Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal

by D'Antonio, Michael

  In style, as well as substance, Anderson mixed formalities with the kind of language jurors might find familiar from television dramas. For example, he noted that, “Bishop Loras Watters continued to place him [Adamson] in other parishes within the Diocese of Winona until it became too hot because of the threats of the Klein family.” The “heat” Anderson described was created by the possibility of disclosure. The choice of words allowed Anderson to speak of the bishop as if he were a crime boss.

  From this beginning, Anderson put on a case that set a template for almost every clergy sex abuse trial to follow. He brought Jay Klein up from Worthington to testify about the complaints his family had lodged in the 1970s. Then he called on psychologist Susan Phipps-Yonas to describe how Adamson’s betrayal had devastated his client and contributed to his many adult problems. Another expert, psychiatrist Martin Blinder, said that when he examined Doe he found “a twenty-four-year-old man whose growing up was arrested in adolescence. He can never recapture those lost years.” He added, “I think for the most part he will always be crippled in some way.”

  Defense attorneys presented their own expert witness, a psychiatrist named Barbara Long. Dr. Long had visited with the victim once and consulted medical records provided to her by defense attorneys. In her report of roughly nine pages she devoted just eight lines to sexual abuse. The rest was focused on the notion that John Doe was profoundly disturbed before he ever met Fr. Adamson. Describing him as only “moderately” affected by Adamson’s assaults, Long suggested that Doe suffered from a personality disorder that was the product of genetics as well as his early relationships with his mother. Long also speculated that Doe may have enjoyed the sexual encounters with Adamson and suggested that he would have become an addict even without the experience of abuse.

  Under cross-examination, Anderson led Long to disclose that she had no particular training in the area of sexual abuse, nor had she written any papers or conducted any research on the subject. He also attacked her suggestion that his client carried, from his family, a preexisting genetic inclination toward mental illness. In fact, as Long had to agree, she had seen no records to indicate mental illness on either side of his family. As Anderson reminded her that Fr. Adamson had abused his client countless times, including six episodes in a single day, the psychiatrist softened her testimony. Eventually she agreed that much of the young man’s trouble could be attributed to years of sexual involvement with a middle-aged priest.

  “What we don’t know,” she hastened to add, “is what this means and whether it’s a significant or a relatively minor causal factor.”

  For Jeff Anderson, who faced Ted Collins and a small flock of additional defense attorneys, the trial became a marathon. Every morning, for six weeks straight, he rose in the darkness before dawn and picked out clothes that he hoped would communicate authority but not excess. He paired dark suits with plain shirts and ties that were bright enough to help the jurors stay alert and focused on him through the long days of work.

  Leaving Stillwater before seven A.M., Anderson drove for an hour to reach the courthouse. On the few days when his wife Julie could sit in the gallery and watch, he found support in her smile. Otherwise his only ally was his young associate Mark Wendorf, who helped manage the flow of documents and labored to keep track of witnesses and their testimony. In the evenings Anderson would leave the courthouse to discover the sun had already set. He drove home to dinner and long conversations in which Julie served as his sounding board for new lines of questioning. Late at night he would drink as a reward, and in order to come down from the excitement of the day and find his way to sleep.

  The local press made much of the fact that Fr. Adamson appeared as a witness and confirmed that his superiors knew he was a danger to youngsters. However, more important testimony came from Adamson’s higher-ups. First, Bishop Robert Carlson recalled how he had twice warned his boss, Archbishop John Roach, that “the archdiocese would regret it” if Fr. Adamson were not fired for having sex with boys. Then Anderson called the archbishop of St. Paul, who had assumed responsibility for Adamson when he departed the Diocese of Winona in a cloud of suspicion. For more than a decade he had allowed him to remain a priest in contact with young people, despite multiple warnings that he was a danger.

  A small man with thinning hair and a big smile, John Roach was beloved by Catholics in Minnesota and widely respected in the national Church. At seventy years of age he had spent forty-five years in the priesthood. Except for his own arrest for drunk driving, he had never been involved in a public scandal.

