OldSpeak

When Priests Become Predators, Profiles of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors: An Interview with Tom Neuberger

The courage of the abuse survivors in the face of these unrelenting personal attacks and underhanded tactics by Church officials led Tom to the publication of his book - When Priests Become Predators, Profiles of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors. Using sworn testimony given in jury trials in open court and documents taken from the public court docket, Tom wanted to tell the stories of several of these survivors and memorialize what they went through so their experiences are not forgotten in a dusty court file and otherwise lost to history. In the words of philosopher George Santayana, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

But the publication of this book is more than just a memorial to the strength and bravery of these survivors. As the Editorial Board of the Wilmington News Journal noted when a settlement was reached with the Catholic Church in Delaware, “Mr. Neuberger never gave up his fight to receive justice for his abused clients.” His book is another part of that same effort. Mr. Neuberger was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to discuss his new book.

John Whitehead: In September you are publishing a book called When Priests Become Predators, Profiles of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors. Sexual crimes against children by those in powerful institutions have been in the news for some time now, most recently the Freeh Report on Penn State by the former FBI Director, and the conviction and jailing at least for three years or more of a high church official in Philadelphia for child endangerment. How did you come about to want to write on this topic?

Tom Neuberger: I’m glad you mentioned Penn State, and there also was the criminal conviction of Jerry Sandusky, the former coach there, for dozens of rape and other sexual crimes on ten children.

Those children were heroes for taking the witness stand and enduring the punishment of everything a criminal defense lawyer could throw against them. They were accused of being liars, that they had big imaginations, and were out just for the money. The church adds a few more, such as, you were a tart and tempted an innocent priest, you have mental problems, your parents were at fault for trusting their church. And it goes on and on.

Who has the courage or the grit to endure such personal attacks?

The public just doesn’t know how hard it is for victims of childhood sexual crimes to come forward, to trust people in authority, be they in the prosecutor’s office or a private lawyer who wants to fight for justice for you. After all, these people have had their ability to trust anyone destroyed as a child. If you can’t trust your priest or minister, who can you trust? Can’t you trust a coach employed by a famous football program? If you couldn’t trust your parents to keep you safe as a child, who can you trust today? Can you trust your wife, your family, or even a jury of 12 men and women who will hear lies thrown up by expensive defense lawyers paid for by insurance companies, by the church or maybe by a university?

So, after handling over 150 actual court cases of children who were sexually abused in their church, or in their public schools, or in other institutions, I decided I wanted to encourage survivors, they want to be called survivors, not victims, to get them to come forward and seek justice against the institutions and persons who victimized them.

Here on the first level my book profiles the story of ten brave survivors in Delaware who took everything the most powerful church in the world could throw against them and who beat them, who beat the church, its bosses, its armies of lawyers, its doctors and other so-called experts willing to say whatever was needed to cover-up the crimes of the church and its priests.

My book is about the moral courage of those survivors who publicly withstood all the dirty tricks that the Roman Catholic Church could muster. The chapters in here are separate stories about the strength of ten persons and I believe they are typical examples of survivors anywhere.

These survivors speak in their own words, sometimes quite movingly, taken from real court proceedings, under oath without paraphrase or interpretation. I even have a short quote here with me that I can read to you later.

JWW: Well just to play devil’s advocate, the church and Penn State’s defenders contend they are all liars. Are they all just out for a fast buck or are they mentally deranged? Did they imagine these attacks by trusted religious or other public figures?

TN: Let me say two things on that, based on the medicine discussed in my book and my own personal experience evaluating over 200 interviews over about nine years.

Personally, as a lawyer you do not get into a fight with a powerful institution unless you can win, and no one wins with a client who is a nut case or is lying. The court and juries see through that. Any child abuse case is very expensive costing at a minimum $25,000 to $100,000 in out of pocket expenses. And so we always carefully investigate and corroborate any claim of sex abuse. Out of about 200 interviews which we investigated I only found one person who was trying to lie and commit a scam. His story did not check out in various ways, he wasn’t living near the priest at the time, as he had claimed, and so we turned him away. Less than one percent as fakers is consistent with the averages I have seen nationally.

Now on the medicine and psychology of it, the public needs to understand this since it is counter-intuitive. We all imagine the female rape victim almost murdered on the street who runs to the police. And so we think, why didn’t this eight year old report a violent rape, why didn’t this ten year old in the showers at Penn State report an anal rape? Or why is he just reporting it now, and is his imagination so big that he added to his story?

Leading psychiatric physicians and psychologists explain this in chapters two and five of my book, in their own words, as they did to two juries in federal and state courts. Here, let me show you this. Psychologist Dianne Langberg, Ph.D. of Philadelphia explained the way survivors mentally cope with their experience, here on page 347 of my book:

Well, you have to think about the abuse as happening to a child. So you have someone who is physically smaller, who doesn't know as much as adults, and who is having something horrific happen to them by somebody they thought was good and trustworthy. And they usually either can’t get away because the other person is stronger, or they freeze and can’t get away. So they just passively stay there because they are so overwhelmed they can’t think straight.

So what happens is the only thing that can get away is the mind. The body can’t get away, and so the mind goes away. The mind goes away by saying: This can’t be happening to me; this can’t be true; this has got to be a dream; I am sure this isn’t so. And if you say that to yourself long enough, you actually believe it.

Not too long ago – this is just an example of that. I was interviewing somebody who was – a woman. When she was twelve years old, she went for a sleep over to a neighbor’s house. That night, the father of her friend raped her. And after he washed her off in the shower and took her back to bed, she remembers laying in bed at twelve years of age saying: Okay. If this really happened, I am not going to be able to get up tomorrow. I am not going to be able to function. But if this was just a bad dream, then I can go down tomorrow and eat breakfast with my friend. And so it was a bad dream. She spent years not remembering the event. And many years later something happened that triggered the memory, and it came back. It’s been corroborated by the girlfriend that she spent the night with, so it is a true memory.

JWW: Well, let me interrupt you. Again as the devil’s advocate, I guess the church would say that is just one person, even if she is a medical professional. Are there any scientific studies that can prove this, that show that these memories or claims are accurate and true?

TN: Well, I’m glad you asked. Let me look. Here it is at page 350. Dr. Langberg told the jury here that “there was a study in the mid-‘90s which was quite fascinating in that the researchers went back and got hospital records of those who had been sexually abused as children and brought to the emergency room; so this was documented abuse. Seventeen years later they did follow-up with these now adults who had been children at the time. And they found two things: One was that thirty-eight percent of the women and fifty-five percent of the men did not remember that they had been sexually abused; the second thing they found was [that] when they went back and looked at the story that was in the emergency room documents and compared it with the recall for those who did remember, the accuracy rates were the same. So the telling of the story originally, when the child was brought in by the parents, and the telling of the story upon recall was identical.”

Do you get that, John? They were raped as a child and then that trauma eventually gave them amnesia so that they forgot the horror of what had happened to them. But when some memories came back years later, in bits and pieces, the memories matched up with the hospital emergency room paperwork that was recorded immediately after the incident. Their memories were accurate and not elaborations or fabrications.

So much for the question of the defenders of these monsters. Survivors are not liars but people who finally have found the courage to come forward to seek justice and expose the truth of what the church let happen to them. The public needs to understand the medicine behind all of this. The trauma of rape or sexual abuse rewires the mind of any child or adolescent so they can deal with the horror.

JWW: Well, they are certainly not liars and science and medicine verify the truth of what happened to them.But none of us have the time to sit through a two month or more trial as occurred in Philadelphia with the conviction and imprisonment of Monsignor William J. Lynn for child endangerment or even sit through one of your long trials in Delaware. Do these ten portraits in your book give us any feel for what these survivors experienced?

TN: Yes. Remember, very little of it is in my words, nearly all of it is in the words of the individual survivor him or her self. This is how they told it from the witness stand under oath. I removed the boring “Question” and “Answer” format lawyers are familiar with from transcripts of trial and made it more into a Perry Mason or Matlock narrative. In chapter two it is even as if the person is just sitting in your living room with you and telling the story to you.

Anyway, if you want to know what a survivor experienced, to stand in his shoes, read the book. Here, I brought it along and marked this page. This is a moving excerpt from an email crying out for help which describes the suffering of John F. Dougherty, who was one of the three persons who blew the lid off the church scandal in little Delaware where I live.

Where am I today? . . . I can’t address my wife by her first name. I can’t depend on my thinking accurately and every day is different as to how I feel. Some days I’m despondent and I never experience joy and some days just go by unnoticed. I get by . . . I’ve contacted some of my boyhood friends who were abused and they won’t deal with it. I have had terrible problems over the past five years with suicidal thoughts. I don’t trust anyone. I can’t trust anyone. I feel like I’m totally alone with no recourse. “The News Journal” newspaper in Wilmington, DE[,] won’t print my story because I can’t corroborate it. I never wanted to use the abuse issue as an “excuse” for my failures but therapy has allowed me to see that the abuse is a very real reason for my aberrant behavior throughout my life. My inability to sleep regularly or to hold down a job or to be consistent in my life has been so damaging. We’ve always been poor and in debt because of my inability to handle money. The rage that is inside of me almost destroyed me. How could anyone rape a little kid like Carley raped me? I was only ten years old. He was a priest! How could so many of us kids been so molested so many times and have no one know? Why hasn’t someone else come forward?

