(We report what you will not read in any corporate media outlet.)
Thursday Sept. 24 at 6PM Central, Arthur Baselice tells of pursuing his son's perpetrator, Charles Newman, (UPDATE: Don't know what happened, but it's past 4:00 and the program is not airing.) - through Philadelphia courts. Watch online here: and you can call in to the program live while it's happening at 866-905-8855. The show, Educating to End Abuse, airs from KCTU, Wichita, Kansas, third Thursday each month. Like last August, City of Angels will run a loose transcript soon after the show.
Tom Doyle sent two emails to City of Angels recently that we are posting here, one with the letter Doyle sent to the California Supreme Court about the L.A. Archdiocese's bending truth to influence justice. Then the canon lawyer dashed off a second email after reading the September 21st post here, with bizarre quotes from a Donald Steier brief defending pedophile priest Michael Baker for Cardinal Roger Mahony. Here is what Doyle had to say first about Steier et al:
Dear City of Angels: Try looking at it this way. Steier, Hennigan, Woods and the other lawyers who work for the archdiocese are not stupid. They have no doubt figured out that Roger is the undisputed monarch and the most important, if not the only important figure in the drama. The accused priests and their files are a kind of by-product.
They are the reason for the challenge to Roger's power, image, control and equilibrium. He found out years ago that the power card doesn't work with the victims and their attorneys. They (or at least most of them) have something the Cardinal does not ... integrity!
There may be a few among the victims' attorneys who are lacking a bit in the integrity dept. but on the whole the attorneys are committed to something Roger and his crew are not committed to ... truth.
The victims have not bowed to Roger's so-called power. They aren't impressed with the mythology he uses to prop himself up and they aren't going away. So it's a matter of fighting it out in court. The longer Roger's lawyers can keep the game going the more money they make. Since Roger is the king of the archdiocese he can do whatever he wants with the millions of dollars donated by the unsuspecting "faithful."
Who suffers? The victims and those who love and support them. In spite of the PR hype that Roger's team churns out, nobody in the archdiocesan control center cares a hoot about the men and women whose lives the clergy have trashed and whose lives the narcissistic Cardinal continues to make miserable.
People of integrity, especially the victims, get furious with the outlandish statements of Roger's Public Relations mouthpiece but its not worth the effort to get mad at him. He's like a tape deck ... put a tape in and he plays back whatever is on it. In the archdiocese he no doubt gets paid decent dollars to keep up the barrage of loonie fairy tales about Roger and his cabal.
If the Mormons, or Enron or SNAP for that matter paid him enough he'd switch sides in a heartbeat.
All this being so, these lawyers know that they are sitting in front of a slot machine and that every time they pull the handle they get a flood of cash ... it doesn't stop. Roger will keep paying their sky-high hourly fees and they will keep churning out the increasingly bizarre defenses ... not to protect the rights of the accused priests but to keep the spigot open.
Maybe someday someone with writing skills will gather all the lunacy the church lawyers have spewed out and publish it as some sort of a caricature of the American legal system, injected with sociopathic toxicity from organized Catholicism. It could be a kind of amalgam of Disney and Stephen King ... Mickey Mouse and the Predator team up to take on the Kingdom of Light.
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Doyle was responding to this post: Monday, September 21, 2009, Click headline for the whole story:
Baker may still offend as ‘lewd fondling does not require an erection,’ reads pedophile priest 5th Amendment plea, hearing tomorrow
*By Kay Ebeling
Because he might commit more sex crimes in the future, Michael Baker cannot release his answers in interrogatories about past sex crimes, according to a Defense motion be heard in L.A. Superior Court Tuesday morning. Baker's age is not relevant, reads the motion, because “Lewd touching with the hands does not require the ability to achieve an erection.”Just when you think the you've read the most outrageous argument ever by an attorney defending a pedophile priest, something like Defense Motion for Protective Order by Donald Steier slaps you in the face. Steier is asking Superior Court Judge Emilie Elias to keep all discovery documents in the upcoming Luis C civil case regarding Baker secret until trial.
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DOYLE's RESPONSE to HENNIGAN:
Below Doyle writes to the Supreme Court of California about a letter from L.A. Archdiocese attorneys to the Court that we quoted in this post at CofA from Tuesday, August 11, 2009:
Sworn Enemies of Catholic Church got CA law amended, then he settled in 2007 due to prejudice and bad publicity, Mahony claims in letter to Court
By Kay Ebeling
Cardinal Roger Mahony understood that the cases settled in 2007 were going to be the last lawsuits about sex crimes in California Archdioceses, his lawyer claims in an April letter to the state's highest court. "Irrespective of merits," the letter states, the L.A. Archdiocese settled all 510 claims in 2007 because plaintiffs were creating bad publicity and prejudice against the Church.
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DOYLE WROTE TO THE CA COURT:
September 8, 2009
The Honorable Ronald M. George, Chief Justice
California Supreme Court
350 McAllister Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
Quarry v The Roman Catholic Bishop of Oakland
Case Number S171382
RE: Letter from Hennigan, Bennett and Dorman, April 21, 2009
Dear Justice George,
I very recently had the opportunity to read the above-cited letter, signed by Lee Potts, apparently of the firm of Hennigan, Bennett and Dorman. I enclose a copy of this letter for your reference.
