A Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae

Ignoring exculpatory evidence and more honest media coverage, a writer’s selective reporting undermines the defense of a priest wrongly imprisoned for 28 years.

October 5, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Editor’s Note: The image above depicts Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin whose investigation of an early 1980s sexual assault case resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of Fr. Gordon MacRae. The following is a guest article by contributing writer, Ryan A. MacDonald. His most recent post in these pages was “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.”

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Writing for InDepthNH, a New Hampshire online news venue, reporter Damien Fisher presented a negligent and entirely biased overview of the case against Fr. Gordon MacRae. On the one hand, it represented well that Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin, who orchestrated the case against MacRae, is now exposed for falsifying records, tampering with evidence, and other misconduct which contributed to wrongful convictions.

On the other hand, a recent article by Damien Fisher obfuscates any future defense of MacRae with content that has already been debunked by more balanced investigations in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. (See our page on The Wall Street Journal.) Fisher’s article includes only the one-sided claims of a 2003 Grand Jury Report that a New Hampshire judge has already determined to have been published without merit or justice. Here is what Judge Richard McNamara wrote regarding the content of that report:

“[The 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester] fulfilled none of the traditional purposes of the common law grand jury. Rather than investigation of crime, the report is a post hoc summary of information the grand jury considered but did not indict on. A grand jury report that does not result in an indictment but references supposed misconduct results in a quasi-official accusation of wrongdoing drawn from secret ex parte proceedings in which there is no opportunity available or presented for a formal defense. ... Such a grand jury report is not far removed from, and no less repugnant to traditions of fair play than lynch law.”

— NH Judge Richard McNamara, August 12, 2019, In re: Grand Jury, No. 217-2017-CV-00382

Much of the content of the 2003 Grand Jury Report was generated in one-sided claims for settlement money and handed over to the State by Diocese of Manchester official Reverend Edward J. Arsenault. While settling without due process some 250 abuse claims against priests of the New Hampshire Diocese dating back 30 to 50 years, Arsenault was later charged and convicted of financial crimes in the amount of nearly $300,000 used to secretly support a relationship with a young gay musician. Now dismissed from the priesthood, he has a new name, Edward J. Bolognini. For some reason, he has been given a pass in Damien Fisher’s account.

The U.S. Department of Justice has recently disclosed an ongoing investigation into over $45 billion in fraudulent claims to reap benefits related to the Covid 19 pandemic. After the massive Gulf oil spill several years ago Exxon Oil Company had to establish a fraud task force to separate valid claims of damages from the billions of dollars in fraudulent ones. What makes anyone think that the Catholic abuse story has been spared such fraud?

This all requires a response. Today and over the next few weeks in these pages, David F. Pierre, Jr. of The Media Report.com, Catholic League President Bill Donohue and I will continue this rebuttal of that one-sided material. I hope readers of this blog will share this information widely to give this truthful side of the MacRae story the attention it deserves. Anything less is to contribute to what Dr. Bill Donohue called “a travesty of justice.”

Conflicts of Interest

In reporting on the MacRae case, however, Damien Fisher also has a conflict of interest. His wife is a columnist for Parable magazine, the official publication of the Diocese of Manchester, Father MacRae’s estranged diocese.

The Parable Managing Editor is Kathryn Marchocki, formerly a reporter for the statewide newspaper, New Hampshire Union Leader. In that capacity, Ms. Marchocki covered the 1994 MacRae trial and the 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester.

In early 2003, just before the New Hampshire Grand Jury Report was released to the public, Kathryn Marchocki met with Fr. MacRae at the New Hampshire State Prison. He presented her with a large amount of documentation that challenged the hyped contents and accusations in that one-sided report. Ms. Marchocki reportedly told the priest that his information is compelling, “but New Hampshire news media and my paper in particular are so anti-Catholic my editor will never let me write about this.”

Nonetheless, she asked MacRae — then in his ninth year in prison — to send her everything he had. He did, but never heard from Ms. Marchocki again. Now she is the editor of the Diocese of Manchester news magazine in which Damien Fisher’s wife is a columnist appearing in the monthly publication just opposite the musings of Father MacRae’s bishop, Most Reverend Peter A. Libasci, who himself now stands accused in a sexual abuse civil lawsuit in the State of New York. (See “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”)

Readers are likely aware of developments in the matter of former Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin and his brief appearance on the Attorney General’s “Laurie List,” also called the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule. When the first rumblings about rampant dishonesty on the part of Detective McLaughlin began to appear in 2021, I personally reached out to Damien Fisher with a concern that the Father MacRae case had not been properly investigated and did not receive a fair trial.