  On the stand, Roach repeated points made many times before in the sex abuse crisis. Mistakes had been made, he said, but like the rest of society the Church hadn’t been well-informed on the nature of sexual abuse. He also said that he had relied on experts whose advice turned out to be wrong. When questioned about the meeting that he and Bishop Watters had to discuss their recollections of the Adamson case he insisted they got together “not in a conspiratorial sense, but to make sure we were remembering the same thing.”

  Nervous under Anderson’s questioning, Roach insisted that the diocese was not guilty of willful indifference to children. “That is not tolerable,” he said. “That is not true.” He also tried to present himself as a compassionate shepherd who was genuinely concerned about the people in the Church. However, he came across as more of a protector of the clergy than a pastor of the people.

  “I want to help people,” he said at one point, “but I really want to help priests.”

  With this statement, Roach made one of Anderson’s key points—that in his heart, the bishop placed a higher value on the welfare of ordained men than he placed on the well-being of children.

  The final witness in the trial spoke about the assets of the two dioceses, which might be available to pay damages and penalties. Anderson left the questioning to his associate Mark Wendorf, who led a consulting accountant named Kevin Bergman through an analysis of audited financial statements submitted to the court. Bergman noted that between St. Paul and Winona, the Church held almost $16 million in unrestricted funds and $27 million worth of real estate. The latter figure was based on dated valuations, but when Wendorf prodded Bergman to estimate current values, Judge Jones stopped him. However, she did allow the defendants to point out that $2.5 million in excess pension funds might be unavailable to the Church due to regulations governing the plan.

  Although they had signaled their confidence throughout the trial, and even withdrew their settlement offer, the defense team concluded with a remarkable admission. The Church was guilty of negligence, the lawyers said, but not of “willful indifference,” which would permit the jury to levy punitive damages. If the jury disagreed, they added, they should confine the penalty to a modest six-figure sum. To back up their call for restraint they blamed Doe’s alcoholism and his parents, who entrusted Adamson with their son at a time when the boy showed signs of psychological problems. They may not have been primarily responsible for the abuse but, they said, they deserved a portion of the blame. (This kind of blame-shifting would become a staple of Church defense in future cases, traumatizing many parents. Some Church lawyers would even maneuver to make parents co-defendants in cases brought by their own children.)

  In his closing argument, Jeff Anderson countered the defense claim about John Doe’s alcohol problem by pointing out that Fr. Adamson had given him his first drink, when he was thirteen. He then compared the bishops’ supervision of Adamson to the Ford Motor Company’s decision to continue selling the Pinto automobile after engineers determined that the car’s gas tank would explode in some minor collisions. Just as the Pinto was a defective car, he said, Adamson was a defective priest “entered into the stream of religious commerce.” At the same time, the Church made efforts to avoid a scandal. “They were successful in protecting their image for many years,” he said. “They were successful in protecting this priest for many years.”

  Knowing that the jury would be challenged to put
a dollar value on his client’s loss and on the appropriate penalty that should be paid by the Church, Anderson did the math for them. He estimated Doe’s emotional distress, embarrassment, and financial losses had to be worth more than $2 million. If the jury agreed, and wanted to send a message to society about abuse inside religious institutions, they should consider the danger Adamson had posed to the public and add the punitive damages equal to the amount recently paid to a young man who had been severely injured in a Pinto accident—$3.5 million.

  The total figure—$5.5 million—was an easy-to-remember number and represented a third of the available cash held by the two dioceses. If the jurors considered it excessive, Anderson urged them to reflect on the damage done to Doe’s sense of self-worth, his ability to relate to others, and his prospects for a happy life. Recalling how Fr. Adamson had drawn a thirteen-year-old into years of sexual victimization, Anderson concluded, “Short of murder, perhaps nothing is worse than what he did.”

