From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love

Canadian Catholic writer Michael Brandon reviews Beyond These Stone Walls. This blog from a wrongly imprisoned priest is a guiding light for many around the globe.

Written on the Feast of the Guardian Angels by Michael Brandon, Ontario, Canada

Once again, a blockbuster article appeared over at Beyond These Stone Walls, this one titled “Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae.”  Every week I await the Wednesday morning posting on Beyond These Stone Walls, with some of the anticipation of a young child for Christmas, and every week I am not disappointed.  The gift given is always just what I needed, never too much and never too little. And it is probably so for many of the other readers of BTSW postings, and so it is a unique gift for each of us.

And isn’t anticipation of Christmas a good thing?  At that first Christmas we received the greatest gift mankind every received, the birth of Our Saviour; God became man for us.  And that gift too is unique for each and every one of us.  The same Jesus, the same manger, the same outward appearance, but he comes to each and every one of us where we are geographically and in our state in life.

The giving of gifts at Christmas was always meant to symbolize that greatest of all gifts, but has come more to mean conspicuous consumption.  But, the underlying meaning of Christmas is still there, even if hidden from the eyes of most. So, when we receive our weekly gift from Father Gordon at Beyond These Stone Walls, we are there too receiving the original intent of Christmas, the gift of Christ. In this particular case we receive the gift of Christ from an Alter Christus, a man ordained to bring Christ to us.

Yesterday our gift though was a little different.  It was a recounting of the case, life and trials of Father MacRae, by a very respected leader of the laity in America, Dr. William Donohue.  If you have been on the BTSW site, or have come across articles or books by Ryan A. MacDonald or Dorothy Rabinowitz to name two of many, you have had access to the story of cruelty and manipulation that resulted in the false imprisonment of Father MacRae.

The available information on his case is voluminous, and with the different perspectives of the various writers focusing on particular aspects of the injustice of it all, and official documents, it is a challenge to put into a single perspective.  However, Dr. Donohue does just that and for that BTSW readers should be grateful.

Dr. Donohue highlights the confluence of evil that was required for our friend and priest Father Gordon to end up behind bars in such an incongruous set of lies, deceptions, hatred, greed, and malevolence.  The devil is in the details, and in this case we can see the devil in the details.

For further reflection we have the words of Saint Bernard an abbot and the author of the Memorare prayer.  Saint Bernard, like Father Gordon was a lover of Our Holy Mother.  In the Office of the Readings for September 10, we find that he wrote:

“The whole of the spiritual life consists of these two elements.  When we think of ourselves, we are perturbed and filled with a salutary sadness.  And when we think of Our Lord, we are revived to find consolation in the joy of the Holy Spirit.  From the first we derive fear and humility, from the second hope and love.”

Father Gordon did not commit the crimes for which he was placed in prison, in no large part because they never happened.  But, he is a sinner like you and me.  Our Lord knew who he was, and also how he, like you and like me, is the very apple of His eye.  He has allowed all that has happened to Father Gordon to occur for His Glory, in ways we cannot understand, in ways that are way above our pay grade.

I do not know anything about the depth of Father Gordon’s spiritual life before going to prison, but I read and see it becoming as deep as the ocean now.  He has been taken to the places of fear and humility; it is evident in his writings.

Father Gordon’s gift of himself to us each week comes from the same place as the gift Jesus gave to us in His Birth, but also in His Death and Resurrection.  That gift and every good gift emanates from the heart of the Father, and as God is love, so too these gifts are gifts of love.

Cherish the gift that is Jesus, and cherish the gift from his Alter Christus, Father Gordon as if it comes from the depths of the heart of Jesus, for it does.  The gift we receive weekly from Father Gordon MacRae is a sign of God’s love for us.

Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae

by William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League

God gives us all a cross to bear, but some are heavier than others. Few can match the weight of the one that Fr Gordon J MacRae has been carrying for three decades.

