While activists and attorneys struggled to keep up with developments by tracking cases nationwide, the general public received only occasional notice of a lawsuit filed here or a settlement reached there. And in the years since Gilbert Gauthe and the suits in Lafayette, only a handful of national print and TV reports had suggested that a broader, systemic problem might be emerging. The lack of information, and more important, context, explained the silence that greeted one of the most shocking moments of performance that was ever presented on television.
The shock came as Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor appeared on the program Saturday Night Live. On October 3, 1992, she came onto the stage with her head shaved and dressed in white lace. After waiting for the audience to settle she sang Bob Marley’s “War,” which was based on a 1968 speech given by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. O’Connor changed the lyrics to make it about child abuse and at the end, where Marley’s verse cries “Good over evil! Good over evil!” she held a photo of Pope John Paul II in front of her face. She then said, “Fight the real enemy” and tore it to pieces.
In the audience, no one reacted. In the production control room technicians broke with their routine and did not switch on the applause sign.
In the weeks following O’Connor’s appearance, she was alternately castigated and defended by politicians, writers, and other performers. Executives at the TV network that aired the program said the act was a surprise and disavowed O’Connor’s sentiment. Many Catholic laypeople and clergy called her bigoted and demanded an apology. In some corners of the media, columnists and commentators tried to understand what O’Connor was saying and eventually connected her demonstration to Church policies on sex and gender and its responses to abuse claims. Although her act was called a “stunt” and a “prank,” as she ripped up the Pope’s picture O’Connor had prompted millions to consider an issue that previously occupied the edges of public awareness.
Among survivors of clergy abuse, O’Connor provoked both admiration and confusion. Those who still hoped to stay in the Church and see it reform didn’t know whether to welcome the attention she brought to the way the hierarchy regarded children or to distance themselves from her. Of course none of them knew that in Ireland Church leaders had already formed a committee, chaired by Bishop Laurence Forristal, to plan a response to future public accusations of clergy abuse. And only those who had taken a critical eye to Irish Catholic attitudes about children—those vessels of original sin—would have grasped O’Connor’s later explanations for her act. In a public letter she wrote about her own experience of being abused as a child and that in Ireland “the Catholic church has controlled us by controlling education, through their teachings on sexuality, marriage, birth control and abortion, and most spectacularly through the lies they taught us with their history books … My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ.”
* * *
With more than a hundred cases in sixteen states, Jeff Anderson had little time to reflect on the Irish Catholic experience or the larger public attitude toward the Church. He was too busy dashing from state to state, trying to advance claims that the Church sought to block at every turn. In many jurisdictions he ran into the same issues involving statutes of limitations, the injury suffered by victims of abuse, and questions of liability. By 1992 laws had been changed in about a third of the states to accommodate the concept of “delayed discovery of injury” and give claimants more leeway to file suits. However, these statutes did not resolve disputes over the supervision of Catholic priests or settle widespread doubts about the nature of memory. Outspoken critics challenged the notion that traumatic incidences were sometimes forgotten or repressed as the human psyche sought to overcome the effects or that these memories could be recovered through hypnosis and other methods.
The debate over memory boiled most furiously around cases in which children may have been coaxed to accuse adults of terrible crimes. Research psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who said she could prompt a five-year-old to recall “a bear that wasn’t there,” began warning the public and trial courts in the 1980s of the suggestibility of children. Loftus said that she had been sexually molested as a young girl but played down any effects it may have had on her life.
In her work, the professor studied the variability of memory and came to believe that outside influences can change how individuals recall events. Loftus questioned whether people who were traumatized ever forgot what happened to them only to remember the events later in life. She received support from social psychologist Richard Ofshe, who openly criticized psychotherapy that produced “recovered memories” of abuse not previously acknowledged by patients. Both served as expert witnesses in trials. By the mid-1990s Loftus would be charging $400 per hour for such services. She would also provoke ethics complaints to the American Psychological Association from victims whom she challenged in court and in the press. In one complaint to the APA, an incest victim objected to Loftus characterizing her memory as “fantastical” even though her sister also recalled being abused by their father. The APA took no action on the complaint. Loftus subsequently resigned from the organization, though she said her decision was not connected to the complaint.
As skeptics and expert witnesses, Ofshe and Loftus followed a trail pioneered by a less well-known psychologist from Minnesota named Ralph Underwager. A minister as well as a therapist, Underwager began testifying on behalf of defendants in abuse cases in 1984. In a 1989 book called Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse he and his wife Hollida Wakefield argued that most accusations of abuse in childhood were based on false memories suggested by incompetent or malevolent psychotherapists. Underwager and Wakefield were widely rejected by the scientific community, and a scathing review of their book in the Journal of the American Medical Association found it of full of “unsupported statements.” Nevertheless, by 1992 Underwager and Wakefield had been permitted to testify as experts in more than two hundred court cases. They also joined Ofshe and Loftus on the advisory board of the newly formed False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), which was devoted to challenging claims of childhood abuse.
