Weapons of Mass Destruction

At the behest of paid, unnamed ‘trauma-informed consultants,’ my diocese provided a six-figure settlement for a claim far too old to be filed in any court of law.

May 22, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

And they keep on coming. A year before the 2002 wave of clergy sex abuse claims rippled out of Boston across the country, Sean Murphy, age 37, and his mother, Sylvia, demanded $850,000 from the Archdiocese of Boston. Sean claimed that three decades earlier, he and his brother were repeatedly molested by their parish priest. In support of the claim, Mrs. Murphy produced old school records placing her sons in a community where the priest was once assigned. No other corroboration was needed. Shortly thereafter, Byron Worth, age 41, recounted molestation by the same priest and demanded his own six-figure settlement. The men were following an established practice of “mediated settlements,” a precedent set in the early 1990s when a multitude of molestation claims from the 1960s and 1970s emerged against Father James Porter and a few other priests. In 1993, the Diocese of Fall River settled some 80 such claims in a single negotiated deal. Other Church institutions followed that lead on the advice of insurers and attorneys.

Before the Murphys’ $850,000 demand was paid, however, Sean, his mother, and Byron Worth were indicted by a Massachusetts grand jury for conspiracy, attempted larceny, and soliciting others to commit larceny. It turned out that Sean and Byron were once inmates together at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Shirley where they concocted their fraudulent plan to score a windfall from their beleaguered Church.

On November 16, 2001, Sean Murphy and Byron Worth pleaded guilty to fraud charges and were sentenced to less than two years in prison for the scam. The younger Murphy brother was never charged, and Mrs. Murphy died before facing court proceedings. Local newspapers relegated the Murphy scam to the far back pages while headlines screamed about the emerging multitude of decades-old claims of abuse by priests. When two other inmates at MCI-Shirley accused another priest in 2001, a Boston lawyer wrote that it is no coincidence these men shared the same prison. “They also shared the same contingency lawyer,” he wrote. “I have some contacts in the prison system, having been an attorney for some time, and it has been made known to me that this is a current and popular scam.”

It is not difficult to understand the roots of such fraud. Prison inmates, like others, read newspapers. Just months before the onslaught of claims against priests, the Archdiocese of Boston landed on the litigation radar screen with the notorious arrest of Mr. Christopher Reardon, a young, married, Catholic layman, model citizen, and youth counselor at a local YMCA who was also employed part-time at a small, remote parish outpost north of Boston. As Mr. Reardon’s extensive serial child molestation case came to light—with substantial and graphic DNA, videotape, and photographic evidence of assaults that occurred over previous months—the YMCA quickly entered into settlements consistent with the State’s charitable immunity laws.

In a search for deeper pockets, however, a local contingency lawyer pondered for the news media about whether the rural part-time parish worker’s activities were personally known—and covered up—by the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. It was a ludicrous suggestion, but it was a springboard to announce in the Boston Globe (July 14, 2001) that “the hearsay and speculation” among lawyers and clients, is that “the Catholic Church settled their cases [of suspected abuse by priests] for an average of $500,000 each since the 1990s.”

It was a dangled lure that would soon have many takers, some of whom have been to the Church’s ATM more than once. In January of 2003, at the height of the clergy scandal, a 68-year-old Massachusetts priest had the poor judgment to be drawn into a series of suggestive Internet exchanges with a total stranger, a 32-year-old man named Dominic Martin. Using a threat of media exposure of the printed exchanges, Mr. Martin demanded that the priest leave an envelope containing $3,000 in a local restaurant lobby.

The frightened priest, who never had a prior accusation, compounded his poor judgment by paying the demand. Soon after, another cash demand was made, but the priest finally called the police who set up a sting of their own. On January 24, 2003, Dominic Martin and his wife, Brianna, were arrested at the drop point, and charged with extortion.

The police report revealed that Mr. Martin had changed his name. His birth name was identified as Tod Biltcliffe, a man who, a decade earlier, obtained a settlement when he accused a New Hampshire priest of molesting him in the 1980s. At the time the priest protested that Mr. Biltcliffe was committing fraud and larceny. The Church settled anyway. Biltcliffe’s claim was that when he was 15 years old, the priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA. Curiously, the investigation file contained a transcript of a 1988 “Geraldo Rivera” show entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” One of the cases profiled was that of a young man who claimed that a priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA.

The 1988 “Geraldo” transcript was a sensationalized account of clergy sex abuse cases from the 1970s and 1980s. The transcript is notable because it contains many of the same claims of exposing secret Church documents, archives, and episcopal cover-ups in 1988 that lawyers and reporters claim to have exposed for the first time in 2003.