His troubles began in 1983. Father Gordon MacRae was working at a clinic for drug-addicted youths in New Hampshire when a 14-year-old told his psychotherapist that the priest had kissed him; there was nothing to the story, so nothing came of it. Three years later, when the young man was expelled from a Catholic high school for carrying a weapon, he started telling his counselor how MacRae had fondled him. It turns out that the adolescent was quite busy at the time making accusations: he said two male teachers also molested him. An investigation into all of these cases was made, and they were all dismissed.

Ten years after the first charges against MacRae were tossed, the same man resurfaced with new accusations. The preposterous nature of the charges meant they would go nowhere, but as fate would have it, they would nonetheless play a role in helping to bolster a criminal charge against MacRae one year later.

It wasn’t over for MacRae, not by a long shot. In 1988, a teenager at a hospital that treats drug abusers told the priest about sexual encounters he allegedly had at the hospital and then exposed himself. MacRae, taking no chances, reported this to his superiors. While they believed him, they nonetheless suspended him pending an investigation. But the effect that this incident had on a local detective was not sanguine. In fact, he proved to be a zealot who made it his duty to get all the goods on MacRae, even to the point of making some details up.

The detective went on a tear interrogating nearly two dozen boys whom MacRae had counseled — looking for dirt — but he came up empty. Then MacRae met a teenager who worked for the detective in a “family-owned business,” and whose mother worked for the police. The young man said MacRae had molested him after the priest turned him down for a loan of $75; the same teenager was accusing others of abuse. Under considerable pressure to end this ordeal —MacRae had no legal counsel and was interrogated for four-and-a-half hours— he signed a statement saying he had endangered the welfare of a minor. The detective, who wanted more, said, “though no actual molestation took place, there are various levels of abuse.” It must be noted that the accuser refused to speak to an FBI investigator about what happened, and his own brother said the whole thing was “a fraud for money.” This was the last time MacRae would allow himself to be framed.

It is not a matter of opinion to say the detective was obsessed with MacRae: the evidence convinced independent observers that he was. For example, when the priest received letters claiming he had abused a male youth, little did he know that the detective had authored the letters for the accuser. Also, it was learned subsequently that a witness signed a statement saying the detective had given him cash, offering “a large sum of money” to make a false claim against MacRae (this happened just before his trial). Word on the street was that the Catholic Church was writing checks to get accusations of priestly abuse off its desk, a process that kept feeding the next frenzy. MacRae was caught up in it, and his superiors were ever quick to clear themselves.

On September 23, 1994, Father Gordon MacRae was shackled and led out of Cheshire County Superior Court in Keene, New Hampshire. He had been convicted by a jury of sexual assaults that allegedly happened nearly twelve years earlier. The 41-year-old priest was sentenced to a prison term of 33 ½ to 67 years.

MacRae says he is innocent. So do those who have looked into his case. Count me among them. “I did not commit these crimes,” MacRae says. “In fact, no one did.” Pointedly, he maintains that he wasn’t the one on trial. “The priesthood itself was on trial. No evidence whatsoever was introduced to support the claims. My accuser committed a $200,000 fraud, the amount in settlement he received from my diocese.”

No one has covered this story better than Dorothy Rabinowitz, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. MacRae’s accuser, Thomas Grover, has a history of theft, drugs, and violence. More than anyone else, he is responsible for the ordeal that MacRae has endured. He provided not a single witness, even though the alleged offenses took place in populated areas; the places were so busy that it is unlikely that no one would notice if something were awry. Moreover, Grover was coached by professionals, people more interested in getting a priest than justice. His attorney put him in touch with a counselor who came in quite handy. She stood at the back of the courtroom during Grover’s testimony, away from the sight of the jury, instructing him when to feign crying. On cue, he cried loudly, often at some length.

In the pretrial hearing, Grover went into high gear. He said MacRae chased him through a cemetery, trying to corner him. The priest also allegedly pointed a gun at Grover, threatening him if he told anyone about their encounter. Not to be outdone, MacRae supposedly chased Grover down the highway in his car.