The false memory foundation presented itself as a kind of countermovement to those who advocated most actively for the rights of people who claimed to have been abused as children. In 1994, Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist based at Johns Hopkins University, offered a comprehensive outline of the group’s views, which included references to mass hysteria and warnings of “pseudo-memories” that may be confirmed by professionals and others predisposed to blame sexual abuse for a subject’s psychological problems. McHugh called for interventions to halt the “juggernaut” of abuse claims, including media campaigns to alert the public of the risk of pseudo-memories.
While credentialed experts like Dr. McHugh provided the FMSF with informed skepticism about abuse claims, the energy behind the organization came from the group’s founders, Pamela and Peter Freyd. Their daughter Jennifer had accused Peter Freyd of incest in 1990.
The Freyds were no ordinary family. Peter was a tenured professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. His daughter Jennifer earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford and became an expert on trauma and memory. She would coin the term “betrayal blindness” to describe how a child who must depend on an adult for survival would seemingly forget traumatic abuse in order to continue living under that person’s care. Memories of such abuse might emerge in adulthood, when a victim no longer depended on an abuser’s attention. Freyd claimed to have experienced this psychological mechanism herself, and allegedly recalled her father abusing her when she was a child, an accusation that her parents denied. Once a personal matter, the Freyds’ conflict became a public battle and the members of the family were regarded as heroes or villains by the factions in the larger debate.
Aided by a surge of publicity, the FMSF grew quickly and its supporters promoted the idea that a practice they called “recovered memory therapy” wa
s producing a rash of abuse claims against people who had done nothing wrong. Members of the FMSF were also critical of recent books on incest and sexual abuse, especially The Courage to Heal, which became popular among people who reported being abused. The authors of The Courage to Heal were creative writing teacher Ellen Bass and her student Laura Davis, who was a victim of incest. Neither one had professional credentials in mental health. The book began what Loftus would call an “incest book industry [that] has published not only stories of abuse but also suggestions to readers that they were likely abused even if there are no memories.”
In the FMSF’s analysis, many of those accused were actually victims of books like The Courage to Heal and of misguided therapists and investigators who manipulated both adults and children and ultimately destroyed relationships, reputations, and even the finances of innocent people. The grueling McMartin preschool case, which yielded no convictions after seven years of investigation and proceedings, was cited as a case in point. Others included accusations of satanic ritual abuse (SRA). This subcategory of claims included charges that Satan worshippers killed children in sacrificial rites that were kept secret thanks to a vast conspiracy.
Although rumors of these rituals circulated widely, studies by both law enforcement experts and social scientists found no evidence of either the rituals or the conspiracy. However, the absence of proof didn’t inhibit lecturers and authors who fanned the flame of fear at conservative churches or authors seeking publicity for books. In 1989, Oprah introduced millions of Americans to Lauren Stratford and Michelle Smith, who had both published memoirs of satanic abuse. Eventually both stories would be thoroughly discredited by independent journalists. Of course, compared with Oprah’s audience, the readership for these accounts was minuscule and the SRA scare would linger for most of the 1990s.
Unsubstantiated claims of satanic ritual abuse and notorious prosecutions, like the McMartin case, made perfect targets for FMSF publicity campaigns and skeptics who warned that therapists were somehow encouraging people to fabricate tales of abuse. However, truly false allegations remained almost as rare as SRA and aside from isolated practitioners “recovered memory therapy” never emerged as an actual method of psychotherapy. Similarly no real authority ever recognized a “syndrome” that produced fabrications of abuse. Instead, this phenomenon remained an artifact of the false memory foundation and its supporters who became steadfast skeptics when it came to sexual abuse claims and reliable allies to those who said they were unjustly accused.
* * *
With experts and family members engaged in open, heated disputes about such difficult issues—child abuse, psychotherapy, the reliability of memory—public attention was diverted from the aspects of sexual abuse, trauma, and memory that were well established. By the mid-1990s, more than thirty different studies would confirm that people abused in childhood could experience periods of “forgetting” or “traumatic amnesia.” (By 2012 the number of academic articles supporting the phenomena would exceed three hundred and fifty.) Clinicians wouldn’t necessarily describe these mechanisms as “repression,” which suggested some kind of active choice. Instead they noted that shame and embarrassment often led victims to deny those episodes of abuse in their own minds until they recalled them in detail during treatment or after some triggering event, like viewing a movie. In nearly all cases, victims reported that they hadn’t actually forgotten what had happened to them but had tried to forget in order to move on with their lives. This last point was often blurred or ignored in press coverage of lawsuits and the broader issue of sexual abuse.
As the most visible victims of sexual abuse, men and women who had been raped or molested by Catholic priests embodied the struggle to understand the cause and effect of sexual abuse. Clergy abuse cases moved judges and juries to gradually recognize the trauma suffered by victims and the many ways that unaddressed experiences can harm individuals. Plaintiffs’ attorneys emphasize the “delayed discovery of harm” by their adult clients and this concept was accepted by some, but not all, courts and state legislatures. But while this concept permitted people to bring complaints, they still had to present evidence that they had been harmed in specific ways by specific people. Here the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church aided plaintiffs by preserving the documents that proved crimes had been committed.
