he could do this,’ or ‘He was too good of a man to have done something like this,’ ” she said. “Nobody knows what happens behind closed doors.”
The last two years, she said, created such stress and depression that she left work for three months.
“I couldn’t face the world,” she said. “And I couldn’t face this town that made me feel like I was unwanted by everyone.”
Near the end of her statement, she raised a question regarding those who supported Paden, believing him and not her.
“To say you support someone who had done this sort of thing makes me wonder how some would react if a son/daughter told you they were a victim of these behaviors,” she said. “Would you sign a petition then? Would you write letters of support?”
The horror of what happened will affect her the rest of her life, she testified.
“Never will I stop having flashbacks and nightmares, and never will I be able to have a normal relationship with anyone, because I am too far from being normal again.”
Wilson, Paden’s great-aunt, said that no matter the outcome of the sentencing hearing, she believed her community would not remain divided.
“Our community is one that we deeply believe in God and we’re not going to buckle under anything,” Wilson said. “We’re not going to let it destroy all of us. We’re going to keep doing our good works and doing what we believe and rely on each other.”
She reiterated of the crime, “I don’t believe it happened,” she said. “But, if it did, I feel sorry for the girl.”
Full article here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article41940072.html
Frank Bajak, Peru-based Catholic society admits founder under investigation for sex abuse after book expose, Associated Press
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformA secretive Roman Catholic society with chapters across South America and in the U.S. has revealed under pressure that a Vatican investigator is looking into allegations that its founder sexually molested young recruits.
The scandal at the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, has close parallels to other recent cases of charismatic Catholic leaders in Latin America being accused of sex abuse — as well as the church dragging its feet on investigating claims and trying to keep scandals quiet.
This week, Sodalitium’s general secretary disclosed the Vatican investigation after two journalists published a book detailing the accusations against founder Luis Fernando Figari, 68.
Co-author Pedro Salinas, a former society member, has been publicly accusing Figari since 2010 of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. According to the book, three men lodged complaints the following year with a Peruvian church tribunal alleging Figari sexually abused them when they were minors.
There is no indication the tribunal did anything with the case, including notifying prosecutors. Nor is it known when the Vatican was advised.
Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, the conservative archbishop of Lima with jurisdiction over the tribunal, was quoted as telling the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio this week that case is “regrettable and painful” and claiming “we have acted with absolute transparency and rapidity.”
No criminal probe was opened in Peru until after the mid-October publication of “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.” Prosecutors, though, say the statute of limitations has almost certainly run out as the alleged crimes occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.
Founded in 1971, Sodalitium has a presence in schools and churches and runs retreat facilities with communities in Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Italy and the United States. Its members are mostly lay Catholics but also include clergy, including two bishops in Peru.
After the book’s release, the society issued three successive press releases as a public clamor for greater accountability and transparency intensified.
First, the society revealed that Figari, who is not a priest, has been living in relative isolation at a Sodalitium community in Rome since 2010 and has been out of public life and governance of the society since then. At the time of his departure as general secretary, Sodalitium said only that Figari was stepping down for health reasons.
It added that the society’s current leader, Alessandro Moroni, decided in 2014 to intensify the regime of “prayer and retreat” being followed by Figari
The statement also noted Figari wasn’t alone in being accused: The book says the society’s No. 2, the late German Doig, was accused of sexually assaulting a minor. He died in 2001. A decade later, after the allegations against him first surfaced, the society said his candidacy for beatification had been canceled.
In a second statement Oct. 21, the society said the book’s allegations were “plausible” and needed to be thoroughly investigated. It said it created a committee to hear complaints from other possible victims and asked forgiveness, calling the accusations against Figari “cause for deep grief and shame.”
It said Figari insists he is innocent, though it notes he hasn’t said so publicly.
This week, the third release disclosed that the Vatican had on April 22 named a local bishop to investigate the society. Figari departed Lima three days later for Europe, according to local published reports.
The book’s co-author, Paola Ugaz, said she and Salinas wrote in January to the Vatican office in charge of apostolic church societies detailing the allegations against Figari. They never got an answer, she said. But the official to whom they wrote, Archbishop Jose Rodriguez Carballo, signed the April 22 decree.
The scandal is similar to one in Chile involving the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a charismatic priest who in 2011 was sentenced by the church to a lifetime of penance and prayer for sexually abusing young people. The local archbishop sat on allegations against Karadima for years, refusing to believe them, and only passed them on to the Vatican after the scandal exploded globally in 2010.
The case also has parallels to a scandal at the Legion of Christ, which was headed by the late Mexican priest Marcial Maciel. The Vatican under St. Pope Paul II ignored decades of credible abuse allegations against Maciel and discredited his victims. Only in 2006 did it act, giving him the same sentence as Karadima.
The Peruvian bishop assigned to the Figari probe, the Rev. Fortunato Pablo Urcey of Chota, is ordered by the decree to “verify the true authenticity of accusations” past and new against Figari and file a full report.
But Urcey, the secretary general of Peru’s council of churches, said in a radio interview this week that he didn’t consider himself an investigator as much as a supporter of Sodalitium.
In an interview with RPP radio, he said he had no plans to interview the ex-members who filed the complaints or to read the book.
“I like the designation ‘visitor’ better than ‘investigator’ because I’m not an investigator,” he said, recalling his official title as an “apostolic visitor.” Three times during the interview, Urcey said he would do all he could to “save the charism of this congregation,” a reference to the spirituality that makes it unique.
Urcey did not return phone messages left by The Associated Press. Efforts to reach a spokesman for the Lima ecclesiastic tribunal also were unsuccessful. The body’s deliberations are secret.
The society’s current leader, Moroni, said in an interview with the newspaper El Comercio this week that he contacted the tribunal about the accusations against Figari more than two years ago.
