Weaponized Psychology: The Psych Evals of Father MacRae
Writer Damien Fisher cited psychological reports to bolster the condemnation of a priest in the court of public opinion, but some omitted facts expose a cover-up.
October 12, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald
Editor’s Note: The following is Part Two of a series of posts by multiple writers presenting facts in the case of a wrongly imprisoned priest that some in the media have ignored or distorted. Part One, posted here one week ago, was: “A Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae.”
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Part One in this series, linked above, explores a tendency of some in modern day news media to simply mimic material gleaned from prosecutorial officials. In news coverage, this practice has increasingly come to replace the hard work of investigative journalism and the natural skepticism every journalist should have.
One of the factors that irked me and other writers in Damien Fisher’s recent coverage of the MacRae story was his blind acceptance of an old and inadequate psychological evaluation of the accused priest that was debunked a decade ago. In 2012, a Catholic magazine published a letter to the editor from a reader of Father MacRae’s blog who defended him. In response, a member of SNAP, the activist Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, wrote a rebuttal which was also published citing psychological evaluations of MacRae as evidence of his presumed guilt.
I wrote a more up-to-date and factual response, but it was a testament to the one-sided jaundice of even Catholic media on this topic that the lurid claims against the priest were published while my factual response was not. Given that Damien Fisher’s recent article cited here a week ago referenced the same biased and one-sided reports, I now present anew what I first uncovered in 2012.
Like all accused Catholic priests, Fr. Gordon MacRae was required by Church officials to undergo a psychological evaluation. It was one of the many travesties of justice in this case that elements of two of those reports inexplicably ended up in public view while a far more extensive and professional report did not.
Mr. Fisher gleaned his information from a 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester that referenced an inadequate and one-sided evaluation from an M.A. level clinician with a state contract to evaluate those accused of sexual offenses. The Grand Jury Report omitted a much broader and more professional assessment from a team of licensed psychologists and psychiatric experts that negates the validity of the evaluation cited in the Grand Jury Report and repeated by Damien Fisher.
It is indeed correct that MacRae was labeled a “fixated sexual offender” in a 1989 report by a masters-level clinician at the Strafford Guidance Center, a New Hampshire outpatient center with a state contract to evaluate those accused of sexual offenses. This evaluation was the result of a misdemeanor solicitation charge that was debunked extensively in my article, “A Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae.”
A second evaluation was conducted over a four-day period at the now-closed House of Affirmation, a treatment center for clergy in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. It was entirely prosecutorial in nature, and in many ways it violated the priest’s basic civil rights. It weaponized the psychological process, reporting, for example, a finding that “Father MacRae exhibits extremely high abstract intellectual ability.” That result, from a single evaluation tool called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, was later used to unjustly label the accused priest as a potential sociopathic manipulator. The report and its conclusions were criminally unprofessional.
EEG recorded during scanning session.
A Forensic Search for Truth
Another, far more extensive evaluation was conducted by a team of three doctoral-level forensic clinical psychologists and two staff psychiatrists with decades of experience in the assessment of offenders. This in-depth assessment was conducted over a period of months at an inpatient facility, the Villa Louis Martin Center in New Mexico. What follows are excerpts of that report introduced by licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Peter Lechner, Ph.D.:
“Of the reports mentioned earlier, one from House of Affirmation where Fr. MacRae spent four days and the other from the Strafford Guidance Clinic where he was evaluated, according to their report, for a two-hour period, they arrived at far-reaching, all embracing and definitive conclusions in regard to Fr. MacRae. The staff at VLM believes that such time periods would be inadequate to properly understand complex problems.
“The conclusions we arrived at came after many months.... It became clear that [Fr. MacRae] did not fit the description of the Strafford Guidance Clinic. He had a depth of conscientiousness and sensitivity to others, and a very high degree of ethical concern that did not fit with what their report said of him. Fr. MacRae does NOT fit the description of a fixated sexual offender. The reports are inaccurate.”
— 1990 Evaluation Report of the staff at Villa Louis Martin
Dr. Lechner went on to describe that the Strafford Guidance Center evaluation was conducted by an unlicensed masters-level clinician. It consisted of a single psychological test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) which was dismissed by the evaluator as “unrevealing and within normal range.” The sweeping negative conclusions of the rest of the report, according to the file, were arrived at based on three 45-minute interviews over the course of six weeks.
The clinician began his assessment with clear bias. The mere fact that MacRae is a Catholic priest with a commitment to practice celibacy, like all priests, was itself treated as sexually aberrant by the evaluator. His process and conclusions were dismissed as invalid and unjust by staff at the Villa Louis Martin Center. They concluded that “Two hours of interviews by a masters-level clinician is simply not professionally adequate to brand a man in the court of public opinion for the remainder of his life.” The director of the VLM Center added another comment to his report:
“In my report to the NH Department of Probation, I mentioned the accusations that had been made in the above reports by way of background information regarding what had been said about [Fr. MacRae]. I indicated that he did not present as someone obsessed by sexual fantasies or driven to act out. I then went on to write about our assessment and the medical issues [MacRae] faced. I was later dismayed to find out that my reports were misquoted, and positive statements that were essential to the reports were left out. This I feel was a serious injustice.”
