"When cases are quieted by bankruptcy, said Dan McNevin, who is on the board of directors of the advocacy group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, it means the public won't have a clear read on who enabled the abuse, who covered it up and whether those people are still in power and behaving in that fashion."
"When McNevin was molested in the Oakland Diocese, he said, the bishop there told him his abuser, the Rev. James Clark, had no prior record. After he sued, McNevin found out Clark had in fact been convicted of a sex crime before moving into his parish. His file was sanitized. There was no record of his probation, McNevin said. We got the information by deposing the former chancellor of the diocese. So discovery is really important."
About 260 sexual abuse lawsuits were paused after the Catholic Diocese of Santa Rosa filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Judge Charles Novack of the Northern District of California recently allowed a small set of those lawsuits to proceed toward trial to establish a baseline for the diocese's potential financial liability. Moving cases to trial could pressure insurance companies toward a global settlement and give survivors opportunities to testify publicly and use legal discovery to expose who enabled or covered up abuse. Survivors report that bankruptcy secrecy obscured institutional failures and that depositions can reveal sanitized records and hidden prior convictions.
Read at www.pressdemocrat.com
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