At the trial, Grover said MacRae sexually abused him when he was 15-years-old during five episodes. Rabinowitz captures the essence of what was really going on. “Why, after the first horrifying attack,” she asks, “had Mr. Grover willingly returned for four more sessions, in each of which he had been forcibly molested? Because, he explained, he had come to each new meeting with no memory of the previous attack.” If this is not preposterous enough, the accuser said he had “out of body” experiences that blocked his recollection. Just as we might expect, Grover conveniently changed his story many times.

Before the trial, MacRae had twice been offered a plea deal, but he turned them down. Midway through the trial, he was offered another opportunity. It sounded reasonable: plead guilty and the sentence is one to three years; refuse and risk spending decades in prison. He refused for a third time. The trial moved forward and he was found guilty. The sentence was obscene: it was thirty times what the state had offered in the plea bargain.

Why do I believe MacRae is innocent, a veritable modern-day Job who has been treated unjustly by the authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil? MacRae and I have been writing to each other for years, and I have read his account many times. The clincher year for me was 2012: recently discovered evidence emerged (now part of on-going court proceedings) that showed how utterly manipulative the accuser is. To be specific, signed statements by the accuser’s family and friends demonstrate that Thomas Grover admitted to them that he lied about everything; they have also spoken about his reaction after the trial ended.

Grover’s former wife and stepson say that he is a “compulsive liar,” “manipulator,” “drama queen,” and “hustler” who “molded stories to fit his needs”; he could also “tell a lie and stick to it ’till his end.'” When he was confronted with his lies, he would lose his temper and sign himself into the psychiatric ward at a local hospital.

The former wife and stepson testify that Grover bragged how he was going to set up MacRae and “get even with the church.” What the stepson said is worth repeating at length:

“Grover would laugh and joke about this scheme and after the criminal trial and civil cash award he would again state how he had succeeded in this plot to get cash from the church. On several occasions, Grover told me that he had never been molested by MacRae…[and] stated to me that there were other allegations, made by other people against MacRae and [he] jumped on and piggy-backed onto these allegations for the money.”

Grover’s former wife, who acknowledges that he “never stated one word of abuse by [MacRae],” knew early on in their marriage that something was wrong. She had two daughters when they met, and both were frightened of him from the start. They saw him as a “sick individual who was obsessed with sex and teenage girls”; thus did they label him a “creep” and a “pervert.” They recall that he was “constantly eying” and groping them. When they woke up in the middle of the night, they would sometimes find him in their room, between their beds, staring at them.

It was also recently disclosed that the detective who had earlier hounded MacRae was guilty of badgering witnesses, misrepresenting what they said, offering inaccurate reports, and even collaborating with Grover’s civil lawyer. No wonder that another detective, a former FBI investigator, exonerated MacRae. “During the entirety of my three-year investigation of this matter,” James M. Abbott said, “I discovered no evidence of MacRae having committed the crimes charged, or any other crimes.”

When the trial was over, and Grover got a check for over $195,000 from the Diocese of Manchester, he photographed himself with $30,000 in cash. He bragged to his buddies, with bags of cash in his hands, that he had succeeded in “putting it over on the church.” That was in March 1997. In August, he took his former wife with him to Arizona where he blew it on alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, and other vices. In a three-day gambling spree, he went through $70,000 and he even had a Nevada casino hunting him down for another $50,000.

MacRae arrived in prison on September 23, 1994. He did not know it at the time, but it was the Feast of Saint Padre Pio, himself the subject of false allegations of sexual abuse. A dozen guards in riot gear surrounded him, forcing him to stand naked in the middle of them for an hour while they laughed at him. “For the first three nights while locked alone in a cell with nothing — naked and with no bedding but a bare concrete slab — tiers of prisoners stomped their feet in unison chanting, ‘Kill the Priest’ for hours on end into the night. It was maddening.” Prayer allowed him to persevere. “I lifted the cross willingly — though perhaps then more like Simon of Cyrene than like Christ — but I lifted it.”