Tribunal officials responded that “they are an independent body and they didn’t have to give us any kind of information until they reached a decision,” he said.
In an article published Friday, Salinas, the co-author, urged that Moroni be removed, calling him complicit in a culture of abuse that Ugaz said included Figari’s burning of his flesh with a candle flame for about a minute in front of fellow initiates.
A Peruvian non-governmental organization, the Institute for Defense of the Rights of Minors, asked prosecutors last week to investigate Cipriani, Lima’s archbishop and an Opus Dei member, for obstruction of justice.
Its president, Daniel Vega, said none of the men who filed complaints against Figari with the tribunal were ever contacted by it afterward.
“There is a recurring conduct of the cardinal and his entire team of covering up crimes and not informing the criminal justice system.”
Full article: http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2015/10/31/peru-catholic-society-admits-sex-abuse-probe-against-founder?page=2
Michaela McGuire, Charismatic school principal Malka Leifer was adored within a strict Jewish sect in Melbourne’s east. Despite whispers of inappropriate acts with students, it was years before her dark secrets were exposed., SBS
/in Australia /by SOL Reform“My childhood was very difficult,” Sarah* says, in a matter-of-fact way. Now in her mid-20s, she has a quiet voice, but speaks with a forceful elegance.
“I just knew that when my mother hit me and when she screamed at me, I couldn’t tell anyone. For anybody to know would be the scariest thing.
“We weren’t allowed to go to the toilet. We weren’t allowed to sleep, or we had to sleep in the way she wanted us to. We’d go to bed and she’d decide she wanted some food made for her in the middle of the night, so she’d wake up. But we had to be dressed in a certain way.”
Sarah and her siblings would dress in socks, dresses, dressing gowns; layer upon layer, so that they appeared “modest”.
“She’d wake us up, just as we’d fallen asleep, make us get her food, and then go back to bed. Ten minutes later, she’d wake us up because she wanted a glass of water.”
At the age of 10, Sarah gave up on the idea of ever having a normal childhood.
“I knew what that looked like, though,” she says. “I’d go to friends’ houses and see how their mothers would feed them, how they would look at them and give them hugs.”
None of the children were exempt from abuse, but Sarah and her youngest brother suffered most. They were also the darkest-skinned and looked more like their mother.
“She used to tell us all the time how ugly we were,” says Sarah, “and how she wished we would die.”
The children “self-diagnosed” their mother as having borderline personality disorder.
“There was no love, there were no hugs, there was no encouragement. It was basically trying to survive.”
Sarah says her mother routinely hit her until she turned 16 and was “very smart about it”, hitting her in places covered by her clothes – places even an observant teacher wouldn’t notice.
“A teacher with the right knowledge would be able to see that we looked… haunted,” Sarah says.
That teacher was Malka Leifer.
“I would say it took her about two years to work her magic,” Sarah says.
Malka Leifer was principal of the ultra-Orthodox Adass Israel School in Elsternwick, Melbourne from 2002 to 2008, a pillar of her tight-knit community. At 48, Leifer was, according to parents of former students, recruited specifically because of her ultra-Orthodox beliefs.
At the time of her appointment, she was widely regarded within the community to be its second-holiest member, behind spiritual leader Rabbi Avrohom Zvi Beck.
A scholar of Biblical texts, Jewish law and Hasidic philosophy, Leifer is a mother of eight. But evidence given earlier this year in a civil case in the Victorian Supreme Court portrayed her as a calculating, predatory paedophile.
“She knew exactly when to do it,” alleges Sarah.
“It was all planned. Slowly, when she set herself up in the community and had their love and respect, at the point when such a thing would never enter their minds, that’s when she started.”
Sarah claims she was systematically abused by Leifer for years, along with “seven or eight” other female students.
“I don’t know how I could explain how charming she was,” says Sarah.
“The community absolutely respected and loved her. They basically treated her like God.”
“The way she played her game was… she’d start by calling you out of class, in the middle of a lesson, and would sit with you and ask you how you were doing, how you were feeling. When I finally, eventually opened up to her and told her that things were really bad, that’s when she made her move.”
Sarah says she heard whispers about Leifer’s relationships with other students, but was not equipped to comprehend the implications behind the rumours.
“I heard little things, but I didn’t really understand. All I knew was that at school if she likes you… that’s what you should aim for.”
Adass Israel is a strain of Hasidism, a movement which was founded in the 18th century by Jewish mystics and quickly became a populist alternative to traditional Judaism. The Hasidim, or “pious ones,” are an ultra-Orthodox movement with a focus on self-preservation.
After generations of persecution, many Hasidic Jews today are second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors, who take quite literally the Lord’s order to “be fruitful and multiply”, to replenish a devastated population. Today, Australia has the second-highest population of Holocaust survivors per capita in the world.
The insularity of the movement is, in part, born of the caution that comes of a history shaped by adversity. It’s also the product of a rich cultural heritage and religious strength that has allowed it, and others like it throughout the diaspora, to flourish and bring new prosperity – both to itself, and to its adopted home of Melbourne. That same insularity has also allowed it to harbour dark secrets. Growing up in the Adass community, Sarah tells me, is to grow up in a culture of humiliation and shame, particularly centred around the body.
Sexual education exists only in the form of a special lesson administered by a community member – with a strict focus on procreation – after a young man or woman is already engaged.
Sarah recalls reading Enid Blyton books at school, where every third or fourth paragraph would be missing a word. Sarah read the whole of The Magic Faraway Tree without knowing the names of two main characters: Dick and Fanny.
“We wouldn’t have even known what ‘Dick’ was supposed to mean, because we didn’t know what a dick was,” she tells me. “Their crossing it out only made us more inquisitive, but biology wasn’t even a subject.”
Outside school, a few of Sarah’s classmates had read different books without their parents’ consent and they shared with friends what they had learned.