Writer Jason Berry, and contingency lawyers Jeffrey Anderson and Roland Lewis all appeared live on “Geraldo” on November 14, 1988 to announce the existence of secret Church archives, cover-ups by bishops, and out-of-court settlements of Catholic clergy sex abuse claims across the country. Jason Berry, who excoriates the Church and priesthood at every turn, actually defended, in 1988, the existence of so-called “secret” Church archives: “Canon law says that you have to have a secret archive in every diocese…. That’s funny because I’ve been attacking the Church for three years on this… I want to express my own irony of [now] being in a position of defending the Church.”

Enter Shamont Lyle Sapp

When Shamont Lyle Sapp first detected the smell of money, he found it too enticing to pass up. Convicted for a series of bank robberies, Mr. Sapp, then age 51, was serving a lengthy sentence in the dark peripheries of the U.S. Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania when the scent first drifted by his cell in 2008. That was when Sapp filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon. Detailing his tragic past, Sapp’s lawsuit claimed that he was a stranded teenage runaway from his Pennsylvania home en route to stay with relatives in Oregon. Then Archdiocese of Portland priest, Father Thomas Laughlin took advantage of his plight to repeatedly sexually abuse him.

Sapp claimed in his highly detailed lawsuit that the priest offered the young runaway a job cutting grass, then sexually abused him at a Portland Catholic church. Then Father Laughlin sodomized him during a five-day motel stay paid for by the priest who then funded the youth’s return trip to Pennsylvania. It was the latest horror story in the Catholic abuse narrative, and one that dismayed Catholics coast to coast.

Mr. Sapp’s story rang true, so it flew. Further inquiry was deemed unnecessary. The detailed claims were reported to civil legal authorities for whom the story also rang true, but Father Tom Laughlin had already been accused and convicted by others with similar tales. Mr. Sapp’s disturbing story added to the weight of a growing millstone around the priest’s neck.

In all public documents in the case, Mr. Sapp found refuge among an ever-expanding list of “John Does” accusing priests from the Archdiocese of Portland to cash in on its bankruptcy proceedings. Sapp’s story was accepted at face value resulting in a cash settlement of $70,000. Inmate Sapp accepted the offer while lawyers, the Archdiocese, and victim advocates all pontificated about how no amount of money could compensate him for the trauma he endured. As for Father Laughlin, the “credible” (aka “settled”) accusations drove another nail into the coffin containing the remains of his priesthood as the Archdiocese sought his dismissal.

There was only one problem with Shamont Lyle Sapp’s story: “It was entirely fabricated,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer who in 2014 prosecuted Sapp for mail fraud and other federal charges for this and three similar frauds carried out against Catholic priests and dioceses in four jurisdictions. While serving another sentence in a medium security state prison in Minersville, PA, Mr. Sapp filed a second lawsuit claiming that a priest of the Diocese of Tucson, Arizona sexually abused him.

Later still, Sapp was serving a sentence in a South Carolina prison from where he sought compensation for claimed sexual abuse by another priest. And before all the above, Sapp filed a 2006 lawsuit claiming that a Spokane, Washington priest had sexually abused him in a similar account.

In all these other claims, Sapp picked from diocesan records the names of senior priests who had never before been accused, destroying not only their good names, but their vocations. Each was removed from ministry under the terms of the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter. They became “Priests in Limbo,” as the National Catholic Register’s Joan Frawley Desmond described priests living, sometimes for years, under a cloud of shame and suspicion for events that could not be disproven after the passage of time. In each of his claims, Shamont Lyle Sapp simply did a little research on publicly available bankruptcy proceedings entered into by each of the four beleaguered dioceses he sued. He then attached his name and claims to each case — one by one over several years — aided and abetted by an assurance of anonymity as “John Doe” at every level in the settlement process.

He was also “John Doe” in the news media, and in the fired-up rhetoric of the activists of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests who are ready to dismiss any hard questions as “revictimizing the victims.” It was ultimately his own greed that unfolded Mr. Sapp’s hand. In 2011, Sapp gained some notoriety when he filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages against comedians Jamie Fox and Tyler Perry, falsely claiming that they stole from him an idea for a film project called “Skank Robbers.” Finally, someone took a hard look at Shamont Lyle Sapp, and it was his undoing.

“Like the Anti-Communist Witch Hunt of the 1950s”

In a 2004 article in the Boston Phoenix, “Fleecing the Shepherds,” legal expert and author Harvey Silverglate cautioned against capitulating to significant numbers of questionable claims brought after the Church entered into huge blanket settlements. In some cases, such claims were deemed “credible” — the standard established for permanent removal of accused priests — with no other basis than their having been settled.

As accusations swept over the U.S. Church, few in the media dared write anything contrary to the tidal wave gaining indiscriminate momentum against the Church. A notable exception was the left-leaning Catholic magazine Commonweal, which editorialized: “Admittedly, perspective is hard to come by in the midst of a media barrage that is reminiscent of the day care sex abuse stories, now largely disproved, of the early nineties… All analogies limp, but it is hard not to be reminded of the din of accusation and conspiracy-mongering that characterized the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.”