Should MacRae have accepted the three plea deals? He never regrets saying no. As he sees it, “to succumb to a negotiated lie was like falling under the weight of the cross of false witness for the first, second, and third time.” Incredibly, even in prison, he is still the target of those seeking to shake him down, looking for the Church to fork over more money. In 2003, he was accused by another man of molesting him many years earlier. But MacRae had never even heard of this guy, so he instructed his lawyer to challenge the accusation. He did, and neither MacRae nor his lawyer ever heard from him and his attorney ever again.

December 23, 2006, MacRae calculated that he had been a priest for 4,125 days before he was sent to prison. He then tallied the number of days he had been in prison and came to the realization that on the very next day he would be a priest in prison longer than in freedom. “For the first time in 4,125 days in prison, I sobbed uncontrollably at this realization. I was losing myself.”

MacRae’s despair was relieved the next day when a Conventual Franciscan priest, Father Jim McCurry, visited him in prison. He gave him a laminated “holy card” depicting Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a member of Father McCurry’s order in whose cause for sainthood he had been involved as a Postulator. To this day, Kolbe’s historic story provides much inspiration to MacRae, as well as to countless others. The Polish priest gave his life in a Nazi death camp so that the life of another innocent person, a young father, would be spared.

Father Gordon J. MacRae does not aspire to be in the same league with Father Kolbe. That is not the point. The point is that his ordeal, like that of Kolbe’s, is born of grave injustice. There are so many guilty parties to this travesty it is hard to know where to begin. At work is maliciousness, callousness, apathy, and cowardice.

Please keep Father MacRae in your prayers. We can never give up hope.

Could Fr. Gordon MacRae Finally Go Free?

There is new evidence that the detective, whose investigative report led to the priest’s conviction, had submitted false reports in an earlier case, and likely in the MacRae case as well.

November 11, 2022 by Kathy Schiffer | Catholic World Report

“Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the pervertion of justice it represents.”

— Dorothy Rabinowitz, The Wall Street Journal

Father Gordon J. MacRae, wrongly convicted of sexual misconduct, may finally be freed soon, after serving nearly thirty years in prison. Father MacRae, who tells his story on his blog Beyond These Stone Walls, has long been believed to be innocent of the alleged crimes for which he was convicted in 1994. He has many supporters, though — among them, the Wall Street Journal.

On October 9, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae”, by famed civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate. The article cited new evidence that New Hampshire Detective James McLaughlin, the detective whose investigative report led to the priest’s conviction, had submitted false reports in an earlier case and, Silverglate believed, likely in the MacRae case as well. According to Silverglate, the detective’s name was included in the original “Laurie List” — a catalog of law enforcement officers who had falsified evidence in order to secure a guilty verdict. McLaughlin was proven to have falsified records in an unrelated case, nine years before Fr. MacRae went to trial.

Silverglate reasoned that this newly uncovered evidence of Detective McLaughlin’s past misconduct raises serious concerns about the Fr. MacRae case. This revelation was important, according to the Wall Street Journal, because

… MacRae has not only vehemently argued that McLaughlin paid off his accusers to manufacture a case against him but that recordings by McLaughlin of the priest purporting to prove MacRae’s guilt were bogus. Indeed, when MacRae demanded that that these recordings be turned over for his trial, McLaughlin was suddenly unable to produce them, claiming that they were taped over and that transcripts of the recordings were not made due to an alleged ‘clerical error.’

Widespread Belief in Fr. MacRae’s Innocence

Silverglate’s new report is not the only public defense of the prisoner priest. His case has received attention from journalists and from voices within the Church.

In 2005, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board, published an account of the travesty of justice by which Fr. MacRae was convicted. Her report was described by Father Richard John Neuhaus in First Things magazine as “a story of a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”

In September 2008, Father Neuhaus published an editorial in First Things calling the case “A Kafkaesque Tale.”

Father Michael Orsi, writing for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, insisted that “Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound.”

The late Cardinal Avery Dulles believed in Father MacRae’s innocence and encouraged him to write his story. Cardinal Dulles wrote in 2005,

Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. Your writing, which is clear, eloquent, and spiritually sound, will be a monument to your trials.