That is a cry from the depths of one man’s soul. A permanently scarred person pleading for help.

If you want to learn about the lifelong suffering of survivors and don’t have time to sit through a court trial, you will find it here in the lives of the heroes in my book. Such broken persons are living in every community in our country and they need to be understood and supported.

JWW: We hear the words “cover-up” a lot regarding Penn State and the Roman Catholic Church. Did you actually discover any hard proof of a cover-up to prevent scandal in the church, like the former FBI Director found in his report on Penn State?

TN: How about a previously secret internal church memo admitting that there was a “cover-up,” to use the memo’s own words? That should do for hard proof.

My book adds to the historic record proving the “cover-up” here in Delaware, and in the world. The church made the business decision to make the staffing of its institutions in a time of personnel shortages more important than protecting kids from being raped. That was its motive! When you look at the facts and documents, any objective person must conclude that the Roman Catholic Church considered its role as a business entity more important than protecting helpless kids.

I fully document the moral failures of the Diocese of Wilmington and two of its religious Orders of priests, from their own business records. The decisions of many Delaware Bishops to employ priests despite repeated warnings such as, “be afraid to take a chance on him,” also are explained. The code words and secret language used in church documents to record and identify which priests were child abusers are also noted.

My book has almost 600 footnotes to public court records. It has been thoroughly fact checked for accuracy and there is abundant proof of the truth of the cover-up. My evidence includes:

• the internal church memo admitting it had engaged in a cover-up,
• sworn trial testimony found credible by juries,
• extensive sworn deposition testimony of actual witnesses,
• court opinions speaking to the conspiracy and cover-up, and
• public release by the church of the names of dozens of priests in Delaware who abused children.

Yes, there is hard proof of a cover-up by the church, just like at Penn State.

JWW: Well, did you reach any conclusions as to why the church allowed this to happen to children?

TN: How could the monster priests found in the chapters of my book be allowed to roam the playing fields of childhood searching for their victims, you ask? Yes, I reached several conclusions about why this happened.

First, the church always put its business interests above its duty to protect the children entrusted to its care. Let’s look at just one example, Edward B. Carley, dead now. He was a longtime problem priest who the church eventually publicly admitted sexually abused young children. As was common, Carley was only hired, qualified or not, due to a fully documented and admitted shortage of priests going back decades.

Even when he was hired, the church conceded that it took a serious, conscious risk with him. In a letter dated July 30, 1947, Bishop Edmond John FitzMaurice wrote about whether to admit Carley to priest training despite his red flags. He said that, “prudence and the like tell me to pass up the applicant, but the heart and other considerations whisper me to take and give him a chance.” Yet, even though the Bishop knew that this was a risky decision, he ignored the danger because “more and more pastors are clamoring for assistants,” he said. Several months later, FitzMaurice again acknowledged the risk, stating, “there is, I realize, some risk entailed in my decision, but . . . I do not believe it is excessive, and I feel that the need for priests at this time in Wilmington is such to justify the venture.”

Do you see that, John? Despite the red flags and the danger he presented, let’s hire him anyway because we need more priests working for us. A shortage of priests existed there since at least the 1940s and they justified endangering kids because of this staff shortage.

Second, to the everlasting shame of the church, we found plenty of red warning flags in the background of its priests. Such warning alarms included: “be afraid to take a chance on him;” “something strange about him;” “may create a problem;” “surprised we took him;” “sometimes unbalanced;” “temperament peculiar.” Another serial child abuser priest was bounced out of two seminaries and was ordained and hired for Delaware without even a job interview! My gosh, to get a job at McDonald’s cooking hamburgers you have a job interview, but not in Delaware to become one of its priests. No wonder they were a danger to kids. The church would take anyone and make them a priest.

Third, the church willfully ignored the known danger that Roman Catholic priests historically presented to young children. It knew for many years that priests were a danger to kids, but that most important fact was kept hidden from church members sitting in the pews. Specifically for Delaware, from the 1950s forward, the church knew that there was a danger that some of its priests could sexually molest children. But no one was ever warned of how dangerous they were in the presence of kids.

Fourth, even though their own rules barred priests from taking kids to the second floor bedroom areas of where they lived, those rules were rarely enforced and instead children would be marched upstairs regularly to priest’s bedrooms for sex and pass by other priests in the household and even housekeepers. But they all kept a conspiracy of silence about what was going on. One priest said that he wouldn’t report a fellow priest. And if a parent found out and complained to a Bishop, the priest then was quietly moved to another location, but he was not fired and no one in his new location was warned about how dangerous he was. The conspiracy of silence was used to protect these criminals, just like at Penn State how they protected Jerry Sandusky.