Mr. Fisher shot back immediately with a verbal attack. He declared MacRae to be guilty based solely on untried rumor, innuendo, and uncorroborated claims for monetary settlement, such as those brought without trial in the discredited 2003 Grand Jury Report. He offered nothing that could be interpreted as evidence. I offered to send Mr. Fisher some compelling documentation that challenged his narrative, but I received this final message in reply: “Stop! I do not want to see anything you send. My mind is made up!” So much for journalistic integrity and objectivity.

Father MacRae in 1983, the time of the alleged charges (Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal)

A Pornographic Priest?

Much of Mr. Fisher’s current media coverage of MacRae centers on a claim that the priest produced pornographic photographs and videos of his accusers. The truth about this is in plain sight right at Mr. Fisher’s fingertips, but he omitted it. The accusation of creating pornography was first lodged by Detective McLaughlin himself in 1988. He had no evidence for it beyond a claim that he choreographed and promoted for a civil lawsuit involving an individual named Jon Plankey described in McLaughlin’s report as his “employee in a family-owned business.”

The first accusation elicited by McLaughlin was that MacRae had attempted to verbally solicit the teen. It was only after some evolution that a more substantial — and more lucrative — claim emerged that MacRae took photographs of the youth. McLaughlin actually wrote in his report that these claims will be the basis for a civil lawsuit against the Catholic Church. The lawsuit was settled without question by MacRae’s diocese over his strenuous objections.

The pornography accusation later weighed heavily in Father MacRae’s 1994 trial and sentencing in an unrelated case, that brought by accuser Thomas Grover. When sentencing the priest to life in prison, Judge Arthur Brennan cited MacRae’s “aggressive denials of wrongdoing [and] the evidence of child pornography is clear and compelling.”

But none of it ever happened. In 2005, Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal investigated this entire case for her extensive report, “A Priest’s Story,” which served as a factual refutation of much of the content appearing in the 2003 Grand Jury Report. The accuser in the pornography matter, then in his 20s, declined to answer any questions, but Ms. Rabinowitz questioned Detective McLaughlin about the “clear and compelling” evidence of child pornography. The detective was cornered, and admitted,

“There was never any evidence of pornography.”

— Detective James McLaughlin

This information was available to Damien Fisher, but if he found it he could not continue the pornography victimization narrative, so he apparently never bothered to look.

There is a lot more to that story. In 1988, McLaughlin interviewed MacRae about Plankey’s claims for four hours on tape. McLaughlin, as was his practice, wrote reports claiming several admissions by MacRae that the priest says today were never made. MacRae insists that those claims could not possibly be on the tape. Later, when MacRae faced trial in 1994, the judge ordered all tape recordings turned over to his defense. Neither MacRae nor his lawyer ever received a single one. McLaughlin claimed, under oath in sworn Interrogatories, that the tapes in question were accidentally taped over for another case and the transcripts he cited were never made due to “clerical error.”

Eleven years later in 2005, McLaughlin apparently forgot his earlier perjury and sent that tape to The Wall Street Journal : Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote of how McLaughlin badgered MacRae again and again to plea to a misdemeanor of attempting to endanger a minor, but without legal representation. Here is her 2005 report about the tape:

“Fr. MacRae, summoned to meet with Detective McLaughlin, was informed that there was much more evidence against him, that the police had an affidavit for an arrest, and that it would be in everybody’s best interest for him to sign a confession. On the police tape, an otherwise bewildered-sounding Fr. MacRae is consistently clear about one thing — that he in no way solicited the Plankey boy for sex or anything else. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says more than once, his tone that of a man who feels that there must, indeed, be something for him to understand about these charges that eludes him.

“He listens as the police assure him that he can save all the bad publicity. ‘Our concern is, let’s get it taken care of, let’s not blow it out of proportion... . You know what the media does,’ they warned. He could avoid all the stories, protect the Church, let it all go away quietly.”

— The Wall Street Journal, “A Priest’s Story”

From here on the recording was shut off. MacRae says the badgering went on for another three hours. The priest had never before been in such a situation. When he asked if he should consult a lawyer, the detective reportedly said, and today denies saying it, doing so “will only muddy the waters.” In the end, MacRae signed the paper without legal counsel just to end this. In concluding the matter, McLaughlin wrote a press release: “Though no sexual acts were committed by MacRae,” it noted, “there are often varied levels of victimization.” Indeed there are!