The following year, Cardinal Dulles invited Father MacRae to contribute a chapter to the volume of Christian literature from believers who were unjustly imprisoned.

Cary Solomon, writer, producer, and director of the pro-life film “Unplanned” has said,

Fr. Gordon Macrae is beyond innocent. It is a travesty that he is in jail. If you listened and read the evidence, transcripts, videos, audio tapes you would be horrified. The people who did this need to get on their knees and beg forgiveness from God.

And William Donohue, Ph.D., president of the Catholic League for Religious Liberty and Civil Rights, said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” Show, “There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

Prejudice against the Church Led to Improper Verdict

Why was Father MacRae convicted if, as he asserts, he had not taken sexual liberties with a young man? The clergy abuse scandal was fresh in the news in 1994, when Father MacRae was accused of sexual assault; and there was a lot of anger toward the Catholic Church. The accuser was 27-year-old Thomas Grover — a man with a long history of violence, theft, and drug charges. The charges against Father MacRae were uncorroborated; in fact, many people, including Grover’s ex-wife and son, testified that Grover had told them the incident didn’t really occur.

Although Grover himself stood to benefit substantially from filing a complaint against the priest (he was eventually awarded $200,000 from the diocese), the court found Father MacRae guilty.

Offered a plea deal which would have brought only two or three years in jail, Father MacRae declined. He was innocent and refused to confess to any crime, even a misdemeanor offense. He was found guilty without evidence or corroborating testimony. New Hampshire Judge Arthur Brennan then imposed a harsh 33-1/2 to 67-year sentence in the New Hampshire State Penitentiary.

As Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Father MacRae’s case is troubling to anyone concerned for the state of due process, justice, and liberty in America.” Catholics and others who value the integrity of the judicial system will be watching this month for signs that the case against Father MacRae might be revisited.

Please continue to keep him in your prayers.

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Kathy Schiffer is a Catholic blogger. In addition to her blog Seasons of Grace, her articles have appeared in the National Catholic Register, Aleteia, Zenit, the Michigan Catholic, Legatus Magazine, and other Catholic publications. She’s worked for Catholic and other Christian ministries since 1988, as radio producer, director of special events and media relations coordinator. Kathy and her husband, Deacon Jerry Schiffer, have three adult children.

Justice Delayed for Father MacRae

Gordon MacRae is escorted out of the Cheshire County Superior Courthouse in Keene, N.H., Sept. 23, 1994.

PHOTO: JIM COLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A list of officers with credibility issues calls his 1994 conviction into question.

The Wall Street Journal

By Harvey Silverglate | October 10, 2022

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PREFACE

The long saga of Fr. Gordon MacRae is likely to soon end

By Harvey A. Silverglate, Esq — November 11, 2022:

To the readers on my opt-in list of those who have chosen to receive my occasional columns and articles:

Many of you are likely familiar with the case of Father Gordon MacRae, the Catholic priest in New Hampshire who got caught up in the massive child sex abuse epidemic that engulfed the Catholic Church some time ago, remnants of which continue to come to public attention even now. This abuse scandal is particularly well known to Boston-area residents since The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for its reporting of the scandal — a scandal that resulted in the exile of Boston Cardinal Bernard Law to a minor position in Rome in order to keep him safe from potential indictment for turning a blind eye toward widespread abuse. The ground-breaking work of the Spotlight Team resulted in an Oscar-winning motion picture entitled “Spotlight.”

However, as the legendary baseball player (and pundit) Yogi Berra once said: “It ain’t over until it’s over.” A startling development in the MacRae case indicates a quite decent possibility — I would say a probability — that post-conviction litigation almost certain to begin shortly will exonerate and free Fr. MacRae.

Harvey Silverglate, Esq

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Father Gordon MacRae has been in prison since 1994, when a New Hampshire jury convicted him of sexual assault and he was sentenced to 33½ to 67 years. The charges against him were “built by a determined sex-abuse investigator and an atmosphere in which accusation was, in effect, all the proof required to bring a guilty verdict,” the Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in 2013. Father MacRae has maintained his innocence all along.

