I am an adult survivor of childhood (teenage actually) sexual abuse by a Roman Catholic clergy member, a priest to use his more familiar description.  Thanks to two years of very intense and emotionally painful EMDR Therapy with a very skilled therapist who specializes in post-traumatic stress, serving both civilians and combat veterans of the military, I have learned to cope with that sad fact and mitigate its effects on me today.

This post is not about pedophilia (technically, “ephebophilia” in my case, as I was 16 at the time and ephebophilia is a primary sexual interest in mid-to-late pubescent adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19).  This post is not about whether Catholicism in general and Catholic clergy specifically is/are more prone to this perversion of healthy sexuality.  This post is not about what happened to me, at the time and in the years following.

This post is about files.

Between 2003 and 2007, I was involved in a civil lawsuit against the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles called California Judicial Council Coordinated Proceeding No. 4286, referred to as “The Clergy Cases I.”  On July 15, 2007, 507 of my fellow plaintiffs and I, all of us clergy sexual abuse survivors, reached a landmark $660 million dollar settlement with the archdiocese. 

The settlement we negotiated through our lawyers (I had four at two different firms working on my case alone) did not merely provide financial remuneration to me and my fellow survivors, it required the LA Archdiocese to publicly release its closely guarded secret personnel files on sexually offending priests within its ranks, and within the ranks of the religious orders working in the archdiocese.  This was a major sticking point in settlement negotiations.

The amount of money being offered us was eye-watering.  In many cases, it was life-changing.  It was for me.  But without the concomitant release of the files – which would show what the leadership of the archdiocese and orders knew, when they knew, and what they did with that knowledge – the money was little more than a lottery win.  All of the survivors I was in communication with at the time, including my friend the late Phil Saviano, whose story was featured in the academy award-winning film Spotlight, agreed that financial compensation without accountability was not justice.  And we wanted justice more than money.

The archdiocese and the orders ultimately “agreed” to release the files, but it would take another eight years of legal wrangling for that to come to pass.  By 2015, 205 confidential clergy files had been released by the nation’s largest Catholic archdiocese and more than two dozen religious orders operating within its jurisdiction.  In 2013, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles released the first 128 files after fighting a years-long battle to keep them private in direct conflict with and contradiction of our 2007 settlement agreement.  We came to the table in good faith.  They did not.

After that, another 68 files kept on priests, nuns, and religious brothers who belonged to 26 different religious orders were made public in drips and drabs, as well as another 9 files concerning priests from other dioceses who offended in Los Angeles.

The files show the coordinated, systematic way that top leaders of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, including and specifically the now-retired Cardinal Roger Mahony – the man in charge, worked secretly to keep accused priests safe from criminal prosecution and to minimize the financial risk posed by civil lawsuits.  Priests were shuffled from parish to parish to avoid scandal with no warning to the public at the priest’s new assignment that a credibly accused sexual predator had been placed in their midst with access to their children.  Some files show priests being moved overseas to avoid trouble brewing in Los Angeles and others include detailed psychological records and accounts of sex crimes.  One file includes memos that detail how a suicidal priest transferred to Los Angeles from Indonesia was secretly hidden away in a hotel in Desert Hot Springs (about 10 minutes north of where I am sitting right now) after he molested a boy in his LA parish and there was a threat of physical injury to the priest from vigilantism on the part of the parishioners who found out about it and sought to take matters into their own hands.

Beyond coverup, what the files show is knowledge.  And that is crucial.  As a victim-survivor myself, I know firsthand how hard it is to get anyone to believe you.  A priest would never do the things we were accusing them of.  Or so people thought.  The files show that they did it, sure, but also that they had help in the form of institutional leadership who knew what they were up to and took an active role in shielding them from public scrutiny.

And that is why I have chosen to break my self-imposed silence on the matter and write about this today – because another fight over “files” is playing out in our nation’s capital:  the Epstein Files.  The House unanimously (minus 1 lone Republican) voted to compel the Department of Justice to release the files, and the Senate gave “unanimous consent.”  The next step is Trump’s, and he is expected to sign the bill – a dramatic and humiliating reversal and defeat for the president who spent months downplaying their importance, even calling the files a “Democratic hoax” at one point.

I stand in solidarity with the survivors of Epstein and his powerful friends.  I don’t know what the files will show or who they will name.  But I encourage every one of you, my thoughtful readers, to look beyond the headlines and salacious details, and focus on this one key point:

they knew, they knew it was wrong, and they covered it up.

To access the clergy files produced by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as a result of our 2007 settlement agreement, which stipulated that they must be made available to the public and easily accessible, CLICK HERE.