The far more comprehensive VLM report by Dr. Lechner and his staff directly refuted the impressions of the Stafford Guidance Center assessment arrived at after three 45-minute interviews. However, the prosecutorial files released by the Diocese of Manchester after its bishop signed over the rights of the priests involved, and published online by the Attorney General in 2003 omitted the more professional report opting to publish only the impressions of the negatively biased one.
In the far more extensive report, the director of the VLM facility explained that MacRae remained at the Center for one year in 1989, an unusual length of time for inpatient treatment, but it was not because he was diagnosed as a sexual offender. That was discounted earlier. MacRae remained at the center for a year because a neurological evaluation that included an EEG and MRI revealed a diagnosis of epilepsy.
It has been professionally suggested that a diagnosis of untreated epilepsy and complex partial seizure disorder that was difficult to manage raised further questions about the legitimacy of the priest’s 1988 misdemeanor plea entered into without legal counsel after hours of intense badgering by a police detective with an agenda other than truth. This was disclosed in my article one week ago.
The VLM report of the evaluation of Fr. MacRae indicated that MacRae succumbed to coercion under duress in 1988 while talked into waiving his Constitutional right to legal counsel because Detective McLaughlin conned him into believing that he would be sparing the Church from adverse publicity if he took the plea. If MacRae is to be faulted for anything in this picture, the report concluded, “it is for placing his own well-being second.”
That 1988 misdemeanor charge was brought forward and propagated by the same detective who would five years later charge MacRae with more serious, but just as dubious offenses that now date back forty years. This is the same detective who now appears on a previously secret list accused of falsifying records, and has now also been accused of lying, erasing tapes, and tampering with evidence.
Four years after writing the Strafford Guidance Center report on MacRae, its author applied for employment at the Villa Louis Martin Center citing its thorough assessment of the priest as the reason for his desire to work there.
When Detective James McLaughlin’s new allegations emerged with new demands for settlement money in 1993, Fr. MacRae voluntarily submitted to two polygraph examinations with an expert. He passed both conclusively. No one who accused MacRae would agree to take a polygraph.
The Most Expert Evaluation
Perhaps the most important assessment, however, is one uncovered by Fr. George David Byers revealed in his article “Omertà in a Catholic Chancery: Affidavits Expanded.” Over 28 years in the New Hampshire State Prison, Fr. MacRae has never been even suspected of any form of predation. The prison system’s own evaluation labeled him at the lowest level of risk for any form of aberrant sexual interest or behavior. For 15 of those years MacRae was housed in a 60-square-foot cell with Pornchai Moontri, an adult survivor of sexual abuse. There is perhaps no better expert on the character of Fr. MacRae.
In Fr. Byers’ article linked above, he conveys a true story revealed to him by Pornchai:
“Pornchai has helped me to understand a truth that is nearly universal among those who have in fact been victims of sexual assault. The only thing that is as obnoxious to them as having been raped is to see their own sufferings capitalized upon by false accusers for money, and by clericalists who make themselves into heroes by paying out settlements with no evidence or due process of law. Priests are too often considered guilty just for being accused.
“Prison, by nature, is often a violent place. As a child of 12 brought to the State of Maine from a foreign country, Pornchai became a victim of violent sexual abuse. When Pornchai went to prison at age 18, he dealt with prison violence in the only way he could. He vowed that he would never again be someone’s victim. So he understandably met violence with violence of his own. It landed him in repeated long years in solitary confinement.
“After 14 years, Pornchai was transferred to the New Hampshire prison. He ended up in a cell with a man accused and convicted of the very thing that destroyed his life. It did not take him long — with his innate alertness to victimization — to discover that Father G had been falsely accused. Pornchai once told me this story that I held off writing until he was out of the prison system:
‘One day, I got a notice from the prison mental health department that a new 2O-week program was beginning called ‘Interpersonal Violence.’ My friend Father G thought it might be an opportunity for me so I said I would go if he goes with me. So we both signed up for it. Prison is filled with needy young men who have really broken lives. Some of them look for safe, comfortable older prisoners who might buy them things and take care of them. The result is a sort of mutual exploitation and prisons are filled with this. One young kid, about 19, who was attending the program quickly tried to latch on to Father G without knowing anything about him. I was going to speak with the kid, but decided to wait.
‘Over the next few sessions as I sat next to Father G, I was aware of how this kid was skillfully trying to gain his interest and maneuver his way into his life, but Father G was oblivious to it. Later that night I told him what I observed, but he had no idea what I was talking about. At the next session, Father G and I simply agreed to switch seats. In all his years in prison, Father G has been surrounded by people like this, many of them young drug addicts who would sell their soul for a few bucks for drugs. In all those years, Father G was never observed or even suspected of having any interest in them at all except to show those receptive to it a way out of their prison within a prison.’ ”
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IMPORTANT EDITOR’S NOTE:
During the 15 years that Fr. MacRae and Pornchai Moontri lived in the same prison cell, MacRae investigated Pornchai’s life and wrote about it in an explosive account that brought his abuser to justice. Richard Alan Bailey was convicted in 2018 on 40 felony counts of child sexual abuse. This most important story is told in
“Getting Away With Murder on the Island of Guam.”
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BREAKING NEWS — NEW IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
Nationally prominent criminal-defense and civil-rights Attorney Harvey Silverglate has just published an op-ed on developments in the Fr. MacRae case in the WSJ. This is the fourth major article in the WSJ on this story. We have reprinted the op-ed so it may be viewed by our readers: