Infamous Scandals

by Anne Williams

  In 2003 Bakker started broadcasting again in his daily Jim Bakker Show in Missouri, accompanied by his new wife, Lori Bakker. It appears once again people are only too prepared to turn a blind eye to behaviour that is not very befitting to one of the Lord’s preachers. For a man with so many loyal followers, it was surprising to learn in his own book, I Was Wrong, that the first time he read the Bible from cover to cover was during his term of incarceration.

  As for Jessica Hahn – she took the money and ran. Her first stop was to a plastic surgeon to become a ‘born again’ woman with a new nose, teeth and breast enlargement. She also netted a neat one-million-dollar deal with Playboy for a spread and video called Thunder and Mud, which has been described as a female mud-wrestling tournament hosted by Jessica Hahn.

  Scandal in the Roman Catholic Church

  The second half of the 20th century has seen the Roman Catholic Church rocked by a succession of child sexual abuse scandals allegedly committed by members of the clergy. The cases involved schools or orphanages where children were under the care of Catholic religious orders. Some of the allegations have led to successful prosecution, while others are thought to have been successfully covered up. Whatever the outcome, the scandal is one of the biggest challenges that the current pope, Benedict XVI, has had to deal with.

  brendan smyth

  One of the worst examples of a clergyman using his links with children to facilitate sex abuse occurred in Ireland. The priest in question was Father Brendan Smyth. Smyth was a Catholic priest who abused his position to obtain access to children. It is believed that over a period of 40 years Smyth managed to rape literally hundreds of children in the parishes of Belfast, Dublin and the United States.

  Originally from Northern Ireland, Smyth joined the Norbertine Catholic religious order, which was founded in 1120 by St Norbert of Xanten. Smyth joined the order, also known as the Premonstratensians, in 1945 and it is believed they were aware of his dubious sexual activities as early as the late 1940s. However, they failed to report him to the police, and instead moved him from parish to parish whenever the allegations reached dangerous proportions. It appears that at no time were there warnings issued regarding Smyth’s history of sexual abuse so that he was kept away from children. Instead he was free to continually molest for the next 40 years.

  When Smyth was finally arrested in 1994, it not only led to the collapse of the Fianna Fáil (Labour coalition government) but it also did an immense amount of damage to the credibility of the Catholic Church in Ireland. When Smyth died in prison in 1997, the Norbertines covered his grave in concrete for fear of it being vandalised. In 2005 one of his victims succeeded in having the word ‘Reverend’ removed from his gravestone – not a very fitting title for a paedophile priest. The Smyth case continues to haunt both the Church and the state to this very day, as it was the first of the high-profile cases against a priest for abusing children.

  john geoghan

  Another key figure in the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal is that of John Geoghan, who probably stands out as one of the worst cases in the recent history of the Church. His case not only shook the foundations of the archdiocese in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, but also led to the resignation of the archbishop emeritus of Boston, Bernard Francis Law. His case became the catalyst for revelations of other clergy abuse and Church cover-ups. It forced the hands of the archdiocese into releasing damaging documents that showed the Church’s obsession with avoiding scandal and trying to protect its own reputation.

  Geoghan was ordained in 1962 after graduating from the Cardinal O’Connell Seminary. He was assigned his own parish, Blessed Sacrament in Saugus, but had to be constantly moved to a new parish as each new allegation emerged. He was eventually treated for his paedophile urges and went to live in a residence for retired priests.

  To many of the single mothers in his parish, Geoghan was nothing more than the kindly priest who shook their hand at the end of a service. He also offered to help them get their children ready for bed, offering to bath them, read them a bedtime story and then tuck them up for the night. Little did they realise that the outwardly friendly man was actually fondling their children through their nightclothes.

  When the scandal started to come out, as many as 150 people came forward, claiming they had been either fondled or raped by Geoghan. Geoghan was accused of sexual abuse on more than 130 people over a period of around 30 years. He was defrocked by the church in 1998 and found guilty in January 2002 of indecent assault and battery for grabbing the bottom of a ten-year-old boy in a swimming pool at a club for boys and girls in Waltham in 1991. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

  The Boston archdiocese was forced to make settlements amounting to $10 million with 86 of Geoghan’s victims, because there was evidence that it had transferred the man from parish to parish despite warnings of his behaviour. As a result of the Geoghan case, it also came to light that the archdiocese had displayed a similar pattern with other priests whenever sexual allegations were made. More than a dozen civil suits are believed to be still pending.

  During his time in prison, due to the nature of his crime, Geoghan was allegedly subjected to abuse by some of the guards. One inmate wrote a letter to prisoner rights lawyers saying that he had actually witnessed guards at the Concord prison abuse Geoghan, including defecating in his bed and destroying his property.

