On The Front Lines
New to OldSpeak: Attorney Tom Neuberger Sheds Light on the Roman Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal & Its Lasting Impact on Abuse Victims
“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.”—Tom Neuberger
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — New to OldSpeak, an online publication of The Rutherford Institute: attorney Tom Neuberger, author of When Priests Become Predators, Profiles of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors, sheds light on his experiences defending survivors of childhood sexual abuse in a protracted legal battle against the Catholic Church in Delaware. In the OldSpeak interview, Neuberger talks about his forthcoming book, which relates the struggle ten survivors of childhood sexual abuse underwent to come to terms with their past and seek justice for themselves and others. The interview, conducted by John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, is available here.
“Victims of childhood sexual crimes are living in every community in our country and they need to be understood and supported,” shared Neuberger. “Survivors are 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.”
Born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, Tom Neuberger received his secondary, college and legal education at pillars of the Catholic school system on the East Coast—Salesianum High School in Wilmington, St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C. After clerking for a federal judge, Neuberger embarked on a wide-ranging legal career. The highlights of Neuberger’s 40-year legal career include forcing the NCAA to rescind its ban on football players taking a knee to say a quick prayer after scoring a touchdown, suing the Pentagon over its requirement that female Air Force officers wear a burqa when traveling off-base on official military business in Saudi Arabia, and forcing the Pentagon to rescind its discipline of a decorated airman who was punished after publicly criticizing the military’s tainted anthrax vaccination program. Having sued more police and public agencies than he cares to remember, exposing wide ranging cronyism, corruption, discrimination, retaliation and a host of other illegal behaviors, Neuberger was well equipped to lead the charge against the Catholic Church in Delaware in approximately 110 childhood sexual abuse cases. Yet as he interviewed and deposed parents, students and priests alike, eventually gaining access to the Church’s internal secret archives, he was surprised to discover that in nearly every case, Church officials had known for years that priests had sexually abused children, yet they were simply shuffled to a new parish each time another report of abuse was raised. The courage of the abuse survivors in the face of unrelenting personal attacks and underhanded tactics by Church officials led Neuberger to write When Priests Become Predators, Profiles of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors. Review copies are available upon request.