In his police report on this matter, Detective McLaughlin wrote that Plankey worked for him in a family-owned business. Plankey’s mother was also an employee of the Keene Police Department. Before MacRae even knew about the claims, The Wall Street Journal reported, MacRae’s diocese received a call from Mrs. Plankey informing officials there that MacRae was being investigated on solicitation charges and a quick out-of-court settlement would “avoid a lawsuit and lawyers.”

Ah, but there’s more! This was not Detective McLaughlin’s first use of Jon Plankey to bring down a target. Plankey made an identical set of claims against Timothy Smith, a Keene Congregational church choir director with whom he struck up a relationship. That case was prosecuted by McLaughlin and ended in a similar misdemeanor plea deal. And Plankey accused a local Job Corp supervisor of soliciting him. That was another misdemeanor case pursued by McLaughlin. Then he accused a man who picked him up hitchhiking of soliciting him.

It was only after the above interview that the claim of producing photographs was made. The priest was never charged with this because that would require producing some evidence. Instead, McLaughlin capitalized on it for a civil settlement for Plankey despite later revealing to The Wall Street Journal that the story was contrived and there was never any evidence of pornography. The story nonetheless had a long shelf life. It was used by Judge Arthur Brennan to enhance MacRae’s sentence after trial in 1994.

And it was used by David Clohessy at SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, to bolster a Crimes Against Humanity charge against Pope Benedict XVI in the International Criminal Court at The Hague. This aspect of McLaughlin’s handiwork was explored by journalist, Joann Wypijewski in “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”

The Plankey case was among the files investigated by former FBI Special Agent Supervisor Jim Abbott, a specialist in counter-terrorism. Like most claimants, Jon Plankey took his money from the Diocese and disappeared. When Agent Abbott found him, Plankey refused to answer any questions without a lawyer. I had been writing about this matter and received an email message from Jon Plankey’s brother. Agent Abbott went to interview him and was told that the claims were a scam for settlement money. The brother said there is more to tell, but he, too, wanted money.

The Plea Deal Injustice

Damien Fisher relentlessly referenced Father MacRae’s post-trial acquiescence to a plea deal coerced by circumstances, presenting it as his sole evidence to bolster his implications that MacRae must be guilty. I do not want to belabor this point for I have written about it extensively already. When MacRae was convicted at trial — after Judge Arthur Brennan instructed the jury to “disregard inconsistencies in [accuser] Thomas Grover’s testimony” — he still faced additional “pile-on” charges from Grover’s brothers and two others who had climbed aboard for the inevitable monetary settlements.

When one of the newer accusers learned that MacRae was not likely to take any deal, he left the country to avoid testifying in a trial and he never filed his civil claim. Another accuser groomed by McLaughlin, Keene native Steven Wollschlager, received a summons to appear before a grand jury to indict the priest on a new charge.

Steven later went on to describe that he was solicited by McLaughlin to join other accusers in fabricating claims against MacRae. The enticement was a $50 bill and an assurance that a lot more money could be obtained in a civil lawsuit against the Church. When Steven balked, McLaughlin allegedly pointed out the girlfriend and child Steven had and said that life could be so much easier for them with a lot of money. Steven pondered this, and then agreed. He later described these meetings with McLaughlin:

“It was all about the lawsuits and the money. I was led to believe that all I had to do was make up a story about MacRae like others had done and I could obtain a lot of money. I was using drugs at the time and could have been influenced into saying anything they wanted for money.”

On the way to the court, Steven explained, he found his moral center and could not go through with it. He said that he knew MacRae as a teen and that the priest only tried to help him. He was told by an unnamed court official, “We won’t be needing anything further from you.”

When the trial was over, MacRae was penniless, abandoned by his Bishop and Diocese. He was placed in jail in custody until sentencing and had nowhere to turn. His lawyer resigned, exasperated at the three-ring circus in the trial and the lack of being allowed to put on an adequate defense. McLaughlin and prosecutors then offered MacRae another deal: a concurrent one-year sentence ending all remaining charges to be served simultanously with the sentence yet to be handed down in the Thomas Grover case.

MacRae’s trial lawyer, who left the trial before it was over, told MacRae in a telephone call from jail that he had no choice but to accept the deal. His bishop and Diocese, anxious to provide settlements and be rid of this, had issued a pre-trial press release declaring that the entire Catholic Church was victimized by MacRae. Everyone around him told him he had no choice. He went to the Court men’s room and vomited after entering his negotiated lie. I wrote extensively of this in “The Post-Trial Extortion of Fr. Gordon MacRae.”

All of this — my articles, the extensive coverage by The Wall Street Journal, the investigation by FBI Special Agent Jim Abbott, the polygraph examinations that Fr. MacRae passed conclusively, the findings of the National Center for Reason and Justice now sponsoring MacRae’s defense — has been in plain sight, readily available to Damien Fisher. He opted instead to spread another narrative, and God alone knows why.