All this is found in chapter one of my book.

Now I’m certainly not saying that all priests are bad. But if you look at the historical documents, internal records, and other evidence, it conclusively establishes that this has been a major problem for a very long time. And if you know about a problem, you legally have a responsibility to take steps to protect against it. And the church knew, but never took any steps to protect kids or warn their parents.

JWW: You have said that your book reads in part like a legal thriller. Is it a legal thriller?

TN: Well on one level it is a legal thriller, and a comment on the church and Penn State scandals.

It’s written using the words of real people in their ten court cases. My five chapters contain ten moving previously unknown short stories, all set in the context of riveting courtroom battles for justice against overwhelming odds.

The last half of this book presents the ultimate legal battle – the two month long trial of survivor John Vai against the church where he grew up and was raped by a known abuser. You can read about things like the destruction on the witness stand of the key priest in the entire diocese, the right-hand man for four Bishops, who was involved with this local scandal for over forty years. Like the jurors in that trial, the reader will hear all the evidence against the church which was presented by John Vai’s attorneys. So by reading this chapter alone the reader can reach his or her own conclusions about the general guilt or innocence of the Roman Catholic Church and the justice of the claims of victims of its priests.

So it is a legal thriller. You could make a movie out of it extolling the courage and iron will of one man, just one survivor. And in proving the guilt of the church, twelve jurors agreed.

JWW: Are there other things in your book that would educate the public and even voters?

TN: Sure, headlines and news stories can’t cover in detail any of the following subjects which I write about. Let me try to name a few of them:

On the human level, the enormous personal anguish of survivors and their families.

The tactics used by priest child abusers to groom their victims and what their enabler bosses did to protect the church from scandal.

The way religious dogma was perverted to enable these rogue priests to circumvent the family as a social institution which normally can protect children. Parents were told priests were just like God and they would never do anything bad to their kids.

The medicine behind how kids reacted to being sexually abused and raped is explained.

And,

The lifelong permanent handicaps inflicted on survivors, such as alcoholism, substance abuse, failure to hold a job, and so on.

JWW: Again, let me interrupt you here. Do families suffer in addition to the survivor victim and what are some of the permanent effects on survivors?

TN: Yes, the families suffer, parents, spouses and children. In chapter two we have the mom of a victim testify in federal court about how it all happened and the guilt she carries with her for trusting her church to protect her son. And then Amy Whitwell, my client’s wife, age thirty-eight and married to Ken for ten years, explains for more than an hour on the witness stand how she thought she had married a prince charming, but her naval officer husband was no prince. Amy illustrated how damaged a survivor really is if you get behind the false front which many of them present. She learned, as do all spouses married to survivors, that instead he was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, living with a split personality.

Amy explained that she was a Navy nurse who married a tall handsome Naval officer with the full ceremony, the Navy Service Dress White Uniform, medals on his chest, a sword hanging from his side and all that goes with that. But immediately they led two lives. When he was on duty Ken was with it, thriving and in command. But when he was off-duty he was a bottled-up, volcanic, angry nightmare at home. So one evening in a screaming argument in their bedroom, she yelled at him that, “You can’t hate me this bad. You haven’t known me this long.” What was wrong with their relationship? He was curled up in a fetal position crying. Like a little child, a light seemed to go on in his head, he made some connection of time and events, and he said, “Could it have been because a priest abused me when I was young?” Well, Amy had been a Navy psychiatric nurse on a lock-down psychiatric floor for two years. All of a sudden relief flowed over her. It wasn’t her, he didn’t hate her, something else had severely damaged her prince charming long ago. That explains everything, she thought. That explains why he’s so angry. It explains it’s not me that’s the problem. You need help, she realized.

At the time of his trial her husband was a thirty-nine year old professional warrior, medical officer, and fighter pilot. Ken readily states that it was the discipline he found in the Navy which saved him from a ruined life and gave him the courage to face up to his nightmarish past. It enabled him to survive professionally, while privately off the base he was a total wreck.

You don’t see anything in the press like this, about the effect on families of all this suffering. This aspect of the crisis needs to be told and my book does so.

Now John your question had two parts. You also asked what are the permanent long lasting effects of child abuse?

After hearing months of testimony, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina on July 24^th described it as destroying the souls of children, when she sentenced Monsignor Lynn to prison. Others call it soul murder.

As for the typical result of childhood sexual abuse, most survivors are severely damaged emotionally. They trust no one. What happened to them is absolutely devastating and long-lasting for each of them. They suffer terrible enormous pain, anger and confusion. The effects of these crimes reverberate through a child’s life and extend into adulthood. They are the walking wounded.

The many consequences of childhood sexual abuse can include alcohol abuse, drug use, suicide, confusion over sexual identity, divorce, inability to maintain a stable marital relationship or relationships with others, guilt, anger, grief, feelings of worthlessness, loss of faith and loss of trust in God.

Each of those ten boys who took the witness stand against Jerry Sandusky will live lives affected in these ways. Their ordeal is not over. It is never over for any survivor.

JWW: Now I know that Delaware, California, and now last April even Hawaii, passed laws giving survivors of childhood sexual abuse access to the courthouse door to file their claim despite the passage of time and get the chance to gather evidence to prove a case against public schools, churches, the Boy Scouts or other organizations who may have caused them to be abused long ago. But the church says we can’t defend ourselves. The cases are too old. This is a lynching of us. What do you say to that?

TN: That claim is just a piece of propaganda. I can tell you that the church keeps better records than the Nazis. You just have to find them because they hide them. You can never prove a case with just one man’s word against a dead man. You have to have independent proof or the judge will throw your case out. It is the job of judges to throw cases out if there is not enough proof. That is what they are paid to do. So let them do their job and do not use this false claim as an excuse to deny survivors access to justice and the courts.

Our Delaware cases were always successful because the internal written business records of the church convicted the church and proved that it had notice of the dangerousness of its priests. Also, we always found priests who were still living and other church officials who knew what was going on but covered it up or looked the other way. We also found other witnesses, children who were being raped at the same time, or kids, parents or coaches who found out about and reported the abuse only to have it be covered-up and their reports ignored. So in the end there was a ton of evidence against the church. Because we had so much evidence, we were even able to prove that the church officials were deliberately reckless with the safety of children and turned a blind eye to what was going on.

If you know someone is a danger, you will have to answer for placing children in jeopardy. The same thing just happened with the Freeh Report on Penn State. Apparently the powers that be up there knew Sandusky was a danger to kids but kept him around for many more years to avoid bad publicity.

The claim that they cannot defend themselves is a sham. The fact of the matter is that there is a ton of incriminating evidence out there and the church just wants to continue covering it up instead of account for its wrongdoing.

This is all explained in my book which on this level is written to convince legislators in states still considering giving relief to survivors, such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey or New York, that the cause of survivors is just and new laws are needed to give them a chance in court. If they do not come up with proof then they will lose their case. But if they do, they deserve a chance at justice.

JWW: You also state in your book that better education about the consequences of childhood sexual abuse will assist the medical profession in helping victims and also better inform the press. What did you mean by that?

TN: I hope my work will contribute to various professions, not just law and criminal justice, but also medicine, nursing, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and journalism, by presenting the actual experiences of survivors of child abuse as they lived it. Instead of presenting abstract quantitative studies of such persons, like “X” percent become alcoholics, I tell the lived experience of these persons in their own words. By this I hope to deepen understanding of these victims across academic and professional boundaries.

I pray that their experiences will be useful for diagnostic and treatment purposes of adult victims of childhood sex crimes. Such victims rarely, if ever, tell a medical professional that they experienced a childhood sex crime which may be the source of their substance abuse, alcoholism, relational problems or other physical or emotional issues. Look at Commander Whitwell who I just spoke about. He never connected the dots explaining why he was such a bear at home with his wife. He never told anyone he had been sexually abused for so many years. But this information may help medical professionals in making proper diagnoses and treatment alternatives may increase. They can push the hard questions and even when the person is reluctant to talk about it, knowing the warning signs can help them to connect the dots. For example, with substance abusers – “Were you ever raped as a child or sodomized?” – they can ask in their medical history.

By knowing what’s out there and understanding the experiences of survivors, journalists and the media also will be better prepared to report on related sex crimes in these arenas.

JWW: This has been very enlightening and your book should increase anyone’s empathy for survivors. Where can we get this book?

TN: No literary agent, publishing house or university press would touch this controversial topic. One agent said, who wants to read about child rape over breakfast? So I had to publish it myself to fulfill a promise that I made to my clients to not let their story be forgotten.

So you can pre-order the book now and it will be on the book stand by mid-September 2012. You can purchase the book from the Ninth Street Book Shop, at 730 North Market Street, Wilmington, DE 19801, telephone (302) 652-3315 and you will find them on the web for purchase at www.ninthstreetbookshop.com.

DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN OLDSPEAK ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE.