"About 260 sexual abuse lawsuits were paused when the Catholic Diocese of Santa Rosa filed for bankruptcy in 2023. That has been a frustration for survivors who want the actions of their abusers, and the failings of the powerful institution that obscured the crimes, dragged into the daylight. Now, it looks like a few of those survivors may have their days in court. RELATED: Diocese of Oakland seeks to pull plug on bankruptcy, send sex abuse cases back to court"
"The judge in the bankruptcy, Charles Novack of the Northern District of California, recently put a small set of lawsuits on the path to trial, where they are expected to set a baseline for the diocese's potential financial liability. It's an important step, those involved say, in pushing insurance companies to enter into a global settlement with the diocese and the dozens of people who say they were harmed by predatory church figures. And it could offer a rare"
About 260 sexual abuse lawsuits were paused after the Catholic Diocese of Santa Rosa filed for bankruptcy in 2023. A judge in the Northern District of California, Charles Novack, recently cleared a small subset of lawsuits to proceed toward trial to establish a baseline for diocesan liability. Those trials could pressure insurers to negotiate a global settlement and allow survivors to testify publicly and use discovery to uncover institutional failures. Advocates note that bankruptcy can quiet cases, obscuring who enabled or covered up abuse. Survivor Dan McNevin recounted sanitized personnel files and stressed that discovery is essential to obtain probation records and other evidence.
Read at The Mercury News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]