A new development will soon provide Granite State courts an opportunity to reconsider Father MacRae’s conviction. The state attorney general has published a so-called Laurie List of law-enforcement officers with credibility problems. The list is named for State v. Laurie, a 1995 case in which the state supreme court overturned a conviction after exposure of a detective’s dishonest conduct.

The list initially included Detective James F. McLaughlin of the Keene Police Department, who was the lead investigator in the MacRae case. He made the list for alleged “falsification of records” in an unrelated case in 1985. Detective McLaughlin successfully petitioned to have his name removed from the list, but the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism sued to learn who had been removed. (Detective McLaughlin has declined to respond to local press requests for comment on the list.)

Father MacRae plans to ask a court to throw out his conviction, arguing that Thomas Grover, his only accuser at trial, testified falsely at Detective McLaughlin’s behest. As Ms. Rabinowitz has documented, Detective McLaughlin’s own reports showed that he attempted a sting by writing a letter to Father MacRae and forging the signature of Jon Grover, the accuser’s brother. According to supporters of Father MacRae who run the website BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com, Detective McLaughlin failed to produce and maintain recordings of interviews with alleged victims, despite making adamant statements about the importance of recordings in child-abuse investigations.

In a May 1994 lawsuit, Father MacRae alleged that Detective McLaughlin accused the priest of having taken pornographic photographs of one of the alleged victims. No such photos were ever found. (Detective McLaughlin filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, which the judge denied. After Father MacRae was convicted in September 1994, the judge dismissed the suit without prejudice.)

Ms. Rabinowitz wrote a series of stories about such cases beginning in the late 1980s. False and implausible accusations of child sexual abuse led to conviction and imprisonment of innocent people from New York and Florida to Washington state.

All this happened because “believe the children” became a nationwide mantra. Society has a duty to protect young children—but also to assess accusations rationally and fairly, especially when they’re improbable, spectacular and horrifying. Journalists, too, must maintain a level of skepticism when cases as improbable as these arise. Any reporter who covers the legal system should have recognized the high probability that these accusations were false.

Most of the defendants in these cases were ultimately released, but their lives had been ruined. The recent development in Father MacRae’s case offers hope of another such bittersweet vindication.

Harvey A. Silverglate is a Boston-based criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer.

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RELATED, by David F. Pierre, Jr. and The Media Report: “Twice Is a Charm? Wall St. Journal Again Profiles Stunning Case of Wrongfully Convicted Priest Fr. Gordon MacRae”

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Addendum by the Author, Harvey Silverglate

“In today’s Wall Street Journal, I have a column about a long-lingering miscarriage of justice that might, I suggest, be on the verge of producing justice at long last. The subject is the Catholic priest Father Gordon MacRae who has spent many years in prison for a crime that I, along with many others, feel strongly that he did not commit.

With regard to this particular genre of cases, I recommend that you read Dorothy Rabinowitz’ 2003 book entitled No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times. Ms. Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer Prize for her path-breaking exposes of wrongful convictions in child sex-abuse cases (including, but not limited to, the MacRae case).

“Those of you from Massachusetts might remember our own local version of this false-accusation phenomenon that swept the nation during a time of particularly intense vulnerability and gullibility. We had the prosecution/persecution of Bernard F. Baran, Jr., out in Western Massachusetts, whose innocence ultimately got him released from a lengthy prison sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baran (Full disclosure: I worked on the Baran case, along with fellow Massachusetts criminal defense counsel John Swomley and Eric Tennen.) Massachusetts was also, shamefully, the location of the prosecution/persecution of the Amirault family, which is featured in Ms. Rabinowitz’s aforesaid book. (Full disclosure: I represented defendant Gerald Amirault at his parole hearing. The Parole Board granted parole. One member of the Board confided to me that the Board was convinced that the crime never happened, but it had the power only to release an innocent convict from prison, not to grant pardons. Gerald to this day wears an ankle-bracelet, a heavy burden for an innocent person.)