  Geoghan met a grisly end while in protective custody on 23 August 2003. He was trapped in his cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Massachusetts, and then strangled and stomped to death by fellow inmate, Joseph Druce. Druce was in prison for murdering a man after he had allegedly made a sexual pass at him after the man picked him up while hitchhiking. That in itself caused a scandal because many felt the two men should never have been allowed to share the same cell.

  eamon casey

  Compared to the severity of the other sexual abuse cases that came to light, the scandal regarding the former Bishop of Kerry, Dr Eamon Casey, seems quite trivial in proportion. However, at the time it was considered to be a major scandal, as Casey was a prominent and outspoken figure in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.

  Casey was ordained as a priest for the Diocese of Kerry on 17 June 1951 and appointed Bishop of Kerry in July 1969. He became well-known for his work with Irish emigrants in Britain and for taking sides with the staff of the Dunnes Store (a supermarket and clothing retail chain in the Republic of Ireland). In 1984 they were involved in a lockout when they refused to sell goods that had come from South Africa famous at the time for its apartheid.

  However, Bishop Casey was forced to resign his post in May 1992 when it was revealed that he had had a longstanding sexual relationship with an American divorcee by the name of Annie Murphy. They had had a son, Peter, who was born in 1974. It was also alleged that he misappropriated Church funds by using them to pay his maintenance obligations to Murphy. After his resignation, Casey went to work as a missionary in Ecuador, and it is believed that some of his clergy friends repaid the Church funds on his behalf. The resignation of Bishop Casey is thought to be a determining factor in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, because it started to lose its considerable influence over the sociology and politics of the Republic of Ireland.

  In 2005, Casey was under scrutiny again when a woman, a native of Limerick living in the United Kingdom, made allegations against the bishop about incidents that had happened 30 years earlier. However, a tribunal said that the allegations could not be proved and the director of public prosecutions decided in August 2006 not to bring charges.

  After his self-imposed exile, Casey returned to the United Kingdom and accepted the offer of a curate’s position in Haywards Heath, East Sussex. All too aware of the furore that his scandal had caused in the past, Casey kept his head down and, apart from a ban for drink-driving, his time there was peaceful.

  Casey returned to Ireland in February 2006 and now lives in Shanaglish, a small village near Gort, County Galway. Although the sca
ndal regarding Bishop Casey seems small-fry compared to the atrocities committed by hundreds of other clergy, it has to be said that his relationship with Annie Murphy was prohibited by church doctrine. Added to that his behaviour was that of a hypocrite, because his duties included speaking against illicit sex – that is sex between unmarried people.

  andrew madden

  The story of Andrew Madden is one of victim, not villain, and shows just what a devastating effect sexual abuse can have on an adolescent. Andrew Madden always dreamed of one day becoming a priest, but his love of the Catholic Church was soon destroyed when he became the subject of sexual abuse. Madden was a choir boy in Father Ivan Payne’s parish, and it was the start of realising his dream. He loved to go behind the scenes in a busy parish church and help Payne on the alter in front of all the parishioners. He was excited that one day he would be standing there saying Mass himself. However, one day his excitement turned to terror, when Madden was molested by his favourite priest. The abuse lasted for three years until Madden was 15 years old.

  The impact the abuse had on the young boy was devastating and lasted well into his adult life. Too frightened to talk about what had happened, he lost his direction in life. He started to drink and found it impossible to have a loving relationship. In the early 1990s, drained by constant bouts of paralysing fear and anxiety, he plucked up the courage and threatened to take legal action. The Church, desperate to cover up the scandal, paid Madden IR£27,500 and forced him to sign a letter of confidentiality. Believing that this would shut him up, the matter was pushed under the carpet.

  However, eventually Madden had the strength to go public and the story broke in The Sunday Times in September 2003. The reaction by the Church was complete denial, accusing the newspaper of lying and saying ‘That boy doesn’t know what he is saying’. When Madden heard about their reaction, still fragile about the whole situation, he broke down in tears. However, his desire to pursue justice on the matter was unbreakable and he took the next major step. He went to the garda, revealed the priest’s identity and showed them the document giving details of the Church’s sordid transaction.

  Although the process was slow, the priest was eventually charged with sexual abuse, not just of Madden, but of several other boys as well. Payne served four and a half years of a six-year prison sentence and was freed in 2002. The investigation into Payne had opened the floodgates and dozens of abuse cases came to light, many having taken place in Church institutions.

  Needless to say, as with many of the other paedophile cases, the Church helped the villain by instigating a cover-up. As soon as the abuse came to light they moved Payne to a different parish and gave him a job inside the Archbishop’s own house, counselling married couples. Even after he was jailed Payne continued to receive visits from his superiors, and after his release he was given a luxury Dublin flat and a weekly allowance, condoning his perverse crime.

  donald kimball

  The last case covered in this section is that of Donald Kimball, who was a charismatic young priest from California who had his own radio ministry, which he directed towards young people. The innovative and award-winning show blended popular music with Bible teachings, making him very popular with local teenagers. However, Kimball used this popularity to his advantage and lured teenage girls into having sex with him.

  Abuse allegations first came to light in 1997, when a lawsuit was filed against Kimball by four different people, including a brother and sister who said they had both been molested by the priest. Criminal charges were filed in 2000 and Pope John Paul II formerly defrocked Kimball.

  When the case went to court in 2002 Kimball was acquitted of raping a 14-year-old girl in 1977, even though the woman testified at his trial saying that she had been raped behind the altar of a Santa Rosa church. She also added that Kimball had later paid for an abortion. The conviction of molesting a 13-year-old girl in 1981 was, however, upheld, after the girl gave evidence against Kimball, saying that she had been molested in his room at Healdsburg rectory. However, this conviction was overturned the following year when the United States Supreme Court overturned a law in California that extended the statute of limitations involving sex crimes involving children.

  The Church settled the plaintiff’s civil suits by paying them about $120,000 each. Kimball later served a prison sentence, not for sexual abuse, but for attacking a photographer for The San Francisco Chronicle in the courthouse during his child molesting trial.

  Kimball’s body was found at around 6.00 a.m. in September 2006, at the home of a friend, but the Sonoma County Sheriff claimed that there were no signs of criminal activity, although an autopsy would reveal more. Donald Kimball was 62 years old at the time of his death.

  vatican scandal

  In 2003 the Vatican itself was subject to an enormous scandal. A 40-year-old confidential document was uncovered from the secret Vatican archive, which gave damning evidence regarding cases of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church. The document itself was 69 pages long and bore the seal of Pope John XXIII. It had been sent to every bishop in the world with instructions outlining a policy of ‘strictest’ secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse. It also threatened anyone who spoke out on the subject with excommunication. The document also called for any victims who made a complaint to Church officials to take an oath of secrecy. It also stated that the document should be ‘diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential’. The document was written in 1962 by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and focuses entirely on the crimes of assault that it describes as: ‘worst crime . . . sexual assault committed by a priest . . . attempted by him with youths of either sex or with brute animals.’Bishops were instructed to pursue any such cases ‘in the most secretive way, restrained by a perpetual silence (including the alleged victim)’.

  The document was uncovered by a Texan lawyer, Daniel Shea, when he was working on behalf of victims of abuse in the United States. He immediately handed it over to the US authorities and asked them to launch a federal investigation into the alleged ‘cover-up’.

  The exposure of this document will hopefully free the victims from their silent and private shame into which they have been forced, and it will hopefully bring the priests and religious figures concerned into public shame for their totally un-Christian behaviour.

  PART SIX: Judges and Teachers

  Clarence Thomas

  You may have never even heard of Clarence Thomas – he is the only the second African-American to serve in the United States’ Supreme Court and possibly their most conservative member. His life has been riddled by many contradictions and has been reviled by many people for his opposition to government programmes that are intended to help minorities. If you have heard the name, then it was probably associated with a scandal that saw Thomas accused of sexual harassment of a former colleague.

  paving the way

  Clarence Thomas was born on 23 June 1948, in Pin Point, a small domain of around 500 inhabitants in Georgia, USA. Pin Point was named after the plantation that once stood on the land, and was given to the former slaves when it was divided up after the  American Civil War. The inhabitants of Pin Point worked hard to earn a meagre living doing manual labour on a dirty, marsh-ridden area that possessed neither roads nor sewers.

  Thomas was the second child and first son of Leola Williams and M. C. Thomas. Thomas never really got to know his father, though, because he abandoned the family when Thomas was just two years old and his mother was expecting her third child. Leola managed to hold her family together by taking a job as a housemaid, aided by handouts from the local Baptist church.

  When Thomas was seven he and his brother were sent to live with their grandfather, Myers Anderson, who lived in Savannah. This was the result of a stressful time for his mother, because their wooden house had burnt to the ground just before she was about to remarry. Life with his grandfather had a profound influence on the young Thomas. Not only were the standards of livi
ng far higher than he was used to, but Anderson also believed in a good education followed by hard work.

  Anderson was a fervent believer of the Catholic faith, a loyal Democrat and also an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was a time when African-Americans were browbeaten, being forced to ride on the back of buses, banned from most restaurants and had little prospects of a decent job. Anderson decided if he was to get anywhere in the world and beat racism he would need to work for himself. He successfully built up a business by delivering wood, coal, ice and heating oil from the back of a pick-up truck. As a result of his flourishing business, Anderson was not only able to provide his grandsons with a comfortable home, but he also enrolled them in an all-black grammar school which was run by white nuns, St Benedict on the Moor.

  Anderson was a fair and loving man, but impressed on the two boys the importance of working hard at school if they wanted to achieve a reasonable standard of living. The nuns themselves were hard taskmasters who pushed their students to achieve their greatest potentials. After school the boys weren’t allowed to go home and put their feet up. They worked for their grandfather helping him deliver fuel.

  In later life Thomas often recalled his grandfather’s words of wisdom: ‘. . . school, discipline, hard work and right from wrong were of the highest priority’.