“We knew that a penis goes into a vagina when you get married,” she recalls. “And I remember a friend saying, ‘There’s no fucking way I’m letting that near me’.”
Sarah grimaces. “I also said that I was never going to let that happen.”
Without sex education, Sarah had no defence against sexual predators.
“I’ve always wanted to share my story,” Sarah tells me on a particularly bleak morning, over three cups of strawberry tea. But it has taken her seven years to feel comfortable doing so.
I ask about her earliest memory.
“When people ask me my memories of my childhood, the good things don’t come to my mind,” she says. “I try not to dwell on that too much. The main good thing about my childhood was having my siblings. If I didn’t have them, I probably wouldn’t be alive.”
She talks about being eight years old.
“We used to go on family holidays and we couldn’t go to the beach because it wasn’t modest enough. Or we’d walk down the street in summer and everyone else would be in shorts and singlets, and we’d be wearing long dresses and tights.
“I remember thinking even at that age that I didn’t want to be different, I just wanted to be the same as everyone else,” she says.
Sarah’s entire universe was contained in one suburb: “We went to Carnegie once, and that felt like going to the end of the world.”
Her parents had moved to Australia fleeing disapproval of their marriage, and soon started a family. “Then they decided to become religious, and they went all the way to the extreme,” Sarah says.
“I think a lot of that shift has to do with my mother’s extreme nature,” Sarah says. “She needed to grab onto something and when she encountered someone from our community who was really kind to her, she decided they were the type of people she wanted to be around.”
Sarah believes her mother’s urge to fit in prompted her to join the community.
“Only if you become so extreme can you become one of them,” she says.
“There’s no middle ground. You’re either extreme or you aren’t part of the community.”
When Sabbath begins on Friday evenings, what is already the quietest neighbourhood in Eastern Melbourne becomes almost eerily silent. Restaurants close down, cars are parked in driveways where they remain for the next 24 hours, and families gather indoors to feast and to pray, shutting out the white noise of contemporary life even more resolutely.
Without the internet, television, media or movies, she says, “you don’t have much to talk about.” Sarah characterises the community as “a world of nothing”.
“What do they talk about? Who has the nicest car. Who has the nicest house. Who has the nicest clothes. I find all that stuff really trivial.”
“It sounds very… strict,” I offer.
Sarah corrects me. “It was a cult.”
The Adass community is the most insular of the Haredi or ultra-Orthodox spectrum of Jews. Melbourne’s Jewish communities have long dominated the Eastern suburbs of St Kilda East, Balaclava and Caulfield; the Adass community is confined to a small grid bordered by Brighton, Orrong, Balaclava and Glenhuntly Roads.
The concept of an eruv encircles this boundary: all buildings within are ritually integrated into a private domain where residents may carry objects that are otherwise forbidden to be held on the Sabbath: prams, house keys, tissues, medicine and babies.
They have their own telephone directory, schools, ambulance service, synagogue, shops, cemetery, bathhouses, security patrols and rabbinical court system.
Male “Adassniks” have long, dark beards and wear black silk coats that reach their knees over white pantaloons and stockings. Twin sideburn ringlets curl down beneath enormous mink fur hats. Female members of the community wear thick tights, long skirts and loose blouses. Married women wear wigs, in keeping with the law that their heads must be covered for modesty’s sake.
Adass Israel School is responsible for the education of 600 students from preschool to year 12. The girls’ and boys’ campuses are strictly segregated, separated by a two-minute walk and gated security. The VCE curriculum that is the benchmark for university entry is not offered: boys leave around the age of 16 to pursue religious education, while girls complete a vocational certificate – if they aren’t married off beforehand.
Mornings are dedicated to Jewish history and scripture. Three hours in the afternoons are spent studying maths and science.
“I was very under-stimulated and very under-challenged,” Sarah says. “Kids would play up because they didn’t care about secular subjects, because their parents kept instilling ‘this is not important, you don’t need to know this,’ because you get married and then that’s it. You won’t ever get a degree because you don’t need one.”
The only boys with whom Sarah had contact growing up were in her immediate family: “We didn’t have cousins here, and even if we did have cousins, we wouldn’t have been allowed to talk to them.”
Much of the wealth within the community of 2000 Adass Jews comes from inheritance, Sarah tells me.
“Most of the elderly in the community came to Australia after World War Two and set up textile and manufacturing businesses. The rest of the community is bred from these heads of the community – cousins marry first cousins and second cousins – and everyone is basically related.”
“It’s very feudal,” Sarah explains. “Heads of the community lay down the network to support all their kids and grandchildren, so most of the community is living off their parents’ or grandparents’ money, or working in their businesses. One person would own the meat, so his children and grandchildren would own all the meat. Another would own the fish.”
Malka Leifer became principal at Adass Israel School when Sarah was in Year Seven. The current principal, Professor Israel Herszberg, declined to be interviewed for this story.
Leifer had eight school-aged children — seven sons and a daughter. “It was really cool that we had her mother as principal,” Sarah says. Leifer taught Year 10 and up, so although Sarah didn’t have much to do with her yet, her older sisters “didn’t stop talking about her”.
The students’ attitude towards Leifer was a potent mix of fear and respect. To be greeted “hello” by Leifer, says Sarah, was “just amazing”. Intensely charismatic, Leifer spent her first two years at the school ingratiating herself to the community and, according to Sarah, didn’t touch a student during this time.
“You just wanted her to like you,” says Sarah. “You really, really wanted her attention . You wanted her to give your time.”
“She was very intelligent, she had a very good way with words. She was very good at listening, so you really thought… she was giving you all the time in the world and that she really cared about you.”
“I see it like a chess game,” says Sarah.
Sarah alleges Leifer began abusing her during Year 12, by which time there were only about half a dozen other girls in her class.
Her teacher’s game, says Sarah, involved “a really long, emotional ride” as much as anything else. She recalls Leifer acting like a teenaged girl herself towards the students who had fallen out of her favour: “She’d drop you, and not speak to you for a week.”
The time that this happened to Sarah was one of the longest and loneliest weeks of her life: “After that time, I’d be hanging out for her attention. It was like being in a relationship.”
“This is where I’m saying it’s calculated. She didn’t pick the girls who came from stable homes: she picked the girls who were vulnerable who she knew, when she eventually abused them, wouldn’t go home and tell their mothers.”
Having taught Sarah’s older sisters, Leifer already suspected what sort of home environment she came from. It began when Sarah was called out of class in the middle of a lesson one day. Leifer asked her how she was feeling, and continued to foster this closeness for some time.
“She got me at my weakest point, and got me to open up and be vulnerable. Then, she set out to make me believe that she was going to be the one to save me. And of course, at the time, I did. I wanted to, because I just wanted to get out of that situation, and she was the one offering that kind of support.”
Today, Sarah identifies Leifer’s manipulations as textbook “grooming”: a series of private meetings, a period of growing closeness and trust, lavish praise alternating with sharp rebukes, and, finally, demands for sexual acts.
“It was very slow,” says Sarah. “Once she got my trust, she’d start sitting across the table from me, but then the next time she’d come and sit next to me. It was painstakingly slow. It would be a hand on the leg, or a hand on the shoulder until, eventually…”
Sarah pauses, admitting that even now it’s hard for her to talk about. Instead, she offers to share some of what she’s written, saying it’s easier to get the words out on a page.
Sarah’s journals do not directly document the sexual abuse she suffered; rather, an entry titled “Dear Teacher” contains line after line in which a young woman struggles to understand how she had allowed herself to be so vulnerable: “I came to you hoping to find a mother figure, I came hoping I could learn how to trust again, I came to you believing that you would help me. You portrayed warmth, understanding and love, all of which I was yearning for.”
Elsewhere, she writes: “I felt so special and wanted, and my vulnerable mind did not stop to think why: why me, out of everyone?”
In May this year, another former student of Leifer’s brought a civil suit in the Supreme Court of Melbourne against Leifer and Adass Israel School, suing the school for damages stemming from the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of the former principal. Over the course of the two-week trial, the court heard evidence that the abuse began in 2002, when the victim was 15 years old, and occurred up to three times a week.
In a damning judgment, Justice Jack Rush said that “the students were vulnerable and Leifer was able to conduct herself with unrestrained power and control within the school.”
Evidence was given from former teachers and students alike about Leifer’s intense charisma, and how this allowed her “to rule the school with an iron rod.”
Like Sarah, the plaintiff in this case felt incapable of asserting herself against Leifer. The court heard that: “She was very, very,very powerful – she had a very powerful personality that everyone looked up to. I saw the way that she reacted to people that attempted to cross her… and I could see the way that she reacted to that and I was scared.”
“I vividly remember the first time that she touched me on the skin. I was in Year 11 at the time, and she took me out of school and took me to her house. Someone else drove us there because she didn’t drive. I recall her being very scared that her husband would come home sometime during the day and find us there. I remember her locking the doors… She created an atmosphere in which she said she was very close to me and that she loved me.”
The court heard that Leifer then asked her to lie on a couch and began rubbing her hands over her, above her clothing at first, then underneath her jumper.
“I recall thinking that it was very weird at the time, but didn’t say anything. I remember wondering if she realised what she was doing. Then she got me to roll over and was touching me on my stomach and over my bra.”
The sexual assaults continued at Leifer’s home, at school camps, then over and over at the school, in different classrooms and offices where Leifer could draw the blinds closed.
The plaintiff told the court that she believed other teachers at the school were well aware that Leifer was spending a great deal of one-on-one time with students: “She always had teachers coming to ask her things, and if she would just disappear for a couple of hours they would have been aware that she wasn’t on school grounds.”
When the plaintiff was in Year 11, the two senior girls’ classes were taken on a two-day holiday to a house in Emerald, Victoria. On the journey home, another teacher, Mindel Weisner, told the court that she saw Leifer in a van with a Year 11 student sitting on her lap and thought it was “very strange”.
When asked in court why she had not reported it, Weisner’s response was simple: “I didn’t have anybody to turn to. Mrs Leifer was the principal.”
On the same trip, the plaintiff was abused by Leifer for hours. She told the court: “The class was doing some sort of group activity and she asked me to come and help her put her child to bed, or she wanted to talk to me while she put her child to bed.”
“Her child was in the pram and she was rocking the baby, who continued screaming, and she told me that she wanted to show me what it was like to kiss me. So she kissed me on the mouth, which I didn’t know was something that could be done. I didn’t have any understanding of what that was. I thought it was disgusting.”
Leifer often pulled the plaintiff onto her lap and held her like one of her own children, muttering how much she loved her and how beautiful she was.
“She would pull me onto her lap and kind of rock me or hug me,” the plaintiff said. “She kept telling me that she loved me and this was her way of showing me how close she felt to me, and that I should consider her like a mother who loved me, and that I was special.”
Hours later, when the plaintiff left the room and went to rejoin her fellow students, a parent from the school who was assisting with the trip commented on the relationship between the plaintiff and Leifer.
“She mentioned that she saw that Mrs Leifer and I were very close,” the plaintiff said. “And she said it in almost a jealous tone, as if it was something she really, that she looked up to.”
Sarah tells a similar story and believes she was doomed, as much by her troubled family life as by the community she was raised in.
“Without any sort of sex education, when someone that you trust tells you that this is the right thing, even when your body was telling you that it wasn’t the right thing and that nobody should touch parts of you that you don’t want them to, but if they’re telling you that it’s a good thing…” Sarah trails off.
“She used to say it was good for me, and to trust her, that I’d enjoy it. Without any other knowledge, what was I to fall back on? I had to believe her.”
Sarah thinks back to the first question I asked her: to recall a happy moment from her youth. She now has an answer: “I ran away once,” she tells me, “for just a few hours.”
“I was going to take the train to Geelong. I didn’t make it in the end, but I felt so free. At the same time, I knew that it was going to be the worst punishment when I came back – and I had to go back.
“There was no thought that just maybe I could go and tell somebody, because there was nobody to tell. The community didn’t condone that – you couldn’t speak out against anyone else. That would make everyone look down on me.”
“But for those few hours of feeling free,” she says, “it was probably the best feeling in the world.”
Like many victims, Sarah felt that everything she was experiencing had to be kept secret. But at the same time, secrecy was breaking down as other communities came under scrutiny for their treatment of sexual abuse.
Over the last five years, former students of ultra-Orthodox schools around Australia have begun to speak out. A full week of evidence from former students of ultra-Orthodox schools was heard at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse in Melbourne in February this year.
Prominent Jewish victims’ advocate Manny Waks, who was the subject of last year’s Walkley award-winning documentary Code of Silence, is just one former victim who has spoken out against the community’s tendency to “brush these stories underneath the carpet”.
“In many cases the police can’t deal with it because victims are too intimidated to come forward,” Waks says.
“We’re aware of around 25 alleged paedophiles within the Jewish community in Australia,”says Waks. “Around 15 of those are within the Yeshivah Centre in Melbourne.”
This code of silence, Waks says, is the Jewish concept of mesirah, a prohibition against turning over another Jew to civil authorities.
“It’s a principle that was invoked mainly in centuries where anti-Semitism was rife in Eastern Europe,” Waks says. “The concern was that if a Jewish person was going to report another Jew for a crime they had committed, the entire community would essentially be held accountable for that and the level of anti-Semitism would be increased.”
According to the 12th century Torah scholar Maimonides, a Jew who informs on another is a “wicked man” who has “blasphemed against the law of Moses.” Informants are known as “mosers” and rabbinical rulings today still invoke this principle. Exceptions can be made to mesirah, but they are rare, as approval needs to come from the rabbi before any alleged crimes can be taken to civil authorities.
But in Sarah’s case, her rabbi was Leifer’s husband.
The civil case brought in 2015 heard evidence on how the allegations came to light. In August 2007, Hannah Bromberg, a teacher at Adass Israel School, received a phone call from a Melbourne psychologist, Ms Ruthie Casen, who asked her, “Is it possible at all that Mrs Leifer has crossed any boundaries with the girls?”
Bromberg decided to visit Leifer in person. “I said to her: Mrs Leifer, someone asked me a question about some of your interactions with the girls and I think you need to know that not everybody is entirely comfortable with that,” she told the court.
Leifer thanked her friend for visiting and said she had actually already talked about the issue with the Vaad HaChinuch, the rabbinical umbrella.
“She told me that she had actually had a chat with them about it and all was in order, all was good,” Bromberg told the court. “I didn’t do any more at that point.”
Unwilling to believe that Leifer was capable of what had been alleged, Bromberg was apparently satisifed with this response.
The following year, Bromberg received another worrying telephone call, in which she was told “there seems to be some substance to these allegations”. The court heard that the same psychologist, Ms Casen, told Bromberg that a former student of Leifer’s had divulged to her therapist in Israel what had allegedly taken place between her and Leifer.
The court heard that Bromberg, who knew the student, telephoned her herself and believed that “clearly sexualised behaviour” had taken place and “important boundaries had been crossed”. Again, Bromberg took these allegations directly to Leifer, who again reassured her that she had already discussed them with the Vaad HaChinuch and had received advice.
Bromberg gave evidence that unsatisfied with this explanation, she made an appointment to see two rabbis from the Vaad HaChinuch, Rabbi Wurzberger and Rabbi Beck. The sabbath was rapidly approaching and the meeting was postponed, but the court heard that the rabbi’s wife, Mrs Wurzberger, told Bromberg over the phone that, “she knew what [Bromberg] was calling about and was literally feeling sick… I’ve heard a little about this before,” and said that she believed the allegations to be true.
Bromberg told the court that in the following week, on Wednesday, 5 March 2008, she attended a meeting at the home of the late Izzy Herzog, a respected Adass community member. Several members of the school board were in attendance, along with a barrister and a psychologist.
The civil case against the school heard that the school had become aware of at least eight separate allegations of sexual misconduct involving girls at the school. Those gathered at the meeting called Leifer on a speakerphone and put the allegations to her. Leifer angrily denied them and said: “You have destroyed my reputation. I’m not going to stand for this”.
Leifer was told that she would be stood down as principal immediately.
Several hours into the meeting, Mark Ernst, a member of the school board, called his wife, Dassi Ernst, who worked as a travel agent at Breakaway Travel. He asked her to book tickets for Leifer, her husband and their eight children on the next flight to Israel, saying that they needed to travel “urgently”.
The current principal of Adass Israel School, Professor Israel Herszberg, gave evidence that Leifer borrowed a great deal of money from members of the community before her departure: “She borrowed money on whatever pretences she had, and very large sums of money to my knowledge”. In the weeks that followed, outraged parents told The Age that they believed Leifer had borrowed $100,000 from a family in the community before leaving Australia.
At 1:20am, on Thursday, 6 March 2008, Leifer, along with four of her children, boarded a flight to Hong Kong, then Israel. The tickets were paid for by an Adass community member and a company associated with the president of the board. At one stage of his evidence, Ernst said he “could not recall” the motivation for asking Leifer to leave the country.
Manny Waks acknowledges that there has been denial in many sectors, “not necessarily out of malice, but more so out of ignorance”. Around the time he went public with his story of the abuse he suffered at Yeshivah College, another ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in St Kilda, Waks says: “I was approached by a senior member of the Jewish community, who said to me that ‘I was shocked, because I knew it happened in the Catholic Church amongst the Gentiles, but in our own community…’”.
This is, according to Waks, a representative view within the ultra-Orthodox communities.
“There was also obviously the issue of cover-ups too,” he says, “where some knew it was happening but definitely preferred to deny it and move on, so that our community would come across as untarnished and perfect. That somehow we don’t have these issues, but others do.”
Waks believes that The Australian Jewish News “got it right when they described the Australian Orthodox rabbinate as being ‘rotten to the core’”.
“Of course, this does not mean that each and every Orthodox rabbi is rotten; there are many good rabbis,” he says. “But the rabbinate as a whole has dealt with this issue in a disgraceful manner.”
In mid-2014, The Age newspaper reported concerns from a member of Leifer’s new community in Immanuel, Israel. Leifer’s husband works as a rabbi at a local synagogue, and the unidentified source told The Age that Leifer often took children from the synagogue to her home for after-school tutoring. The Age reported that this caused alarm for members of the community who knew accusations had been levelled against her in Australia. However, there has been no record of any investigations or charges against Leifer in Israel.
Extradition proceedings finally commenced in September 2014, when Leifer was placed under house arrest in Israel, but in the year that has passed, there still has not been an initial hearing. On July 15 this year, Leifer’s lawyers successfully argued for yet another delay, on the basis that she is suffering from “psychosis and stress”.
Lawyer Yehuda Fried said: “The Israeli law confirms that anyone in a psychotic state cannot be subject to legal proceedings”, telling reporters he was willing to spend years fighting the extradition and would appeal to the Israeli High Court if necessary.
Attorney-General George Brandis’s department has confirmed that if returned to Australia, Leifer will face prosecution for 74 sexual assault offences against her students in her time at Adass Israel School.
In the separate civil proceedings brought by the former 14-year-old student against the school, in what has been described as a landmark ruling, Justice Jack Rush found Adass Israel School to be directly and vicariously liable for Leifer’s conduct and awarded the plaintiff more than $1.27 million in damages, including $100,000 exemplary damages against the school, and $150,000 against Leifer.
In his judgment, Justice Rush said: “In considering the merits of the case against Leifer, I consider her conduct warrants punishment; in awarding exemplary damages against Leifer I have particular regards to deterrence, both deterrence to Leifer but also importantly to others in like positions of authority and trust minded to act in a similar manner.”
Justice Rush said he believed the school had acted in such a “deplorable” fashion that “amounts to disgraceful and contumelious behaviour demonstrating a complete disregard for Leifer’s victims”. He also commented on the school’s apparent “disdain for due process of criminal investigation in this state,” and said it had likely acted in such a way protect the reputation of the Adass community.
“The conduct of [the school]… in facilitating the urgent departure was likely motivated by a desire to conceal her wrongdoing and isolate the conduct and its consequences to within the Adass community.”
Solicitors for the plaintiff have confirmed that they have been engaged by another former student of Leifer’s.
Meanwhile, the wider Jewish community has rallied around victims of child sexual abuse. Leifer “must be returned to Australia to face justice”, says Executive Director of Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Peter Wertheim.
“The case illustrates yet again the devastating long-term effects of child abuse on survivors and how those effects have been compounded by institutional attempts to cover up, minimise or fail to acknowledge instances of abuse,” he says.
The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies started a child protection task force focused “on educating the Jewish community on all factors relating to this issue.”
“Sixty community leaders participated in our initial seminar, prioritising prevention policies and procedures and the obligation to report to police,” chief executive Vic Alhadeff says.
In 2011, Sarah finally filed a report with the police. Earlier that year, with the help of a friend she had made outside the Adass community, she completely cut ties with her parents – and with the only way of life she’d ever known.
Previously, Sarah had seen that the only other way to escape her life was to be married, and begged her older sister to help arrange a match for her. Sarah met her husband-to-be only three times before they were married, in supervised half-hour visits where they would discuss “what role religion would have in our lives, and what kind of wife I would be”.
Following the wedding, the young couple moved overseas, as Sarah’s husband continued his religious studies. Five weeks after the wedding, Sarah was raped outside her house, near a building site.
“I didn’t actually tell my husband straight away,” she says, “and when I did, the next day, he got really, really angry. He blamed me, saying the way that I was dressed caused the rape.”
Sarah was wearing the traditional attire of a newly-married woman: a long skirt, long top, a wig to cover her hair, and no makeup. “Everything was completely covered, you couldn’t see a thing,” she says.
“My husband took me to five or six rabbis, and without making eye contact with me, they made me sit next to my husband and told me that I should have dressed more modestly, and that my husband should tell his wife that she needed to wear clothes that were two sizes too big for me, and that if I had, this wouldn’t have happened.”
The anger Sarah felt at this moment, she says, is indescribable.
“I’d just been raped,” she spits. “Instead of understanding me, my husband had taken me to people to tell me that it was my fault, and what I was doing wrong.”
The marriage deteriorated quickly and was never consummated. Sarah moved back to Melbourne and this, she says, “is when I realised I didn’t give a shit about what anyone in the community thought about me”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sarah’s religious views have changed drastically over the past decade.
“Honestly,” she says, “I don’t know if I believe in God now, because after everything that has happened to me, I don’t know that there can be a God.”
“When I was young and growing up, I used to lie in bed and pray to God. I would pray, ‘Please make my Mum die,’ and he didn’t listen. Even back then, I used to question. Faith wasn’t something that I held on to. I hold onto people, and I hold on to my support network.”
A female friend from a less Orthodox community helped Sarah to put her old life behind her. The pair moved in together, and soon Sarah had a whole new network of friends. She describes her social interactions as painfully awkward at first.
“I was like a baby,” she laughs. Sarah got a secretarial job and was soon supporting herself. It was the first time she felt valued as a person.