With media coverage of the unprecedented $4 billion invested in mediated settlements, the trolling for claims and litigation continues unabated. In 2007, a Boston area high school history teacher and coach of twenty years, a husband and father with no prior record or accusation, was caught up in an Internet sting by New Hampshire Detective James F. McLaughlin posing on-line as a teenage boy cruising Internet chat rooms for sexual encounters. The practice has netted the detective some 600 arrests, including — by his own estimation — one Catholic priest, six police officers, and 18 public school teachers.

The Keene, New Hampshire police detective was also known to have fielded cases for local contingency lawyers. The ex-teacher, now prison inmate, related that as the handcuffs were set upon him, before he was even led out of the YMCA to which he had been lured and arrested, Detective James F. McLaughlin reportedly asked some enticing questions: “Are you a Catholic?” “Yes,” said the suspect. “Were you ever an altar boy?” Another “Yes.” “Were you ever molested by a priest?”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: The mainstream media, and sometimes even the Catholic media as well, too often shrinks from reporting on the story of fraudulent claims of victimhood. So please share this post on social media and elsewhere. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report

Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

A federal jury found Rolling Stone liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice, but their earlier malice cost the life of an innocent priest.

At some point before or after reading this post, pay a visit to Ralph Cipriano’s “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case” in Newsweek Magazine, published in February, 2016. My post about it is one of the most widely read and shared posts on Beyond These Stone Walls. Some readers found it infuriating. Others enlightening. But nearly all readers were shocked to learn of this story from only one humble little “new media” blog while all the once trustworthy “old media” (with the striking exception of Newsweek) blatantly ignored it.

I’ll explain why they ignored it in a moment, but I warn you in advance, the answer isn’t pretty. I reveal this true account only on a “need to know” basis — as in, “You need to know.” Before you spend another dime on a news media subscription under the guise of being kept informed, you need to know.

In an article for Newsmax magazine (“Trump Taps Into Mass Distrust,” April 22, 2016), Catholic League President Bill Donohue cited a new poll by the Media Insight Project. It was a joint effort by the Associated Press and the American Press Institute, and the results did not go well for the political and media elite.

Respondents in the survey were asked to comment on how much confidence they have in various sectors of society. I found the results fascinating. The top five sources of public trust in America are the military, the scientific community, the U.S. Supreme Court, organized religion, and financial institutions.

At rock bottom on the barometer of public trust were the very news media platforms that launched the survey. Only six percent of Americans responded that they had a great deal of confidence in the press. Members of Congress followed close behind with an embarrassing four percent.

Bill Donohue, whose academic background includes a doctorate in sociology, reported that the two most common reasons cited for widespread public mistrust of the news media are inaccurate reporting and media bias. Donohue also cited other sources that give perspective to the media survey results. In 1985, a Pew Research Center poll found that 55 percent of Americans trust the news media to “get the facts straight.” By 2011, that figure dropped by more than half to only 25 percent. In the 1985 Pew survey, 45 percent of Americans judged the media to be biased. In 2011, that figure jumped to 63 percent.

The Crocodile Tears of a Predatory Media

One of the clearest examples of why the media is no longer trusted can be found in an important story that became buried under all the recent election coverage. A few weeks before the election, Journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, testified under oath as a defendant in a $7.5 million lawsuit charging her with actual malice, and Rolling Stone with defamation. The lawsuit was filed by University of Virginia Administrator Nicole Eramo.

Two years earlier, Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone defamed Ms. Eramo and U-VA in “A Rape on Campus,” a notorious November, 2014, story. It was the shocking account of “Jackie” who claimed to be a victim of gang rape at a U-VA fraternity in 2012. The story helped launch a national debate about sexual assault on college campuses across the nation, and contributed to an atmosphere of moral panic. Draconian measures to limit the due process rights of any student so accused were set in place in response to the high profile account.

Erdely’s Rolling Stone account depicted U-VA administrators as having callous disregard for the pain and suffering of Jackie and, by extension, other victims of sexual assault. But when Erdely’s rolling stones gathered up their dirt and the dust settled on this story, a major problem slowly came to light.

Jackie’s story turned out to be a massive lie, and Erdely’s coverage of it a massive betrayal of journalistic standards. Erdely did no fact checking of her own. She just ran with the lurid and sensational account with no attempt at corroboration. In the defamation trial, Erdely drew upon the same script used by contingency lawyers against Catholic priests and bishops for two decades.

“It takes trauma victims some time to come forward with all the details,” said Erdely in dismissal of her callous disregard for the journalistic skepticism so many in the media have abandoned in favor of political correctness. It is the same necessary skepticism that journalist Joan Wypijewski described in “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”

I am haunted by the familiar ring of this story’s aftermath. Reading about Ms. Erdely’s agenda masked as journalism brought a loud and clear echo from my own trial as Judge Arthur Brennan instructed jurors to “disregard inconsistencies” in accuser Thomas Grover’s testimony.