  A unanimous vote was required for the jury to reach a conclusion and during the first day of deliberation none of the lawyers involved in the case expected they would reach one. The case they had heard was complex and the verdict they would render might send a signal across the entire country. For three days they considered the case quietly. On the fourth, the jurors demonstrated a bit of weary anxiety when they complained about a microwave antenna raised by a TV truck crew. Worried that the equipment on the mast might pick up their conversation, they asked the judge to order the truck moved. She did.

  Finally, five days after they were asked to compare a priest to a Pinto, the jury sent word that they had finished their work. When the parties gathered in the courtroom the only one who didn’t appear was Fr. Adamson, who had been present through the entire trial. A cadre of five lawyers and several clerics sat on the defense’s side of the courtroom. John Doe sat beside Anderson and Wendorf while his parents took seats behind them. Doe burst into tears as the verdict was read.

  On the matter of compensation, the jury found that Doe deserved $855,000. On the question of willful indifference they agreed that the bishops were liable and the Church should be punished by an additional penalty of $2.7 million.

  In the courtroom John Doe embraced both of his lawyers and then turned to his mother and father, who had listened while defense attorneys blamed them for what happened to their son. His mother had believed the jurors were “people like me, down to earth” and suddenly she felt as if “something was lifted off of me.” His father immediately imagined the news of the verdict rippling across the country as a warning to other bishops trying to deal with criminal priests.

  Church officials and their lawyers were stunned by the size of the awards. Insurance would pay the compensatory damages, but the additional $2.7 million was not covered by any liability policy. The defense attorneys told the press they would ask the judge to overturn the verdict or strike the punitive damages from the award.

  * * *

  The Anoka jury’s verdict was delivered on a Friday night, which was convenient for a lawyer who would celebrate to excess. By 1990 Jeff Anderson had switched from brandy/sevens to blue martinis—a combination of vodka and blue curacao—which he could consume in great quantities at a party he held in his office. Under the influence of this bright blue concoction he was able to laugh, almost uncontrollably, about the foibles of the judge who had tortured him through the trial. He was also able to imagine, with some excitement, the improved prospects for other cases he had undertaken on behalf of abuse victims across the country.

  Julie Anderson stood a bit to the side during the celebration. In the years since she had been married, she had outgrown her interest in big parties and become even more convinced that her husband had a serious drinking problem. With the self-help movement in full swing the media was full of information on the subject and she had built a collection of books on alcoholism, codependency, and relationships. In her mind the evidence of her husband’s addiction was overwhelming. But no amount of information made it any easier for her to talk about what she believed. On one level she dreaded even attempting to argue with a man who was so gifted at persuasion and denial. On another, she sensed that if she ever succeeded in getting through to him, and he somehow quit drinking, everything would change.

  Uncertain she was ready for the seismic shift that would come with sobriety, Julie would begin conversations but then feel overwhelmed and retreat. She was able to write down her concerns, and she gave him letters that described her loneliness and fears. Her husband seemed sympathetic when he read them, but as far as she could tell, they had no lasting effect.

  The need for some change seemed all the more urgent to Julie because a new member of the family had arrived at the house in Stillwater. Two months before the Doe trial she had given birth to her first child, a son who was named Darrow (after the famous lawyer) and the new responsibility had made her even more wary of her husband’s wild ways. She was having more trouble accepting her husband’s absences and erratic behavior, and she knew that on some level he understood that something was wrong. Julie had noticed that when his sober friend Grant Hall came to visit after Darrow’s birth, Jeff had hidden a bottle of vodka he had just brought home. Nothing had been said about this little sleight of hand, but it spoke volumes nevertheless.

  On the day after the verdict, friends and colleagues who had missed the news on Friday night called to congratulate Anderson after they read about it on the front pages of the local papers. Most, if not all of them, had made a rough calculation of the fee that Anderson might collect on the award, but he wouldn’t let them talk about this aspect of the victory. Besides, the appeal promised by the defendants would be heard by the same Judge Jones who had run the trial. Given her previous rulings, Anderson expected her to ratchet down the jury’s numbers. One friend, an attorney named Lee Daly, came to the Andersons’ house on the hill in Stillwater and told him to prepare “to move this whole thing forward.” Daly saw the issue of abuse unfolding as a national cause. Anderson told him he was too exhausted to even consider a strategy for the future.

  Soon, however, Anderson began to see the clergy abuse cases as part of a larger, liberal trend in human affairs. Just as bishops, cardinals, and the Pope saw themselves as defenders of constant truths, Anderson saw himself as an agent of equality. In his view, overly broad readings of the First Amendment had allowed the Church to operate outside the rules of decency and become a power unto itself. Given what he knew about human nature—including his own nature—he was sure that under these conditions any group of men would come to abuse their privileges. This is what had happened in the case of sex, crime, and the Church.

  Previous efforts to limit the scope of First Amendment protections for religion had failed, but there was something about the rape and sexual abuse of children that moved the legal system to reconsider the balance. The cases in Louisiana, the Smith ruling, and now the Doe decision had not only changed the balance, but had broken the cover of secrecy that allowed bishops to hide complaints and shuffle abusive priests from parish to parish, exposing vulnerable children with every move. Without this cover, ordinary Catholics would be able to see the values of the hierarchy at work as they dealt with sexual sins inside the priesthood, and they could judge for themselves both the men and their principles. For his part, Anderson would be happy to pursue one case after another until the institution itself changed in ways that would put an end to the crisis.

  In the months that followed the John Doe verdict, Judge Jones held hearings on the jury’s award and then slashed the total to a little over $1 million. This result was just about equal to the highest settlement offered by the defendants before trial. Considered one way, Jones’s actions deprived Doe and his attorneys of any reward for the extra effort they made during the six-week trial. They had risked losing it all, and endured all those days and nights of stress, to wind up right where they had started.

  But while the plaintiff and his attorneys could fault Jones on
the dollars, they could find some affirmation in what she had to say about the jury’s answers to the key questions posed at trial. Jones had noted that the bishops were responsible for protecting Church members from criminal clergy and she had rejected the defendants’ claim that they enjoyed First Amendment protection from liability. “The interest of the state in the health and welfare of its citizens, particularly its youth, overrides the religious interests enumerated by defendants,” she wrote.

  Anderson appealed the reduction in the award, but the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld Judge Jones’s reasoning and her decision to reduce the penalties levied against the two dioceses. Though not close to the seven-figure amount he could have earned based on the jury’s original award, Anderson’s fee would fund his work on new cases and reassure his partner Mark Reinhardt. Although Reinhardt had supported the investment of time and money in the clergy cases, he had also fretted about the revenues lost as more ordinary cases—like personal injury claims—were set aside.

  For Anderson’s client, the money was an acknowledgment of his injuries and it promised to make some aspects of life easier, if only in the short term. Anderson would advise Doe to invest the small fortune wisely and husband it for the future, but based on his experience with some other clients, Anderson couldn’t feel confident that he would. Indeed, as Anderson considered the path followed by his other abuse clients who had received a substantial award, he found himself worrying about whether the cash might do more harm than good. Anderson continually admonished him to stick with his commitment to sobriety and Alcoholics Anonymous. It didn’t occur to him to consider taking his own advice.

  Greg Lyman had given Anderson reason to fear how Doe might act under the influence of more than half a million dollars. In periodic conversations, Anderson had continued to counsel Lyman to get help for his psychological problems and support for his effort to stop drinking. None of what he said worked. In the months leading up the Doe trial, Lyman had begun drinking heavily and acting impulsively. Although he had established a relationship with a young woman named Annette and together they had brought a child into the world, Lyman showed few signs that he was settling down or even recovering from the effects of abuse. Instead he talked angrily about how he had been betrayed and exploited. Obsessed with the idea that Thomas Adamson was living freely and potentially abusing new victims, he often ranted about how “someone should do something.”