There is more still, and it is coming. Perhaps the most egregious “evidence” cited by Damien Fisher came from supposed psychological evaluations of the accused priest. This will be the topic of a follow-up post next week in these pages.

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“In my three-year investigation of this matter, I have found no evidence that Gordon MacRae committed these crimes, or any crimes.”

— Sworn Affidavit of former FBI Special Agent James Abbott

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Editor’s Note: Ryan A. MacDonald has written extensively on the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic Church. You may also be interested in these related posts.

Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester

The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud

The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Fr Stuart MacDonald and Our Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests

Our Catholic tabloid frenzy about fallen priests has become a scandal of its own. As we tackle it Beyond These Stone Walls, Fr. Stuart MacDonald joins our team.

Wednesday July 28, 2021

Back in 2019, I wrote a post entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” I had no idea at the time that a reader in Texas sent a copy of it to Cardinal Pell who was then serving a deeply unjust sentence in an Australia prison. I also did not know at the time that he was writing a prison journal that, after his exoneration and release, would be published to become a highly celebrated masterpiece of priestly witness in a time of trial. I have been reading the Second Volume of the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell published by Ignatius Press, and I was moved to see that I appear prominently therein.

Over the course of four pages in the book (57-61) Cardinal Pell, from his prison cell, recounts a summary of my own travesty of justice and then thanks me, at the end, for my support of him:

“I am grateful to Fr. MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr. Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr. Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes. I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr. MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu: ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice. (1742)”

I was deeply moved because there are not many in our Church, and certainly precious few with the prominence of Cardinal Pell, who would openly cite something I wrote and commend me for it. I will return to the importance of this.

Writing my own prison journal for Beyond These Stone Walls has always been somewhat of a letdown in the summer months. I do not write for accolades or approval, but I admit that it is nice to at least be noticed. In eleven years of writing this prison journal, the months of June through August have always seen our smallest readership. Who could blame you? I, too, would rather be in the water.

Something unexpected happened this year, however. My posts for June and July 2021 generated an explosion of readers and new subscribers setting an eleven-year record. My recent post, “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul” topped the list of recent titles that went off the charts. That post is about a matter of Sacramental integrity, but it also speaks to the very heart of what it means to be Catholic in the public square. The “Catholicism” moderator at Reddit rejected it twice as a “political post,” but I do not think the Reddit moderator actually Reddit (pun intended!). Some in other venues who dismissed it as political or partisan changed their minds after reading it to the end. Most Catholic readers thanked me for writing it. A smaller minority of Catholics were furious with me for writing it, but they refuted none of it.

I did not at all expect the vast response that post evoked. It was most evident in the comments it generated, but it was also evident in the traffic. Readers by the thousands came to it from Washington DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and unlike most other BTSW posts, 90-percent of its readers were in the U.S. It had the highest one-day record for both visitors and new subscribers.

But I have no awareness that the people who most should read it did read it: the Catholic Bishops of the United States. So at the request of several readers, our friend and new Canon Law advisor, Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, created a printable 5-page PDF version that you could print and mail to anyone you wish, including your bishop. We have also compiled a PDF contact list of the United States Catholic Bishops organized by state. Here are the links:

PDF of Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul

PDF List of U.S. Bishops and Contact Information by State

Cardinal Pell being released from prison in 2020, and Father Gordon MacRae being taken to prison in 1994.

Our Catholic Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests

As recent posts here have demonstrated, this is not an easy time to be a priest in a divided and politically partisan America. It is an exponentially more difficult time to be a bishop. Please keep that in mind when writing to them. Our shared goal must be communion and solidarity, not confrontation. That should not in any way inhibit the faithful from being faithful in the clarity of our message. We should write as though the very integrity of the Catholic Church in America is at stake — because it is.

Few of us ever awaken in the morning with a decision to become an activist that day. Activism is technically defined as “a theory or doctrine of assertive action, such as a strike or public demonstration, used as a means of supporting or opposing a controversial issue, person, or event.” Having known Father Stuart MacDonald for some time, I would never have considered him to be an activist, nor would I have ever applied that term to myself.

In recent years, as a number of my posts suggest, the need for Catholic action in support of priests and the priesthood has become evident. The newly formed “Coalition for Canceled Priests” is a good first step in that direction. I cannot speak for this coalition, but one facet of its activism has become clear to me. A minority of more “progressive” and powerful bishops of the United States has tried to steer the narrative, not only about the priesthood, but also about the hierarchy of concerns of Catholics. My post, “Biden and the Bishops” lays out the fault lines of this effort. (More recently, we have seen the influence of this progressive suppression in the Motu Proprio of Pope Francis on the Traditional Latin Mass. This will be our topic on BTSW next week.)

But there is something else that must happen before Catholics engage their bishops about the treatment of priests. We must put an end — in our own hearts and beyond — to our Catholic tabloid frenzy about fallen priests. Satan has never felt more fulfilled than in seeing priests fall at the hands of their own bishops.

Many priests have fallen morally to the point of the total collapse of their priesthood. Why should this be a surprise to any of us? Is there anyone, in the spiritual battlefield of our time, with a bigger satanic target on his back than a Catholic priest in the trenches? In our current climate of fear and loathing, the Church does nothing to catch them on their way down as they fall, nor is anything done to stem the tide of their descent. We just let them fall, and then discard them at the bottom. We as a Church make it very clear that there is to be no redemption for a fallen priest, no path upon which to step back into the light. Should this be the practice of a body of faith in a Church built upon the Blood of Christ? I must repeat, as I have done a few times in these pages, how my friend and mentor, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, described our bishops’ collective response to their fallen priests in the pages of First Things:

“Zero Tolerance. One strike. Boot them out of ministry. Of course, the victim advocates are still not satisfied, and sadly may never be satisfied. But the bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and un-Catholic approach to sin and grace ... They end up adopting a policy that is sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost anything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

— First Things, "Scandal Time III," August 2002

The trends that allowed this to happen in the U.S. Church and then spread throughout the world now lend themselves toward the demise of any priest for any cause that displeases his bishop — or even a more influential bishop in the diocese next door. Catholic League President Bill Donohue boldly addressed this in a quote on our “About” page: “There is no segment of the U.S. population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic Priest.”

Father Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL

There is a reason why false witness is included among the Ten Commandments. Its presence there is clear in Sacred Scripture: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16). The Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 19, lays out the conditions under which this Commandment is to be observed: “A single witness shall not prevail against a man.” (Dt. 19:15). False witness is destructive, not only of the person who falls prey to it, but also to the entire community of believers and the justice system of an entire people.

Sometimes false witness takes the form of gross exaggeration of what otherwise might just be a slip in judgment. This is how public stoning, as a means of execution, is done today. It is not a person’s body that is stoned to death now, but a person’s good name. I fell prey to this. Standing by the truth sent me to life in prison while a simple lie would have released me a quarter century ago. And it was my own bishop (at that time) who first told the bigger lie when he declared me guilty in a press release even before jury selection in my trial.

My activism now takes the form of standing by other priests falsely accused or accused with great exaggeration which always has a specific goal: a swifter, more lucrative monetary award from a bishop anxious to settle, or some animus against the Catholic Church. Cardinal George Pell was very much an innocent victim of the latter.

Sometimes the animus comes from Catholics who blindly use The Scandal to further some agenda of their own. Father Stuart MacDonald also became a victim of grossly exaggerated false witness. It involved only an exchange of words for which he was entirely cleared of wrongdoing by the Holy See and fully restored to ministry. That should be enough for any of us, but it sadly never is for those wanting only to demean the priesthood.

As a witness in support of Father Stuart and his priesthood, I have invited him to assist Beyond These Stone Walls with his expertise in Canon Law. We have also established a Category under his name at the BTSW Public Library. Father Stuart has written several excellent posts for BTSW which are now being restored for addition to the Library. First up will be his superb and timely post, “Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” You may not recall this name, but last month, Raymond J. Donovan died. He was a member of President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet who resigned forty years ago after being charged with a crime. When he was exonerated by a New York City jury, he famously asked, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

No priest should have to ask that question in a community of believers who have been offered Divine Mercy. No priest should have to claw his way back to redemption or just disappear into the night. What have we done?

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Important announcement from Father Gordon MacRae: Just days before this is posted, the Most Reverend Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester and my bishop has been accused of sexual abuse in the State of New York. The accusations against him are alleged to have occurred in 1983, the same year in which claims against me were also alleged to have occurred. Bishop Libasci has stated his innocence as did I. I know painfully well the great difficulty in defending against claims that are so old and brought forward with financial expectations but zero evidence or corroboration. Despite Bishop Libasci denying these accusations they may still result in his removal from ministry. Please pray for him and for a just and truthful outcome.

Please read and share these relevant posts.

Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List by Ryan A. MacDonald

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood by Ryan A. MacDonald

Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction by Fr. Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL

The Reliquary Heart of St. John Vianney, Patron of Priests