And it recalled Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin’s shady and unexplained coaching of accusers. [In 2022 McLaughlin was exposed on a New Hampshire Attorney General’s previously secret list of dishonest police. McLaughlin’s offense was the fabrication of records and evidence.] In a 1994 police report, he described his response to my accusers’ inconsistencies and multiple versions of the story: “I gave them a copy of MacRae’s resume to help them with their dates.” Dates that repeatedly changed, and were off by years, not days or weeks or months.

“It’s not unusual,” Erdely explained when confronted on the witness stand about her response to the ever changing details and versions of Jackie’s account detailed in the Rolling Stone lawsuit. When Jackie changed aspects of her story, Erdely never questioned her credibility, never confronted her about the discrepancies. With streaming tears, the story and the wreckage left in its wake were all Jackie’s fault. “It was a mistake to rely on someone whose intent was to deceive me.”

The jury saw this differently. Rolling Stone was found to be liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice. The bar for proving defamation and malice against a journalist is steep. A jury must conclude, as it did in this case, that a media venue published what it knew to be false, or did so with reckless disregard for the truth. It was only after a multi-million dollar judgment was rendered against Rolling Stone that Erdely was removed from its Contributing Editors listing in the December 2016 issue.

Former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely; the late Fr. Charles Engelhardt, who died in prison; newly minted millionaire Daniel Gallagher, aka “Billy Doe.”

A Media Double Standard: When Erdely’s Jackie Was Billy

One can easily detect between the lines the rest of the news media’s discomfort with this story. Moriah Balingit took it on for The Washington Post in “Rolling Stone reporter says ‘Jackie deceived her about U-VA gang rape’” (October 20, 2016).

I commend Ms. Balingit for her truthful treatment of the story, but it’s a truth reported with carefully drawn limits. My strong suspicion is that the limits on truth were not those of the writer, but of The Washington Post. The focus of the account was on this one story, and not the standards and ethics of Sabrina Rubin Erdely. There is no reason to conclude that her compromised journalistic standards began with Jackie at U-VA.

A news media in pursuit of the whole truth instead of an agenda would look at Ms. Erdely’s past work as well, but they won’t. They won’t because doing so would require delving into another Rolling Stone debacle by Ms. Erdely. It’s a story that I have suggested at the top of this post: “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case.”

In that story, Ms. Erdely applied her “reckless disregard for truth” to the wildly inconsistent account of “Billy Doe” told in Rolling Stone on September 15, 2011 with the title, “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files.” It was a clear example of a writer’s preference for shock value over truth.

This time Ms. Erdely’s disregard for journalistic standards cost Father Charles Engelhardt — a good man and good priest — his life. He died chained to a bed in the hospital wing of a Pennsylvania prison because the news media failed in its once honored pursuit of truth. There is an explanation for why most in the news business cower from revisiting this story to look under the rolling stones cast by Ms. Erdely. The Wall Street Journal’ s Dorothy Rabinowitz, a rare and courageous “old media” voice of journalistic integrity, explained why:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the progressive views held by many toward crimes involving special categories of victims like women and children… [T]here [is] a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse charges was to undermine the battle… It was to betray all other victims of sexual predators … Where advanced reasoning of this sort prevailed, the facts of a case were simply irrelevant.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz, No Crueler Tyrannies, p. 17-18

“The Story Was Killed Higher Up”

And it’s not just the press. Broadcast news is driven by the same agendas. Last year I was contacted by a correspondent for a popular cable news venue. This is a news figure with obvious integrity whose positions I trusted and still do. She had been reading Beyond These Stone Walls and invested some time in researching the story described on our “About” page. The news correspondent wrote to me asking if I would agree to an on-camera interview for what was described to me as “a few hard questions.”

I agreed, and then waited. And waited. And waited… But the hard questions were never asked. They were never asked because someone did not want them publicly answered. An acquaintance of the news correspondent told me of her disappointment that “the story was killed higher up.”

The story was killed for the same reasons The Washington Post or The New York Times will not look into Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s prior work for Rolling Stone. Hard questions will be asked, and it would be a politically incorrect affront to the media’s progressive agenda if those hard questions were answered. This would require a legitimate inquiry into the story of Daniel Gallagher — Erdely’s “Billy Doe” in the pages of Rolling Stone. It would require some integrity reborn in an “old media” venue such as The Washington Post. For too many in the news business a progressive agenda requires the suppression of truth. As I wrote earlier, you need to know.

You need to know this too. The presiding judge in the case profiled by Ms. Erdely in Rolling Stone in 2011 was by no means immune from the bias Erdely helped to shape. During the process of vetting jurors for the trial of two priests accused in that case, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina objected to a question posed to prospective jurors saying,

“Anybody that doesn’t think there is widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is living on another planet.”

