Pedophile priest crime victims who can't file civil lawsuits, the "silent victims"

by Kay Ebeling

http://www.opednews.com


Silent Victims: Neither church nor advocates have done enough. “You don’t patch over the rot, you expose it,” says Boston organizer Paul Kellen

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By Kay Ebeling

"There could be 1400 silent victims in Providence, Rhode Island, alone."


First: Deposition transcripts from cases of 30-year Santa Barbara pedophile priest Matthew Kelly, now posted by Nye Peabody Stirling and Hale in Santa Barbara on their website (linked in left-hand column of this blog) and WO-O-O-O-O-W. You can click into the documents, read the deposition transcripts, AND copy and paste sections into your own writing.

Now it begins: nonstop proof of church crimes and coverups as documents start pouring out from resolved civil cases. Especially gratifying to me since last September when Bishop Brom said he hoped the San Diego settlements bring “closure to all the victims,” I erupted. How can settlements to about 10 percent of the crime victims bring closure?

Last week when I read this phrase:

“the importance of outreach to still silent victims,”

I had to phone the contact person on the press release from People of Conscience in Boston to find out more. They held a rally outside the Voice of the Faithful national meeting last week.

According to spokesman Paul Kellen, “For every one victim there are 10 others. Those are the silent victims. If they don’t come forward and identify their abuser, then we're not going to know who the guy is.

“And pedophiles don’t stop. If they (the church and advocacy groups) treat the public survivors in such a shabby manner then we are not encouraging the silent survivors to come forward.”

Bishop Accountability Dot Org held a press conference at the VOTF national meeting showing another place where you can find the “silent victims.” Documents released by attorneys for the archdiocese in Rhode Island contradict numbers released by the Rhode Island Archdiocese in the John Jay Report. Paul Kellen described the situation:

“

In the John Jay Report the Diocese of Providence reported from 1957 - 2002, there were 56 accused priests.

“The diocese of Providence is now being sued by somebody within the statute of limitations for failure to supervise and in that case the Judge ordered release of documents.

“The diocese is objecting due to undue hardship because we would have to prepare copies of documents on 125 accused pedophiles.

“So they just said 125 accused priests since 1971, in their own documents filed with Superior Court in Providence by their own attorneys.

“The number of names they released in Providence is 11. So that means there are 114 that nobody knows who they are.

“And

“For every one victim there are 10 others -- those are the ten silent victims.”

There could be 1,400 silent victims in Providence, Rhode Island alone.
TALK ABOUT SILENT VICTIMS!

I Wouldn't Make It Past the Interrogatories

I read more closely the Interrogatories that LA crime victims had to fill out in order to get their lawsuits past archdiocese attorneys, posted at City of Angels 11 forwarded by Kiesel Boucher & Larson plaintiff firm.

I wouldn't have gotten past the second or third question. How can I give addresses of my family members when no one in my family has spoken or seen each other since my dad’s murder in 1997? How can I give the name and address of every employer, when I’ve had hundreds of jobs, some that only lasted a few days, some a few weeks, a few months. That's a pattern with so many pedophile priest crime victims.

How many potential plaintiffs were discouraged before they got past Interrogatory 20?

People who lived lives like mine can’t carry on casual conversation around a water cooler.

(PARAGRAPH CUT HERE AND PASTED AT THE BOTTOM DUE TO VERY DIFFICULT DETAILS FOR ME TO RELEASE)

Kellen believes neither the church nor most advocacy groups are doing enough to reach the “silent victims.”

“My reason for organizing this rally is I believe we are not doing enough. I can look at everything that's being done and say no.

“The way the church attacks the family, the victim, anybody who supports the victim, discourages other plaintiffs from coming forward,” says Kellen.

“The biggest negative, let’s start where it starts -- Bernard Law going to Rome. You send a message to the clergy, hey fellows if you do what you're supposed to do, we'll take care of you.

“Did it stop with Bernard Law, no.

“That isn’t to say that the classes etcetera the church has started aren’t positive and helpful. That sensitivity is good. However to me --

HERE IS THE KING OF METAPHORS FOR THE DAY

Paul Kellen:

“You don’t patch over the rot, you expose it.”

“There’s rot at the end of a gutter, but before you can do the repairs, you have to expose all the rot. You don’t patch over it, you have to expose it all,” Kellen says. “This organization is patching over and hiding all that it can.”

He means the church AND the advocacy organizations who try to cowtow to the church

The best way to find out about silent victims, he said, is talk to plaintiff attorneys. So City of Angels Lady is loading up her speed dials.

Attorneys have told Kellen that for every case they take regarding clergy sex abuse, they turn away three, because they are un-litigatable cases.

Like mine.
Unlitigatable cases. People without closure.
We who cannot sue
are the silent victims.
And I am determined to keep babbling.

The longer I research to write this blog the more I realize:

The people like me who couldn't file lawsuits almost always end up being the ones with the most horrendous stories.

There’s women who have eerily similar stories about Satanic ritual abuse that accompanied their childhood experiences at the hands of Catholic priests, most of these stories come from Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, out of the way areas of the Midwest. City of Angels will report one of these stories soon.

Some lives are SO damaged that carrying out something like a lawsuit is -- impossible.

Most victims of priest pedophilia aren’t able to take part in anything as civilized as a civil lawsuit. If you're living in a cardboard box, you might miss the news that a 2-year window has opened for you to file a suit about the abuse you suffered 30 years ago, even if that's probably the core of why you're living in a cardboard box.

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END COMMERCIAL BREAK*****

Paul Kellen also said this about Boston activism:

“In the early days hundreds of people came to Voice of the Faithful meetings. We had steering committees with typically 20 people. We have a group of people that on any Sunday there’s between 8 and 10 who show up in front of Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston before the 11:30 Mass every Sunday. We had a snow storm so bad they called off Mass and there were two people outside the church on the sidewalk.”

Why can’t people in LA do things like that? Last September hmm, about the same time Brom was delivering his ridiculous apology quotes that set me off on a month long anger rage that hasn’t ended, a few of us met at the local Starbuck’s to talk about the future of the clergy sex abuse issue and about the only things we agreed on were

A - it’s almost impossible to get people in LA to be activists because we all have three or four jobs we have to juggle just to survive

And

B - if there is an issue for the future in this crime it’s the thousands of victims who have not gotten any settlement, any “closure,” and whose perpetrators are not even named in any databases.

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Here is the pasted paragraph from above:

No one in my family speaks since my dad’s murder, by a family member, in 1997. Yes, there’s that much dysfunction in just this one family, and yes, you can trace the animosity and anger that led to the murder DIRECTLY back to the jealousy that resulted from a priest diddling two of the daughters and not the eldest.

More to come. . .

www.cityofangels3.blogspot.com

Wordsmith working in TV production in Los Angeles. Also free lance journalist with an active blog. Old enough to have demonstrated against the Vietnam War but still young enough to dance.