“Those interested in the problem of wrongful convictions are also advised to take a look at a recently-published book by Northeastern Law School Professor Daniel S. Medwed, entitled Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get out of Prison. And, of course, an occasional visit should be paid to the website of The National Innocence Project, co-founded and still led by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Similarly, there is the Boston-based organization dubbed The National Center for Reason and Justice, led by Robert D. (“Bob”) Chatelle. (Disclosure: I am on the organization’s advisory board. The NCRJ also sponsors the defense of Fr. Gordon MacRae.) And the problem of wrongful convictions is not reserved to state prosecutions. Consider my 2009 book (updated in 2011) Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”

The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae

by William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League

Noted sociologist Dr. Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, investigated the unjust imprisonment of Father Gordon MacRae.

On September 23, 1994, Father Gordon MacRae was shackled and led out of Cheshire County Superior Court in Keene, New Hampshire. He had been convicted by a jury of sexual assaults that allegedly happened nearly twelve years earlier. The 41-year-old priest was sentenced to a prison term of 33 ½ to 67 years.

MacRae says he is innocent. So do those who have looked into his case. Count me among them. “I did not commit these crimes,” MacRae says. “In fact, no one did.” Pointedly, he maintains that he wasn’t the one on trial. “The priesthood itself was on trial. No evidence whatsoever was introduced to support the claims. My accuser committed a $200,000 fraud, the amount in settlement he received from my diocese.”

No one has covered this story better than Dorothy Rabinowitz, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. MacRae’s accuser, Thomas Grover, has a history of theft, drugs, and violence. More than anyone else, he is responsible for the ordeal that MacRae has endured. He provided not a single witness, even though the alleged offenses took place in populated areas; the places were so busy that it is unlikely that no one would notice if something were awry. Moreover, Grover was coached by professionals, people more interested in getting a priest than justice. His attorney put him in touch with a counselor who came in quite handy. She stood at the back of the courtroom during Grover’s testimony, away from the sight of the jury, instructing him when to feign crying. On cue, he cried loudly, often at some length.

At the trial, Grover said MacRae sexually abused him when he was 15-years-old during five episodes. Rabinowitz captures the essence of what was really going on. “Why, after the first horrifying attack,” she asks, “had Mr. Grover willingly returned for four more sessions, in each of which he had been forcibly molested? Because, he explained, he had come to each new meeting with no memory of the previous attack.” If this is not preposterous enough, the accuser said he had “out of body” experiences that blocked his recollection. Just as we might expect, Grover conveniently changed his story many times.

Before the trial, MacRae had twice been offered a plea deal, but he turned them down. Midway through the trial, he was offered another opportunity. It sounded reasonable: plead guilty and the sentence is one to three years; refuse and risk spending decades in prison. He refused for a third time. The trial moved forward and he was found guilty. The sentence was obscene: it was thirty times what the state had offered in the plea bargain.

Why do I believe MacRae is innocent? We have been writing to each other for years, and I have read his account many times. The clincher year for me was 2012: recently discovered evidence emerged showing how manipulative his accuser is.

Grover’s former wife and stepson say that he is a “compulsive liar,” “manipulator,” “drama queen,” and “hustler” who “molded stories to fit his needs”; he could also “tell a lie and stick to it ’till his end.'” When he was confronted with his lies, he would lose his temper and sign himself into the psychiatric ward at a local hospital.

The former wife and stepson testify that Grover bragged how he was going to set up MacRae and “get even with the church.” What the stepson said is worth repeating at length:

“Grover would laugh and joke about this scheme and after the criminal trial and civil cash award he would again state how he had succeeded in this plot to get cash from the church. On several occasions, Grover told me that he had never been molested by MacRae…[and] stated to me that there were other allegations, made by other people against MacRae and [he] jumped on and piggy-backed onto these allegations for the money.”