Survivors and Liars

A recent issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture has an article by Penn State University professor Philip Jenkins entitled “Survivors and Liars” (August 2016). It’s an analysis of the story of Lauren Stratford. Her shocking tale of childhood sexual abuse and Satanic Ritual Abuse became a fixture of 1980s tabloid journalism “including a legendary Geraldo Rivera special broadcast near Halloween in 1988” in a “Geraldo” installment called “Satanic Breeders.” The story helped launch a moral panic giving unquestioned credence to the claims of adult “survivors” of sexual and Satanic Ritual Abuse that emerge without evidence, often with claims of “repressed and recovered” memory.

Just two weeks later, Geraldo Rivera helped launch the birth pangs of another moral panic with the November 1988 airing of “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” It featured the early wave of contingency lawyers and the nascent voices of SNAP eager to harness the news media’s developing scent for Catholic scandal.

Ryan MacDonald found a transcript of that 1988 Geraldo Show among the first documents obtained by Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin to help defraud the Church out of a lot of money. Ryan produced a rather shocking report of his own about how that Geraldo Rivera show influenced the case against me in “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.”

As for Geraldo’s Lauren Stratford story, it was later exposed as a fraud thanks to a report of Bob and Gretchen Passantino entitled “Satan’s Sideshow” — described by Philip Jenkins as “a superb piece of investigative journalism.” Lauren Stratford’s shocking tale hyped on “Geraldo” was just a massive lie told by a delusional narcissist. In its wake, Philip Jenkins asks,

“Might other adult ‘survivors’ of child abuse be telling the literal truth? Certainly. But the case of Lauren Stratford should be a ringing reminder that, absent evidence, to the contrary, any one of them could be making up every word.”

A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court

Federal Judge Joseph Laplante dismissed without testimony Fr Gordon MacRae’s recent hope for justice. No U.S. court has allowed this defendant to utter a single word.

June 22, 2016 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald, author of “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud.”

I am not here to cast Donald Trump-like aspersions upon a judge whose decision I simply do not like. I have no doubt that Father Gordon MacRae would bar me from publishing here if I did. I am simply here to describe a grievous error that occurred in United States District Court in Concord, New Hampshire, and other facts that continue to trouble me greatly a year after I published an important article on this site: “Judge Joseph Laplante Denies Priest’s Appeal.”

Many people have come to believe that the 1994 prosecution and trial of Father Gordon MacRae, and subsequent appeals, have left an innocent man in prison and a gaping wound on the integrity of the criminal justice system. One issue that I and others simply cannot comprehend is that no one in this system — absolutely no one — has allowed this accused priest to utter a single word in his own defense.

After the prosecution rested its case in 1994 — with lots of theatrics but no evidence — Judge Arthur Brennan addressed MacRae directly, outside the presence of the jury. He cautioned MacRae against testifying in his own defense. If he did so, the judge warned, the door would be opened to allow other claims from Thomas Grover, his brothers, and others to come before the jury and taint its view of this case.

The public defender who minimally handled MacRae’s direct appeal in 1996 said that he was surprised by Judge Brennan’s warning, but could find no legal precedent to cite it as an appeal issue. At one point in the trial, Judge Brennan instructed the jurors to “disregard inconsistencies in Thomas Grover’s testimony.” As Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “they had much to disregard” (WSJ, “A Priest’s Story,” April 28, 2005).

In a sentencing hearing weeks after the trial, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced MacRae to a term of 67 years in prison — more than thirty times the two-year maximum sentence proposed to MacRae pre-trial, deals that the priest rejected citing his innocence of the charges. During the sentencing phase, he was not permitted to say a single word in his own defense while the Judge berated him for observing his Constitutional right to a jury trial.

When sentencing MacRae, Judge Arthur Brennan offered some evidence and testimony of his own: “This court has heard clear and convincing evidence that you created child pornography of your victims.” In the entire trial, not a single word about child pornography was ever raised. Eleven years later, the lead detective in the case admitted to Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

MacRae, in prison after the trial, was neither present nor represented by counsel as Thomas Grover and his brothers continued the fraud in civil court seeking lucrative settlements from the Catholic Diocese of Manchester. Everyone had a voice and a lawyer except Gordon MacRae.

And he was silenced yet again, not even permitted to be present, in his direct state appeal in 1996 when judges dismissed as “harmless error” the egregious testimony of a psychological expert that should not have been admitted at trial while MacRae’s defense was allowed no expert. As Innocence Project founders, Attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld described in their book, Actual Innocence  (Random House 2000):

“For an innocent person, the two most dangerous words in the language of the law are ‘harmless error.’ These are the magic words that appellate courts use to absolve police officers and prosecutors of misconduct.”

— Actual Innocence, p. 172

“Especially a Catholic Priest”

There was a lot to absolve. As The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz described (see “The Trials of Father MacRae,” May 13, 2013): “Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the perversion of justice it represents.” I exposed some concrete examples of those perversions of justice in “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud.”

