Richard Winton, Hannah Fry
Wed, October 16, 2024
The agreement caps a quarter-century of litigation against the most populous archdiocese in the United States. Above, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
In what could be the closing chapter in a landmark legal battle, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $880 million to victims of clergy sexual abuse dating back decades in the largest settlement involving the Catholic Church.
Attorneys for 1,353 people who allege that they suffered horrific abuse at the hands of local Catholic priests reached the settlement after months of negotiations with the archdiocese. The agreement caps a quarter-century of litigation against the most populous archdiocese in the United States.
The settlement leaves only a few lawsuits pending against the church in Los Angeles, attorneys for the victims say.
The archdiocese had previously paid $740 million to victims in various settlements and had pledged to better protect its church members, so this settlement would put the total payout at more than $1.5 billion.
"These survivors have suffered for decades in the aftermath of the abuse. Dozens of the survivors have died. They are aging, and many of those with knowledge of the abuse within the church are too. It was time to get this resolved," said attorney Morgan Stewart, who led the settlement negotiations.
Attorney Mike Reck of Jeff Anderson & Associates said, "This is a measure of justice. There can never be full justice. These brave survivors brought it to protect kids in the future."
Archbishop José H. Gomez approved the settlement, which will be funded by archdiocese investments, accumulated reserves, bank financing, and other assets. According to the archdiocese, certain religious orders and others named in the litigation will also cover some of the cost of the settlement.
“I am sorry for every one of these incidents, from the bottom of my heart,” Gomez said in an announcement to parishioners. “My hope is that this settlement will provide some measure of healing for what these men and women have suffered.”
He said it provides "just compensation to the survivor-victims of these past abuses while also allowing the Archdiocese to continue to carry out our ministries."
The archdiocese enforces strict background and reporting requirements, Gomez said, and it has established extensive training programs for staff and volunteers to protect young people. “Today, as a result of these reforms, new cases of sexual misconduct by priests and clergy involving minors are rare in the Archdiocese," he said. "No one who has been found to have harmed a minor is serving in ministry at this time. And I promise: We will remain vigilant.”
Still, victims have continued to come forward with decades-old claims.
Read more: Former L.A. Archdiocese priest pleads no contest to possession of child pornography
For more than two decades the church has been roiled by allegations that onetime leaders mishandled abuse cases, sometimes moving clergy known to have sexually abused minors to other parishes rather than removing them from the priesthood and informing law enforcement.
In legal documents, diocesan and police records over the last few decades, more than 300 priests who worked in the archdiocese in Los Angeles have been accused of sexually abusing minors.
Gomez succeeded longtime Cardinal Roger Mahony, whose handling of the scandal drew fierce criticism and undercut his moral authority as one of America’s most prominent Roman Catholic leaders. In 2013, documents were released that showed Mahony and a top advisor plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement.
"Cardinal Mahony is the center of a lot of these allegations," Stewart said. "His years of covering up allow more children to suffer."
As part of the new settlement, Stewart said, the archdiocese will disclose more of the files it kept that documented abuse by priests.
Among the clergymen cited in the lawsuits that were settled Wednesday, Father Michael Baker is one of the priests with the most victims. He confessed to abusing boys to Mahony in 1986, but was allowed to return to the ministry after receiving therapy. However, authorities say, he went on to molest more children.
Authorities believe that Baker molested more than 40 children during his years as a priest.
In 2009, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles launched a federal grand jury investigation into Mahony and the church’s handling of abuse allegations. The investigation did not result in any criminal charges.
But during decades of civil litigation, it was revealed that the archdiocese went to extreme lengths to ensure that abuse was not reported to the police. Memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, revealed in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.
After Baker admitted his abuse of young boys, Curry wrote in a memo, "I see a difficulty here, in that if he were to mention his problem with child abuse it would put the therapist in the position of having to report him. He "cannot mention his past problem," Curry added. Mahony’s response to the memo was handwritten across the bottom of the page: "Sounds good — please proceed!!"
Two decades would pass before authorities gathered enough information to charge Baker with abuse. Baker pleaded guilty in criminal court to sexually abusing two boys in 2007 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was released in 2011 because of credit for time served in county jail and good behavior.
It was the Baker case that largely led to Mahony's downfall.
Baker told The Times in 2001 that he had informed Mahony of his sexual attraction to children in 1986.
"I told Mahony I had a problem," he said. Mahony did not ask for specifics and appeared willing to let him remain in the priesthood, Baker said. "He was very solicitous and understanding. I was glad I brought it up."
Read more: Newsom vetoes bill allowing more lawsuits from victims of sex abuse at juvenile facilities
George Neville Rucker was another priest who faced abuse allegations and was the subject of several cases settled Wednesday, Stewart said. Lawyers allege he had at least 41 victims from the late 1940s to the 1980s and was accused of raping girls as young as 7.
Rucker was forced to retire as a priest in 1987. He remained a chaplain until 2002, when he was charged with 29 counts of molesting girls; fearing he would try to flee prosecution, authorities plucked him off a cruise ship bound for Russia. The charges were dropped in 2003 after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling determined some cases, including Rucker's, were beyond the statute of limitations.
In 1991, Rucker met with a victim in Seattle and attributed the sexual abuse he'd committed to a steroid medication he was taking and to God, a meeting attendee wrote in a letter to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The attendee's name is redacted in the letter.
"Well, God called me into the priesthood and God doesn’t make mistakes, so I assume all of this happened as part of God’s plan for [the victim's] salvation," Rucker told the person.
"It’s the first time I ever heard someone lay responsibility for their sexual abuse of someone at God’s doorstep!" the person wrote in the letter, adding that that they were concerned because it's rare to "see a sex offender with only one victim."
In 2014, the Los Angeles Archdiocese settled what it believed would be the last of its pending priest molestation lawsuits and imposed a series of reforms. However, a change in state law in 2019 that gave adults more time to file lawsuits over childhood sexual abuse resulted in a new wave of litigation against the archdiocese.
The settlements have been financially crushing for Catholic dioceses across the country. To finance them, they've sold vast swaths of church property and in some cases exhausted or relinquished insurance coverage for past and future abuse claims.
More than two dozen Catholic dioceses, including those in San Diego, Oakland and San Francisco, have filed for bankruptcy in recent years.
In 2019, the L.A. Archdiocese announced a record $8-million settlement with an 18-year-old former Catholic school student who was molested by a coach. It was the largest individual settlement by the archdiocese in a sex abuse case. Her attorney said concerns about the teacher’s conduct were ignored.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Archdiocese agrees to pay over $800M to settle sexual abuse claims
Ashleigh Fields
Thu, October 17, 2024
The Archdioceses of Los Angeles has reached an $880 million settlement Wednesday with 1,353 victims of childhood sexual abuse cases.
Survivors came forward after California passed Assembly Bill 218, which opened a three-year window for the revival of civil claims of past sexual abuse involving minors.
“While there is no amount of money that can replace what was taken from these 1,353 brave individuals who have suffered in silence for decades, there is justice in accountability,” the plaintiffs’ liaison counsel wrote. “We are grateful to the brave survivors who came forward to hold those responsible accountable and to protect the children of the future.”
The archdiocese’s administrative office will fund the settlement using accumulated reserves and investment holdings, bank financing and other archdiocesan assets, in addition to payments by certain religious orders and others named in the litigation, according to their announcement.
The Plaintiffs’ Liaison Committee is coordinating with plaintiffs to approve the proposed settlement. The final implementation of the agreement is dependent on the achievement of certain approval levels.
“The Archdiocese apologizes for the harm that was caused by individuals in the Church that contributed to the pain that survivor-victims have endured,” said Kirk Dillman, counsel for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, in a statement almost a year after concluding mediation with the Judge Daniel J. Buckley presiding.
This is the second time the Los Angeles Archdiocese has reached a global settlement of abuse claims. The entity previously addressed 500 claims of sexual assault brought forth in 2003 and entered into an international settlement in 2007.
“Most of the alleged acts of abuse covered in this settlement took place more than fifty years ago, with a number of the cases dating back to the 1940s. Some of these acts are alleged to have been committed by Archdiocesan clergy, some by lay people, and some by religious order priests and clergy from other dioceses who were serving here,” José H. Gomez, archbishop of Los Angeles, wrote in an open letter.