“I always knew I wasn’t dumb,” she says, “I’ve got two very smart parents. But not having any opportunity to develop intellectually was very difficult.”
Today, she’s at university and hopes to be able to help young people who are suffering from abuse.
“Now I don’t have anything to do with the community, which is just the best thing,” she says. Sarah doesn’t often smile, but when she says this, a hint of a grin creeps in.
* Sarah is not her real name.
Malka Leifer’s extradition is still pending. She is yet to face criminal charges for any allegations in Australia.
Alert: please call to urge passage of anti-Child Porn Legislation
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformPosts from Amy and Vicky Act for 10_28_2015
Amy and Vicky Act Update
Contents:
Academics Both Left and Right Endorse Congressional Action to Fix the Supreme Court’s Decision in Paroline
Academics Both Left and Right Endorse Congressional Action to Fix the Supreme Court’s Decision in Paroline
Oct 27, 2015 11:47 pm | Child Victims
Seldom has an issue—any issue—garnered such bi-partisan support as the Amy and Vicky Act which passed the Senate in February 98–0. Unfortunately the bill remains stalled in the House Judiciary Committee despite a March hearing and bi-partisan vows of quick Congressional action.
Perhaps most surprising of all is that the AVA has near universal support (except from child pornography defendants) from both Republicans and Democrats, and liberal and conservative academics.
Consider this piece from one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America, Professor Richard L. Hasen, at the University of California Irvine School of Law:
Today the Supreme Court decided a statutory interpretation case, Paroline v. U.S. with no easy answer, an unusual cross-ideological divide among the Justices, an interpretation offered by the majority which Adam Liptak rightfully describes as “a new and vague legal standard,” and a Chief Justice in his dissenting opinion begging Congress to fix the problem (“The statute as written allows no recovery; we ought to say so, and give Congress a chance to fix it.”). Even though Congress rarely overrides [the Supreme Court] these days, I predict an override in this case, and probably relatively quickly….
But thinking about this from the point of view of Legislation, this seems the ideal case for a Congressional override. As I’ve noted in a recent law review article, Congress now rarely overrides the Court, and when it does, there tend to be partisan overrides (as when Republicans overrode the Supreme Court in cutting back habeas for detainees in Hamdan or when Democrats overrode the Supreme Court in allowing more employment remedies in Ledbetter). I attribute the decline of bipartisan overrides to increasing political polarization in Congress….
But even in an era of intense partisanship, as we are in right now, there is room sometimes for biparisanship, and this looks like the perfect opportunity for two reasons. First, everyone hates child pornographers and wants to look tough on crime. Unless Congress is satisfied with the vague standard of the majority, it could look good for all of Congress to get tougher than the Court was willing to be on child pornographers—particularly when the Court’s ruling means that many victims are undercompensated….
Second, though related to the first point, taking a stand in favor of fixing the statute won’t be seen as going up against the Supreme Court. If all the conservatives were on one side and all the liberals on the other in a 5‐4 decision, then an override of a Supreme Court statutory case looks like an attack on one wing of the Court. Here, you have a case with a cross-ideological majority throwing up its hands as to an administrable rule, and three of four dissenters asking Congress to step in.
In an era where Congress can do so little thanks to ideological polarization, a new Amy Act looks to be a no-brainer.
Similarly, this piece in The Federalist Society’s journal Engage, calls on Congress to fix the statute that three conservative justices in Paroline found “impossible:”
In the end, Congress will have to fix the statute it wrote. Well intentioned guidance by the Supreme Court is simply no substitute for the hard work of legislating. And in the meantime, busy trial courts will work with what they have, and do their best to dispense justice under difficult circumstances, and in often heartbreaking cases. Congress, however, appears to believe that Amy deserves better.
Finally, Professor Marci Hamilton, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, best sums up the need for Congressional action in the wake of the Paroline decision:
This is a hard case, in part because we are still not very good at dealing with the evils of the Internet. As Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion and Justice Sotomayor’s dissent agreed, it just cannot be that a victim should have to prove that she knew the identity of the posessors and traders in her images when the distribution network is the Internet. That is an impossible task. And, without question, she was harmed by Paroline, even if she did not know about him.
But it is even more of a hard case, because Congress’s language is not clear, and the system it laid out does not comport with anything we have seen before. There is a simple two-part fix, if you parse Justice Kennedy’s and Justice Sotomayor’s views closely enough: (1) Congress should enact a federal rule of contribution among child pornography defendants and (2) replace “proximate cause” with “aggregate causation.” That would make it possible for the many Amys of our world to obtain restitution from even one perpetrator in the marketplace and obtain full restitution. The best part of this solution is that it would then incentivize the one defendant forced to pay it all to identify others as contributors. Let the defendants go after their many contacts in the market for contribution. That reduces the restitution, even if levied against a single person, from an excessive personal fine, and puts the burden of parsing out blame on the bad guys, not the victims who never asked to be on the Internet in the first place.
The AVA incorporates both of Professor Hamilton’s suggestions with a federal rule of contribution among child pornography defendants and by replacing proximate cause with aggregate causation.
Most of these articles were written over 18 months ago. The Congressional “hard work of legislating” which seemed like such a bi-partisan “no-brainer” back in 2014 to fix a “system [which] does not comport with anything we have seen before” remains tragically elusive.
It’s time for the House to get moving to finally pass the AVA! With 38 Republican co-sponsors and 35 Democrat co-sponsors, the AVA completely lacks “ideological polarization.” And maybe that’s the problem. But with an election approaching in just 12 months “it could look good for all of Congress to get tougher than the Court was willing to be on child pornographers—particularly when the Court’s ruling means that many victims are undercompensated.”
Contact House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte [R-VA] and ask him to vote S.295/H.R. 595 out of the House Judiciary Committee for a swift vote by the full House.
