A Baltimore judge has ordered the public release of a redacted version of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office report detailing the history of childhood sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
Circuit Judge Robert Taylor presided over secret proceedings Feb. 14, with attorneys representing the attorney general’s office, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, an anonymous group of people named in the report, and two separate groups of abuse survivors.
Taylor issued his written ruling Friday, directing the attorney general’s office to prepare a heavily-redacted report for public release.
Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori has said multiple times neither he nor the church oppose the report’s release.
None of the parties are authorized to speak publicly about the proceedings or the report after Baltimore Circuit Judge Anthony Vittoria issued a confidentiality order in the case Dec. 8. Vittoria oversaw the Catholic abuse proceedings as part of his duties on the grand jury docket, but was transferred off that docket and replaced by Taylor at the beginning of the new year, a move that was scheduled months in advance.
The report and the litigation around it are secret because the 456-page document relies heavily on information obtained by way of a grand jury. Maryland law requires all grand jury records be kept secret, and former Attorney General Brian Frosh’s office filed a motion in November asking the court to waive that secrecy.
Frosh’s office finished the report in mid-November, and asked a judge’s permission to make public its investigative findings into how 158 priests and other church employees sexually abused and tortured at least 600 people, with examples of abuse going back at least eight decades. The report also shows how the church, in that time period, sought to cover up the abuses and, in some cases, enabled them.
“The sexual abuse was so pervasive that victims were sometimes reporting sexual abuse to priests who were perpetrators themselves,” said a motion filed by the attorney general’s office.
The coming release of a redacted report figures to play prominently into lawmakers’ debates about whether to pass legislation making it possible for more survivors to sue their abusers and the institutions that enabled them. Maryland law does not allow for childhood sexual abuse survivors to file lawsuits after their 38th birthday.
Supplemented with interviews, the report relies on more than 100,000 internal church documents that the attorney general’s office obtained via a grand jury subpoena.
The attorney general’s investigation found the archdiocese failed to report many allegations of sexual abuse, conduct adequate investigations, remove abusers from their posts and restrict their access to children. Instead, the attorney general’s office found, the archdiocese “went to great lengths in order to keep the abuse secret,” according to the motion.
Vittoria’s Dec. 8 ruling retroactively sealed all previous filings in the matter, including the attorney general’s office’s motion to disclose the report. However, all previous filings up to that point had been publicized. In his order, Vittoria said he made the decision to “preserve the secrecy and sanctity of grand jury proceedings.”
Vittoria’s order followed a letter from Zuckerman-Spaeder attorneys William J. Murphy and Gregg Bernstein, who represent an anonymous group of people named in the report but not accused of abuse, that requested that the proceedings be made secret in fairness to their clients.
Attorneys for the group wrote that they would identify their clients only in a private hearing.
The church is paying, at least in part, the legal fees for that anonymous group. Lori said previously the church “pledged to support the rights” of people named in the report but who are not accused of abuse and who were not given the opportunity to respond to the attorney general’s investigation.
--------