It is an inescapable fact of injustice that from 2012 to 2015 three additional judges and courts heard motions to revisit this trial, but dismissed them without permitting a single word of testimony from defendant Gordon MacRae or any of the witnesses who have come forward, some quite courageously.

On March 17, 2015, Judge Joseph Laplante heard oral arguments from attorneys Robert Rosenthal and Cathy Green representing the imprisoned priest, and Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Woodcock for the prosecution. Neither Father MacRae nor any of the newly presented witnesses in this case were present, nor was any of their testimony heard. The arguments took just under two hours, a flash in time compared to the twenty-two years MacRae has thus far spent in wrongful imprisonment. On March 25, 2015, Judge Laplante dismissed the habeas corpus petition from going forward. There was to be no further hearing on testimony, merits or evidence.

Additionally, Judge Laplante declined to grant a Certificate of Appealability to bring this matter to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. This had the effect of forcing MacRae to fund an added appeal of the denial of a Certificate of Appealability. One full year later, in April of 2016, the First Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reverse the decision not to allow a further appeal. I held my pen until that decision was rendered.

I do not want to use limited space here to rehash what I wrote in “Judge Joseph Laplante Denies Priest’s Appeal.” I hope that after reading this article, you will go back to read it for yourselves for it lays out all the reasons why I believe this outcome to be an abuse of judicial discretion. Denying the Certificate of Appeal had the effect of bankrupting the defense of a man who has spent twenty-two years in prison for crimes that most observers today conclude never took place.

The Grievous Error

However, none of that addresses the error that I am here today to address. I have spent considerable time reading a transcript of that hearing and Judge Laplante’s ruling. A significant part of both troubled me greatly, and I know that it troubled Father MacRae as well. It simply did not concur with MacRae’s memory of this case, and his memory, according to Dorothy Rabinowitz, is “encyclopedic.” The error involves a point that was heavily stressed by Judge Laplante in both the transcript and his dismissal order. I will begin with the transcript. The speaker is Judge Laplante:

“Now, leaving [Thomas] Grover’s credibility aside, nothing that [new witnesses] say undermines what seems to be a very important piece of evidence in the underlying criminal trial which is that when [James] McLaughlin, a detective from Keene, confronted MacRae with these accusations, he didn’t deny them. He had a very unusual response, basically quibbling with [Detective] McLaughlin over the proper terminology to apply to a person who is sexually attracted to children under 14 or 15. I don’t even remember the terms right now, but he basically corrected the detective for using the word pedophile. He came up with a more correct term — a more precise term. Whether that was even correct is debatable. But it was a very unusual response. It wasn’t a denial. It wasn’t the type of conduct that one would expect one to undertake when accused in that way. Especially a Catholic priest … MacRae did not react in a manner one would expect of an innocent person.”

— T: 51-52

Now, the excerpt above reflects just two paragraphs of a 70-page court transcript, but it was an extensive part of the reasoning behind Judge Laplante’s two-page decision dismissing the federal habeas petition. What Judge Laplante described above is a claim that Detective McLaughlin confronted Father MacRae about the charges involving Thomas Grover, referred to MacRae as a “pedophile,” and then instead of simply denying it, MacRae supposedly corrected McLaughlin by telling him that the correct term is “hebophile.”

There is just one major problem here. It never happened! Detective James McLaughlin never once “confronted MacRae with these accusations,” nor did any of what Judge Laplante refers to above have any connection with the case at hand. This is an egregious perversion of justice.

When I read this I was very troubled. Father MacRae has been confined in a 96-square-foot cell for twenty-two years with very limited access to documents in this case and no access to online research. As the above scenario surfaced, his lawyers sent him a statement to sign stating that he never made any such admission to Detective McLaughlin, but “told him that someone who might be attracted to someone Grover’s age would be an ‘phebophile,’ not a ‘pedophile.’ “

MacRae was troubled because he has no memory of McLaughlin ever discussing any aspect of the Thomas Grover case with him. He simply assumed that someone (his own lawyers? the prosecutors?) who have access to transcripts, must have found such a reference somewhere.

But they did not. No such reference exists. In the case for which Father MacRae was indicted and faced trial, McLaughlin and the prosecutors brought secret indictments. This priest first learned of the very existence of this case on the night of May 5, 1993, the night that police showed up at his door to arrest him on charges that were then over a decade old. He had no subsequent or even previous discussion about these charges with McLaughlin.

So what is going on here? When I got to the bottom of it, the truth was spine-chilling in its gross manipulation of this defendant, but it had no connection whatsoever with Thomas Grover’s charges or this trial or the appeal of this case. Bear with me, please, for this is indeed a complex account.