Grover’s former wife, who acknowledges that he “never stated one word of abuse by [MacRae],” knew early on in their marriage that something was wrong. She had two daughters when they met, and both were frightened of him from the start. They saw him as a “sick individual who was obsessed with sex and teenage girls”; thus did they label him a “creep” and a “pervert.” They recall that he was “constantly eying” and groping them. When they woke up in the middle of the night, they would sometimes find him in their room, between their beds, staring at them.

When the trial was over, and Grover got a check for over $195,000 from the Diocese of Manchester, he photographed himself with $30,000 in cash. He bragged to his buddies, with bags of cash in his hands, that he had succeeded in “putting it over on the church.” That was in March 1997. In August, he took his former wife with him to Arizona where he blew it on alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, and other vices. In a three-day gambling spree, he went through $70,000 and he even had a Nevada casino hunting him down for another $50,000.

Please keep Father MacRae in your prayers. We can never give up hope.

The Injustice Against Father MacRae

By Rod Dreher | The American Conservative

May 11, 2013

Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ, who has been following for years the tragedy of the trumped-up sex abuse charges against Father Gordon MacRae, has a blood-boiling update on the MacRase case today.

Excerpt

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In due course there would be the civil settlement: $195,000 for [alleged abuse victim and key state witness] Mr. [Thomas] Grover and his attorneys. The payday—which the plaintiff had told the court he sought only to meet expenses for therapy—became an occasion for ecstatic celebration by Mr. Grover and friends. The party’s high point, captured by photographs now in possession of Father MacRae’s lawyers, shows the celebrants dancing around, waving stacks of $50 bills fresh from the bank.

The prospect of financial reward for anyone coming forward with accusations was no secret to teenage males in Keene, N.H., in the early 1990s. Some of them were members of that marginal society, in and out of trouble with the law, it fell to Father MacRae to counsel. Steven Wollschlager, who had been one of them—he would himself serve time for felony robbery—recalled that period of the 1990s in a 2008 statement to Father MacRae’s legal team. That it might not be in the best interest of a man with his own past legal troubles to give testimony undermining a high-profile state prosecution did not, apparently, deter him. “All the kids were aware,” Mr. Wollschlager recalled, “that the church was giving out large sums of money to keep the allegations from becoming public.”

This knowledge, Mr. Wollschlager said, fed the interest of local teens in joining the allegations. It was in this context that Detective James McLaughlin, sex-crimes investigator for the Keene police department, would turn his attention to the priest and play a key role in the effort to build a case against him. The full history of how Father MacRae came to be charged was reported on these pages in “A Priest’s Story,” April 27-28, 2005.

Mr. Wollschlager recalled that in 1994 Mr. McLaughlin summoned him to a meeting. As a young man, Mr. Wollschlager said, he had received counseling from Father MacRae. The main subject of the meeting with the detective was lawsuits and money and the priest. “All I had to do is make up a story,” Mr. Wollschlager said, and he too “could receive a large amount of money.” The detective “reminded me of my young child and girlfriend,” Mr. Wollschlager attests, and told him “that life would be easier for us.”

Eventually lured by the promise, Mr. Wollschlager said, he invented some claims of abuse. But summoned to a grand-jury hearing, he balked, telling an official that he refused to testify. He explains, in his statement, “I could not bring myself to give perjured testimony against MacRae, who had only tried to help me.” Asked for response to this charge, Mr. McLaughlin says it is “a fabrication.”

Along with the lure of financial settlements, the MacRae case was driven by that other potent force—the fevered atmosphere in which charges were built, the presumption of innocence buried. An atmosphere in which it was unthinkable—it still is today—not to credit as truthful every accuser charging a Catholic priest with molestation. There is no clearer testament to the times than the public statement in September 1993 issued by Father MacRae’s own diocese in Manchester well before the trial began: “The Church is a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae as well as the individuals.” Diocesan officials had evidently found it inconvenient to dally while due process took its course.

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Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. A veteran of three decades of magazine and newspaper journalism, he has also written three New York Times bestsellers—Live Not By Lies, The Benedict Option, and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming—as well as Crunchy Cons and How Dante Can Save Your Life. Dreher lives in Baton Rouge, La.