I am writing in reference to certain statements in the letter which are factually incorrect and others that are phrased in such a way so as to drastically distort the truth of the matter. This letter and the case it refers to are grounded in the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clergy. My interest in this matter is grounded in the fact that I am a Catholic priest and a Canon lawyer. I have served as a pastoral minister and counselor to victims of Catholic clergy sexual abuse throughout the United States for 25 years. I have also served as a consultant and expert witness in several hundred civil and criminal legal actions in secular courts throughout this country. In particular, I have been a consultant and expert witness in many Catholic clergy sexual abuse cases throughout the State of California since 2002. I have had extensive contact with the victims, with their families, their counselors and their attorneys.
The first statement I wish to address as being untrue is in reference to the legislation passed which allowed time-barred claims. The author of the letter says “In California, ‘sworn enemies of the Catholic Church’ helped draft and secure passage of legislation to revive otherwise time-barred claims against employers of abusers. Although the statute was worded in neutral terms, the target of the legislation in floor debates and committee reports was always the Roman Catholic Church.”
This statement is completely erroneous. Those who worked for the passage of the legislation in question were hardly “sworn enemies of the Catholic Church.” The proponents of the legislation included persons, attorneys and non-attorneys, who had extensive experience dealing with the victims of sexual abuse. The perpetrators were clergy and lay persons. One of the strongest motivating factors in urging the legislation was and remains the clinically demonstrated fact that the vast majority of sexual abuse victims are psychologically unable to publicly disclose their abuse and consequently seek any form of help including judicial relief, for periods of time that generally run between 20 and 30 years.
The push for new legislation was no doubt influenced by the state-wide revelation that hundreds of Catholic clerics had sexually abused thousands of minors over the years and that these abusers had, in most cases, been sheltered by their bishops. Exposing the existence of widespread criminal behavior by Catholic priests is certainly not evidence that those who demand accountability and justice are “sworn enemies of the Catholic Church.”
In practice the official Church spokespersons, both clerical and lay, habitually try to label any criticism of clerics or Church behavior as “anti-Catholic” or “Catholic bashing.” This is nothing more than a crude attempt to shift the blame for wrong-doing or criminal behavior from the perpetrators to the victims. In the 25 years that I have been directly involved in this issue I have seen Church officials and their attorneys defame, slander, devalue and threaten victims, victims’ families, their attorneys, their supporters and those who have advocated for them. All of this was done in the name of “defending the Church.’
The target of floor debates was not “always the Catholic Church.” This statement grossly distorts the truth. The reality in 2002 was that several hundred Catholic clergy perpetrators had been uncovered along with clear evidence of systematic cover-up by Catholic cardinals, archbishops and bishops. The Catholic Church was the most visible offender but certainly not a target of unjust criticism.
The letter describes the numbers of cases reported as a result of the legislative change as if this were proof of a campaign to defame and bankrupt the Catholic Church. The fact is that over 800 cases were surfaced in which Catholic clergy were involved. The investigation into these cases revealed that in nearly every case sufficient evidence was available to proceed. The numbers speak for themselves. There were many cases because there had been an astounding number of clergy sexual abusers. The courts only responded to what was already in existence. The victims did not make up stories and their attorneys did not make up fictitious cases.
The fourth page contains a statement about media attention: “That pressure is necessarily exacerbated as the number of cases reaches into the hundreds and the Defendants are relentlessly held up to public scorn, ridicule and contempt by mass media.” This is an overly histrionic dramatization of the facts. The Catholic Church and its clerics and bishops are not above the law. The high degree of trust demanded by them and placed in them is viciously betrayed by sexual abuse. The bishops appear to want the media to portray them as victims. Any scorn, ridicule or contempt is the direct result of the harsh reality of the widespread nature of clergy sexual abuse.
The Church’s attorneys have reaped vast sums by using every tactic available and conjuring up others that had been otherwise unknown to create an endless series of barriers and delaying tactics that have succeeded in prolonging the legal process to outrageous lengths. The victims are the only ones who have suffered through this by being subjected to a seemingly endless process of mental and emotional torture.
The objections of the Catholic cardinals, archbishops and bishops, expressed by their attorneys, are based on their fundamental but totally erroneous belief that they are somehow above the laws of the State of California. This arrogant and unrealistic attitude has apparently blinded them to the essential fact of what this entire phenomenon is all about. It is not about money, or the image of the hierarchy or the power of bishops. It is about thousands of innocent, vulnerable children whose physical, emotional and spiritual lives have been savagely devastated by Catholic priests and bishops and their rightful search for compassion and justice.
Sincerely,
Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, J.C.D., C.A.D.C.
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Posted by Kay Ebeling, Producer, City of Angels Blog
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Just to document how bad it gets, here is the Face of Kay in September 2009:
I'm still crying way too much.
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