He highlighted the years of past abuse the archdiocese has been accused of covering and shared that survivors are offered pastoral care and financial support to “assist in their healing.”
“No one who has been found to have harmed a minor is serving in ministry at this time. And I promise: we will remain vigilant,” he later added.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Attorney: 900 to 1,000 filed sex abuse claims in Archdiocese of Baltimore bankruptcy case
Alex Mann, Baltimore Sun
Updated Tue, October 15, 2024
Between 900 and 1,000 people have filed claims in the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s bankruptcy case, alleging they were sexually abused as children by people employed by the Catholic Church’s, a lawyer for a committee of abuse survivors, said during a hearing Tuesday.
The figure adds scope to the scourge of clergy sexual abuse in Maryland. Last year, the state attorney general’s office released a report documenting the torment of more than 600 children by 156 clergy and other church officials dating to the 1940s and spanning Baltimore and nine other counties. Officials maintained there likely were more victims than investigators had identified.
“Wow. Woah,” said David Lorenz, Maryland director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, after being informed of the estimate. “My heart sinks. There’s that many people that got hurt. It’s a stab in the heart. I wouldn’t have guessed it was that many.”
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In an emailed statement to The Sun, Christian Kendzierski, a spokesman for the archdiocese, commended survivors for coming forward.
“The Archdiocese knows that behind these claims lie horrible and tragic stories. Stories of abuse, stories of misuse of power and stories of how the most innocent were harmed,” Kendzierski said. “Our goals in this process include compensating those individuals with the aim of helping to provide a possible path toward healing. The Archdiocese continues to acknowledge the courage of the victim-survivors who have stepped forward, many for the first time, during this process.”
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michelle M. Harner said she called Tuesday’s hearing to “continue the flow of information” in a highly technical and, at times, confidential legal proceeding.
The archdiocese, America’s oldest, declared bankruptcy Sept. 29, 2023, two days before the effective date of a new law that erased time limits for people who were sexually assaulted as children to sue their abusers and the institutions that enabled their torment.
By filing for bankruptcy, the church aimed to limit its liability and protect its assets. Archdiocesan officials also attributed the decision to a desire to compensate all survivors of abuse, rather than paying immense sums of money to a few.
As a result, lawsuits slated for state court had to be repurposed into proof of claim forms in bankruptcy court. The deadline for such claims came and went with hundreds filing. But until Tuesday, there had been no official estimates offered.
Attorneys in the case are currently involved in the critical mediation phase, where they hash out behind closed doors such issues as how many claims there are; how much money the archdiocese, its parishes and insurers have to contribute to settle them; and how the church will prevent such abuse from occurring in the future.
“The silence in the court can be unsettling to those in the process,” Harner said.
Edwin Caldie, the lawyer who estimated the number of claims filed, describing the survivors who came forward as courageous, and encouraged them to trust the bankruptcy process, particularly the committee chosen to represent all survivors’ interests. He called the seven committee members as “unusually devoted,” intelligent and “dogged in their process.”
“I’ve never worked with a group of people like them,” said Caldie, who is tasked with representing the interests of all victims in the bankruptcy case.
He later added, “the mediation process, which has to be confidential, is moving forward.”
Phillip D. Anker, an attorney for one of the archdiocese’s insurers, urged patience.
“I think that this process is going to take a while. It’s going to take a lot of time given the issues involved,” said Anker, who represents the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., Hartford Casualty Insurance Co. and Hartford Fire Insurance Co.
Tensions between insurers, the archdiocese and survivors committee mounted ahead of mediation, with the church filing suit against its insurers for alleged breach of contract. The church and insurers agreed to table the lawsuit so long as the insurance companies were allowed to nominate a third mediator, in addition to the two originally approved by Harner: Robert J. Faris, chief judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Hawaii and Brian J. Nash, an attorney who specializes in mediation.
Anker described the process of evaluating abuse claims as time intensive.
He said each claim has to be evaluated through the lens of whether the archdiocese is liable and, if so, which of its insurance policies were applicable at the time of the alleged abuse.
Mediation, Anker said, is like “the beginning of a marathon.”
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