Despite the urgings of Bishop Quinn, who had recommended proactive review of sensitive documents, employment files held in church offices around the country were filled with notes and formal reports on sexual crimes committed by hundreds and perhaps thousands of priests. By early 1993, more than four hundred American priests stood accused in either criminal or civil proceedings and lawyers across the country were using discovery and court-issued subpoenas to access incriminating records.
In Minnesota alone, Jeff Anderson used confessions and Church documents to negotiate payments for the victims of half a dozen different priests, including a visiting preacher from Tanzania and a charismatic pastor known as the “Polka padre” because he played polka music at his services. Anderson’s clergy abuse practice grew to twenty-seven states and counted more than two hundred clients. In many cases he partnered with local attorneys who called on him for expertise.
When Anderson heard from potential clients in California, he worked through a network of trial lawyers to reach a prominent litigator named Joseph Dunn, who allied with him to sue on behalf of men who said they were abused by a friar at Catholic schools in Fullerton and Anaheim. In Colorado he helped a Boulder-based attorney named Scott Lasch sue the diocese of Pueblo on behalf of a man who said he was infected with HIV by a priest who first drew him into a sexual relationship when he was sixteen years old. In New York City, Anderson helped bring a case against the famous priest Bruce Ritter. The founder of Covenant House, which served homeless and runaway youth, Ritter left New York for India. The case was dismissed on the statute of limitations.
Anderson wasn’t alone in this legal arena. In New Jersey and California other lawyers developed regional practices in this area of law. Most of these came into being after a particular scandal became public and victims were moved to report what had happened to them. In New England, for example, attorneys Roderick MacLeish and Mitchell Garabedian came to represent dozens of people who had claims against James Porter, and then heard from people who claimed to be abused by other priests in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Other religious groups were also affected as individuals came forward to describe abuse by rabbis, ministers, and elders. One insurer reported two hundred claims of sexual abuse against individual Protestant pastors and churches.
But while others confronted the problem of abuse in the context of supposedly sacred relationships, the Catholic Church remained the focus of mass media reports, and Jeff Anderson stood as the institution’s main antagonist. The Church held this special status because its problems were so much more widespread and because it stood as a highly organized institution with a theology that stressed, more than most, the importance of sexual control. Anderson maintained his standing by traveling the country to take on ever more cases and adding staff to his firm to keep up with the workload. He also responded whenever the press called, answering questions with blunt and imminently quotable lines.
When the general counsel to the bishops’ conference said “lawyers should stay out” of abuse cases so the Church could provide “healing and reconciliation,” The New York Times offered Anderson an opportunity to respond. He noted the Church’s failure to control abusive priests like Porter, who had victims in five states, and suggested he still had a role to play. “When they get the rats out and clean the basement I’ll be out of business,” he said. “That’s my goal: not to have to do any more of this.”
Critics, including the loyal Catholics who sent Anderson letters calling him “scum maggot” and the “Antichrist” wouldn’t have believed that Anderson wanted out. Considering his fees from judgments and settlements, which ranged from 33 to 40 percent, it was easy t
o estimate Anderson had made more than a million dollars by suing the Church. Didn’t the money motivate him? “I like getting paid,” he admitted. “But that isn’t what motivates me.”
In fact, given the disturbing nature of the crimes and the quality of his clients—many were demanding, psychologically fragile, and erratic—a lawyer with Anderson’s talent and drive could have found easier ways to get rich. He persisted because he believed in the cause.
Had he been raised Catholic, Anderson might have found it all too disillusioning. But as an outsider he never expected priests and bishops and cardinals to be different from other men. And as far as he was concerned, the Church was acting like any other large, powerful institution intent on self-preservation. Moving it to change would require a long fight, but he was willing to conduct it. In the meantime, he wasn’t especially disturbed by what he saw and heard. Others who joined the cause couldn’t say the same.
14. THE PENDULUM SWINGS
With winter just weeks away, the Indiana sky turned dark by the time Tom Doyle got home from work. After putting down his keys and stripping off his military fatigue jacket he grabbed a glass and opened the refrigerator to tap the three-liter box of wine he kept on the shelf. With glass in hand he sat down in his living room where he could look out a back window that faced some woods. On good days he thought the quiet land was beautiful. On bad days he saw only blackness streaked with gray, and he could hear in his mind the nuns who taught him in grade school declaring, “Hell is the absence of hope.”
The hell that is hopelessness had crept up on Doyle over the years. Its source was a mixture of profound doubt about his life choices—ordination, obedience, then defiance—and anxiety about the future. Military duty was satisfying. He had never met a group of men more honest and forthright than his fellow officers. But at the end of the day, when others went home to wives and families, Doyle was met by silence and his own thoughts. Sometimes he would turn to the writer John Dominic Crossan, an ex-priest who wrote about a Jesus who was a radical and independent thinker. But when Crossen couldn’t help, Doyle found himself thinking about suicide.
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