It’s time for the House to pass the AVA. Child pornography victims have waited long enough!
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Recent Posts
U.K. Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety Recommends Restitution for Child Pornography Victims
House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee Hearing on the AVA: Child Exploitation Restitution Following the Paroline v. United States Decision
House Judiciary Subcommittee Announces Hearing on the AVA
Senate Passes the AVA 98-0!!
United States Leading the Way Worldwide in Victim Compensation with the AVA
About the AVA – S.295 / H.R.595
A federal statute (18 U.S.C. §2259) requires that, in child sexual exploitation cases, a defendant must pay restitution for “the full amount of the victim’s losses.” That works for crimes in which a defendant directly causes specific harm to a victim, but child pornography crimes are different. A child pornography victim is harmed by the initial abuse, then harmed by the distribution and possession of images of that abuse.
The Supreme Court has recognized that victims are harmed by the ongoing “trade” and “the continuing traffic” in child sex abuse images. “In a sense,” the Court said, “every viewing of child pornography is a repetition of the victim’s abuse.” On the Internet, that abuse never ends.
Each step in the child pornography process—production, distribution, and possession—increases the harm to a victim but makes it more difficult to identify those responsible. Victims of this kind of crime are especially in need of restitution to help put their lives back together. Meeting that challenge is the purpose of the Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Restitution Improvement Act of 2015.
“Amy” and “Vicky” are the victims in two of the most widely-distributed child pornography series in the world. On April 23, 2014, in Paroline v. United States, which reviewed Amy’s case, the Supreme Court found that the existing restitution statute is not suited for cases like theirs because it requires proving the impossible: how one person’s possession of particular images concretely harmed an individual victim. That standard puts the burden on victims to forever chase defendants and recover next to nothing.
The Amy and Vicky Act creates an effective, balanced mandatory restitution process for victims of child pornography that responds to the Supreme Court’s decision in Paroline v. United States. It does three things that reflect the nature of these crimes.
First, it considers the total harm to the victim, including from persons who may not yet have been identified.
Second, it requires real and timely restitution.
Third, it allows defendants who have contributed to the same victim’s harm to spread the restitution cost among themselves.
A victim’s losses include medical services, therapy, rehabilitation, transportation, child care, and lost income
If a victim was harmed by a single defendant, the defendant must pay full restitution for all her losses
If a victim was harmed by multiple individuals, including those not yet identified, a judge can impose restitution on an individual defendant in two ways depending on the circumstances of the case
the defendant must pay “the full amount of the victim’s losses” or, if less than the full amount,
at least $250,000 for production, $150,000 for distribution, or $25,000 for possession
Federal law already provides a mechanism for creating a restitution payment schedule
Multiple defendants who have harmed the same victim and have paid at least those minimum amounts are jointly and severally liable and may sue each other for contribution to equalize the restitution cost (the Supreme Court said in Paroline that this is important)
Those who continue a victim’s abuse should not be able to hide in the crowd; there should be no safety in numbers. Victims should not be abused again by putting the burden on them to prove the impossible. Instead, the Amy and Vicky Act creates a practical process, based on the unique kind of harm from child pornography, that both puts the burden on defendants where it belongs and provides actual and timely restitution for victims.
Anthony Borrelli, Diocese, DAs team up to hold priests accountable in sex abuse cases, Press Connects
/in New York /by SOL ReformProsecutors from seven counties have joined the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse in an effort to root out sexual abuse by members of the clergy by improving how those allegations are reported and investigated.
The agreement puts on paper what has been in practice for 12 years, Broome County District Attorney Gerald Mollen said during a Wednesday news conference in his office. But now, he said, this designates the Diocese as a mandated reporter of any allegations regarding sexual abuse.
“The overall goal is that no child ever again would be abused by anyone, even in the clergy,” Mollen said. “It’s a combination of holding the offender accountable and giving closure to the victim.”
Bishop Robert Cunningham said this does not mean names of clergy members whom the Diocese found credible evidence of abuse would be disclosed, but that information is being shared with prosecutors.
Allegations of sexual abuse by priests date back decades but exploded into a crisis for the church in the USA more than 10 years ago after media reports detailing a litany of abuses and coverups by American bishops.
Cunningham acknowledged the church has not always done a good job handling abuse allegations in the past, but described this agreement as a means to help change that perception.
“It’s no secret that people are unhappy with the Diocese,” Cunningham said. “A priest or any other adult who abuses a child is wrong.”
According to the agreement, the Diocese will immediately contact a county district attorney’s office when a Diocesan official has learned or has reason to suspect a member of the clergy or person under the auspices of the Diocese has sexually abused a minor.
The agreement also prohibits the Diocese from conducting an independent investigation prior to reporting it to law enforcement, beyond conducting a preliminary inquiry to determine whether the allegation is a possible sex crime. If there is a question about the allegation being a criminal matter, the Diocese will be required to consult with a district attorney.
Among the seven prosecutors to sign the agreement is Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick, who said Wednesday this is a “huge step forward” in shedding light on these types of allegations.
This protocol will be carried out regardless of how old the allegations are, or whether the suspected perpetrator is active in the Diocese, the document states.
“The age of the allegation is irrelevant,” Fitzpatrick said. “If it’s beyond the statute of limitations, the matter will still be referred to the district attorney’s office.”
Once the Diocese reports the allegation, they will be required to coordinate with the prosecutors to ensure any criminal investigation is not compromised, the agreement states.
In addition to Cunningham, Mollen and Fitzpatrick, the agreement was also signed by Madison County District Attorney William Gabor, Chenango County District Attorney Joseph McBride, Oneida County District Attorney Scott McNamara, Oswego County District Attorney Gregory Oakes and Cortland County District Attorney Mark Suben.
Full article: http://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/public-safety/2015/10/28/diocese-das-team-up-hold-priests-accountable-sex-abuse-cases/74736618/