Whack-a-Mole Justice Holds Court

In 1988, a full five years before Thomas Grover and his brothers concocted their scheme to accuse Gordon MacRae, Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James McLaughlin targeted a number of Catholic priests who had lived and worked in the Keene area. One of them was Father MacRae who was assigned in Keene from 1983 to 1987. In 1987 and 1988, on a leave from parish ministry, MacRae was Executive Director of a regional chemical dependency treatment center near Keene, and in 1989 he became Director of Admissions for the Servants of the Paraclete facility for troubled priests in Albuquerque, NM.

No one had come to Detective McLaughlin with a complaint about MacRae. He launched an exhaustive investigation based on a letter from state social worker, Sylvia Gale, claiming that MacRae was once a priest in Florida where he “molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.” Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote about that contrived and slanderous account in “A Priest’s Story” (WSJ, April 27, 2005). The Florida story had no basis in fact. MacRae had never been a priest in Florida nor had such a crime ever occurred there. The social worker’s claimed source was an official of the Diocese of Manchester who later denied it. For Detective McLaughlin, however, it became probable cause to launch a moral panic.

On September 19, 1989, Father MacRae received a telephone call from his sister in the Boston area. Upset and angry, she informed him that she received a call from Detective McLaughlin in Keene who told her that he was investigating MacRae for creating pornographic photographs of Keene youths. She gave her brother the number that McLaughlin left, and of course, knowing there was no truth to the claim, the priest called that number.

This was all set up in advance. That particular telephone line into the Keene Police Department was automatically recorded so McLaughlin was not required to obtain a warrant to call and record the priest. A warrant would require evidence, and there was none. This was a fishing expedition. In this telephone call, McLaughlin accused MacRae of taking pornographic photos of 15-year-old Jon Plankey who was later described by McLaughlin as an employee of his in “a family owned business.” It was also later discovered that McLaughlin and Plankey had made similar claims against three others, one of them Timothy Smith, a local Protestant church choir director who was charged and pled guilty.

MacRae vehemently denied the claim. He did not know he was being recorded, but at some point he invited McLaughlin to search his earthly possessions which were still stored in New Hampshire. McLaughlin declined to search anything, but stated that Plankey’s claims would become part of a lawsuit against the Diocese of Manchester. MacRae insisted that no such photographs were ever taken and do not exist. He asked McLaughlin why he isn’t even interested in searching for them. The detective reportedly replied, “Because I know there will be nothing there. You probably gave them to another priest.”

The detective wrote a report about this telephone conversation. It was report file number 89-12196 dated September 19, 1989. In that report, McLaughlin wrote that he recorded the conversation. His report claimed that he and Jon Plankey listened to the tape together, and that “a transcript will be made of this tape.” MacRae states (above) that McLaughlin said, “You probably gave [the photographs] to another priest.” If true, McLaughlin omitted this from his report, but it would have been present on the tape and transcript. So, where are they? And where are the condemning photographs?

Also in that report, McLaughlin wrote that he asked MacRae if he is a “pedophile.” His report claims that MacRae corrected him saying, “the correct term would be ‘hebophile.’” MacRae says he has never even heard of this word. I have found a reference to that word in only two places: McLaughlin’s 1989 report, and a transcript of a 1988 Geraldo Rivera Show faxed to McLaughlin (described below).

Among the many people McLaughlin approached in 1988-1989 looking for someone to accuse MacRae were members of the Grover family. Their mother, Patricia Grover, was then a social worker for the state agency that investigates child abuse cases, a position in which she interfaced often with Detective McLaughlin and with Sylvia Gale, author of the bogus Florida letter. His 1988 report indicated that Mrs. Grover would interview her three adopted sons, Thomas, David, and Jonathan Grover, all in their early twenties. None voiced a complaint about MacRae. Five years later, when the prospect of money loomed, all three changed their minds at the same time. Demonstrating the role that expectations of money played in this case, there is hard evidence that McLaughlin conducted some of his investigation from the office of Attorney Robert Upton, Thomas Grover’s contingency lawyer.

In 1993, as MacRae prepared for trial in the Thomas Grover case, state prosecutors were required to turn over all police reports related to the priest. MacRae was shocked to learn of a vast 72-page 1988 report and the 1989 report of the taped phone call with the “hebophile” claim.

When Thomas Grover accused MacRae five years later in 1993, prosecutors attempted to introduce into the trial the Plankey claim from 1989 as so-called “404-B” evidence of “other bad acts.” The defense filed a motion to obtain the recordings referred to in McLaughlin’s 1989 report. Judge Arthur Brennan ordered the state to turn over all recordings that McLaughlin claimed in reports to have made. McLaughlin wrote in a sworn statement that the tapes were lost due to having been “recycled.” Judge Brennan also ordered him to turn over the transcript of the 1989 recording. McLaughlin claimed that due to a clerical error the transcript was never made. The 1989 tape recorded conversation detailed herein is well documented (see USDC-NM 1504, §§ 28-32).

I can only conclude today that McLaughlin knew the recording contained his comment, “You probably gave [the lewd photos] to another priest,” a statement that would have unmasked a vile prejudice that would have weighed heavily in the trial. So the recordings disappeared. So did the so called “404-B” evidence.

Eleven years after this trial, after claiming repeatedly and under oath that all the tape recordings of MacRae that McLaughlin referenced in his reports were “recycled” and cannot be produced, the detective mailed one of them to Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal. It contained 45 minutes of Father MacRae sounding bewildered by the lurid accusations aimed at him, and his reference that he should talk to a lawyer, a request McLaughlin claims the priest never made.

This issue of tape recordings is very suspicious and has never been explained. McLaughlin claimed to have taped three phone conversations with MacRae, without his knowledge, and though there was no evidence obtained, McLaughlin attributed remarks to MacRae that the priest says he never made. Then all the tape recordings disappeared. The only witnesses to their existence or content are the detective and the priest. So why do the courts believe one over the other? Further, it seems that it was McLaughlin’s practice to tape record all conversations with accusers, but in this one case he produced not a single tape recording of any interview with the Grover brothers. In every other case of this sort he meticulously created recordings and preserved them as evidence. In some cases, including a claimant against another priest, McLaughlin arranged a polygraph for the accuser. None of this happened in the MacRae case. It should be noted here that MacRae himself underwent two voluntary polygraph examinations and passed them both.

There is more. It seems that the source of the “hebophile” term for which Judge Joseph Laplante dismissed MacRae’s petition may have been McLaughlin himself. Among the discovery obtained from the 1989 report about Jon Plankey’s claims of pornographic photos was a transcript faxed from the Geraldo Rivera Show to the Keene Police Department on November 14, 1988. The pages of the transcript were labeled by prosecutors in the discovery material as E-326 through E-331.

The topic of the “Geraldo” transcript that became part of Detective McLaughlin’s file was “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” It contains this passage that someone at either Keene Police or the prosecutor’s office underlined and marked with a bold asterisk before sending it in pre-trial discovery in 1994. The transcript has nothing to do with the MacRae case, nor was he ever a part of it. It details a conversation between Geraldo Rivera and “Roland Lewis, Attorney for Church sex abuse victims”:

Geraldo: “Did there come a time, sir, when this priest was recognized to be a pedophile by the church and was taken to St. Luke’s Institute to be treated?”

Mr. Lewis: “They sent him to St. Luke’s Institute. He was kept there 12 weeks. During that time it was determined, according to their medical records, that he was a homosexual. We finally were able to obtain copies of those medical records. We have had them evaluated. They establish without question that he is a pedophile and a hebophile.”

Geraldo: “What’s a hebophile?”

Mr. Lewis: “It’s an abuser of adolescent children.”

Geraldo: “I thought that’s what a pedophile was. Help me.”

Mr. Lewis: “The preadolescent is primarily a pedophile. The adolescent is a hebophile.”

I wrote of this same transcript, and the role it played in the MacRae case, in “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” It seems that someone has lifted the supposed 1989 telephone conversation between Father MacRae and Detective McLaughlin — mired in suspicions of misconduct over missing tapes and transcripts — implanted it into the unrelated trial involving Thomas Grover, then used it twenty-two years later to deny access to justice in Father MacRae’s appeals. If this is the state of criminal justice, it is only half right. It is criminal. But it isn’t justice.

Saint Thomas More returning the Livery Collar of his office and fealty to King Henry VIII

What Would Saint Thomas More Do?

On September 13, 2012, a full year before MacRae’s habeas corpus petition came before Judge Laplante, the annual “Red Mass” for the legal and law enforcement community took place at Saint Joseph Cathedral up in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. It was officiated by The Most Reverend Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester. Following the Mass, Bishop Libasci was a guest of honor as the New Hampshire Catholic Lawyer’s Guild held its annual awards dinner at the Radisson Hotel to honor the 2012 recipient of the St. Thomas More Award.

According to the Catholic Lawyer’s Guild invitation, the award is bestowed upon a Catholic lawyer or judge “who embodies the spirit of St. Thomas More in courage, dedication, integrity, civility, and compassion toward others.”  On September 13, 2012 the St. Thomas More Award was presented by Bishop Libasci and the Catholic Lawyer’s Guild to The Honorable Joseph N. Laplante.

Saint Thomas More would have heard all sides. He would not, as so many have done, simply assume a priest’s guilt. He would not have made comments like “especially a Catholic priest.” He would not have presumed the existence of evidence he had never seen nor heard for himself. He would have gotten to the truth of the matter before tossing the case off his desk. He would not have allowed the continued judicial railroading of an innocent man.

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ADDENDUM JANUARY 26, 2022:

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

Keene New Hampshire sex crimes detective James McLaughlin developed claims against a Catholic priest while suppressing exculpatory evidence and coercing witnesses.

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For more information on this story, please read these other articles by Ryan A. MacDonald:

The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud

The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence

The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae

In the Fr Gordon MacRae Case, Whack-a-Mole Justice Holds Court

Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester