Files Reveal Cardinal Mahoney Allowed Sexual Abuse

Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials maneuvered behind the scenes to shield molester priests, provide damage control for the church and keep parishioners in the dark, according to church personnel files.

The confidential records filed in a lawsuit against the archdiocese disclose how the church handled abuse allegations for decades and also reveal dissent from a top Mahony aide who criticized his superiors for covering up allegations of abuse rather than protecting children.

Cardinal Roger Mahony, former archbishop of Los Angeles, attends a ceremony held by Pope Benedict XVI at the Saint Peter's Basilica Feb. 18, 2012, in Vatican City. / Getty Images

Notes inked by Mahony demonstrate he was disturbed about abuse and sent problem priests for treatment, but there also were lengthy delays or oversights in some cases. Mahony received psychological reports on some priests that mentioned the possibility of many other victims, for example, but there is no indication that he or other church leaders investigated further.
 
"This is all intolerable and unacceptable to me," Mahony wrote in 1991 on a file of the Rev. Lynn Caffoe, a priest suspected of locking boys in his room, videotaping their crotches and running up a $100 phone sex bill while with a boy. Caffoe was sent for therapy and removed from ministry, but Mahony didn't move to defrock him until 2004, a decade after the archdiocese lost track of him.

"He is a fugitive from justice," Mahony wrote to the Vatican's Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. "A check of the Social Security index discloses no report of his demise, so presumably he is alive somewhere."

Caffoe died in 2009, six years after a newspaper reporter found him working at a homeless mission two blocks from a Salinas elementary school.

Mahony was out of town but issued a statement Monday apologizing for his mistakes and saying he had been "naive" about the lasting impacts of abuse. He has since met with 90 abuse victims privately and keeps an index card with each victim's name in his private chapel, where he prays for them daily, he said. The card also includes the name of the molesting priest "lest I forget that real priests created this appalling harm."
 
"It remains my daily and fervent prayer that God's grace will flood the heart and soul of each victim, and that their life journey continues forward with ever greater healing," Mahony wrote. "I am sorry."

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The church's sex abuse policy was evolving and Mahony inherited some of the worst cases from his predecessor when he took over in 1985, J. Michael Hennigan, an archdiocese attorney, said in a separate series of emails. Priests were sent out of state for psychological treatment because they revealed more when their therapists were not required to report child abuse to law enforcement, as they were in California, he said.

At the time, clergy were not mandated sex abuse reporters and the church let the victims' families decide whether to contact police, he added.
 
In at least one case, a priest victimized the children of illegal immigrants and threatened to have them deported if they told, the files show. The files are attached to a motion seeking punitive damages in a case involving a Mexican priest sent to Los Angeles in 1987 after he was brutally beaten in his parish south of Mexico City.

When parents complained the Rev. Nicholas Aguilar Rivera molested in LA, church officials told the priest but waited two days to call police — allowing him to flee to Mexico, court papers allege. At least 26 children told police they were abused during his 10 months in Los Angeles. The now-defrocked priest is believed to be in Mexico and remains a fugitive.


The personnel files of 13 other clerics were attached to the motion to show a cover-up pattern, said attorney Anthony De Marco, who represents the 35-year-old plaintiff. In one instance, a memo to Mahony discusses sending a cleric to a therapist who also is an attorney so any incriminating evidence is protected from authorities by lawyer-client privilege. In another instance, archdiocese officials paid a secret salary to a priest exiled to the Philippines after he and six other clerics were accused of having sex with a teen and impregnating her.

The exhibits offer a glimpse at some 30,000 pages to be made public as part of a record-setting $660 million settlement. The archdiocese agreed to give the files to more than 500 victims of priest abuse in 2007, but a lawyer for about 30 of the priests fought to keep records sealed. A judge recently ordered the church to release them without blacking out the names of church higher-ups.

They echo similar releases from other dioceses nationwide that have shown how church leaders for decades shuffled problem priests from parish to parish, covered up reports of abuse and didn't contact law enforcement. Top church officials in Missouri and Pennsylvania were criminally convicted last year for their roles in covering up abuse, more than a decade after the clergy sex abuse scandal began to unfold in Boston.

Mahony, who retired in 2011 after 26 years at the helm of the 4.3-million person archdiocese, has been particularly hounded by the case of the Rev. Michael Baker, who was sentenced to prison in 2007 for molestation — two decades after the priest confessed his abuse to Mahony.

Mahony noted the "extremely grave and serious situation" when he sent Baker for psychological treatment after the priest told him in 1986 that he had molested two brothers over seven years.

Baker returned to ministry the next year with a doctor's recommendation that he be defrocked immediately if he spent any time with minors. Despite several documented instances of being alone with boys, the priest wasn't removed from ministry until 2000. Around the same time, the church learned he was conducting baptisms without permission.

Church officials discussed announcing Baker's abuse in churches where he had worked, but Mahony rejected the idea.
 "We could open up another firestorm — and it takes us years to recover from those," Mahony wrote in an Oct. 6, 2000, memo. "Is there no alternative to public announcements at all the Masses in 15 parishes??? Wow — that really scares the daylights out of me!!"

The aide, Msgr. Richard Loomis, noted his dismay over the matter when he retired in 2001 as vicar for clergy, the top church official who handled priestly discipline. In a memo to his successor, Loomis said Baker's attorney disclosed the priest had at least 10 other victims.

"We've stepped back 20 years and are being driven by the need to cover-up and to keep the presbyteriate & public happily ignorant rather than the need to protect children," Loomis wrote.

"The only other option is to sit and wait until another victim comes forward. Then someone else will end up owning the archdiocese of Los Angeles. The liability issues involved aside, I think that course of complete (in)action would be immoral and unethical."

Mahony preferred targeted warnings at schools and youth groups rather than a warning read at Masses, Hennigan said. Parish announcements were made two years later.

Baker, who was paroled in 2011, is alleged to have molested 20 children in his 26-year career. He could not be reached for comment.

The files also show Mahony worked to keep molester priests out of state to avoid criminal and civil trouble.

One case involved the Msgr. Peter Garcia, a molester whom Mahony's predecessor sent for treatment in New Mexico. Mahony kept Garcia there after a lawyer warned in 1986 that the archdiocese could face "severe civil liability" if he returned and reoffended. Garcia had admitted raping an 11-year-old boy and later told a psychologist he molested 15 to 17 young boys.

"If Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese, we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors," Mahony wrote to the director of Garcia's New Mexico treatment program.

Mahony then sent Garcia to another treatment center, but Garcia returned to LA in 1988 after being removed from ministry. He then contacted a victim's mother and asked to spend time with her younger son, according to a letter in the file. Mahony moved to defrock him in 1989, and Garcia died a decade later.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57565046/files-show-l.a-archdiocese-manipulation-in-abuse-cases/

Jodie Foster (Came) Comes Out???

Jodie Foster delivered an emotional barn-burner of a speech Sunday night as she accepted the Golden Globes' Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award, driving the audience to tears with some of the most intimate revelations of her 47-year career in show business.

In an era where, as she said, "Every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show," it turns out, she's "not Honey Boo Boo Child."

Instead, she teased a long-held rumor about her sexual preference right out to the point of admission, still keeping a grip on her long-held privacy in this area. "I had a sudden urge to say something that I have never really been able to air in public, a declaration that I’m a little nervous about ... but I’m just going to put it out there, loud and proud. So, I’m going to need your support on this. I am ... single. Yes, I am, I am single."

Kevork Djansezian / NBC via Getty Images

The audience laughed, but Foster followed up quickly: "I’m kidding. No, I’m really kidding but I’m kind of kidding. This could have been a big coming out speech tonight. I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the stone age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, and co-workers and gradually probably to everyone who knew her ..."

She went on to thank her "heroic co-parent, my ex-partner-in-love, my righteous soul sister in life, my confessor ... most beloved BFF for 20 years, Cydney Bernard," acknowledging their partnership and sons (whose father(s) have never been named publicly) Charlie and Kit made up their "modern family."

And then she defended that long-held privacy with a light admonishment to the audience outside the Beverly Hilton: "Seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe then you too might value privacy above all else. ... I have given everything up there since the time I was 3 years old and that’s reality show enough, don’t you think?"

Foster got started early in show business, a seasoned TV actress with credits on "Gunsmoke" and the TV adaptation of the 1973 film hit "Paper Moon" when she began accepting roles in much more adult-themed films, including "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" and "Taxi Driver," in which she played a 12-year-old prostitute. The role has been freighted with controversy for her entire career, and so obsessed John Hinckley Jr. that he shot President Ronald Reagan in 1980 to get Foster's attention.

As she's grown up, Foster has released at least one film every year of her life, never taking an extended break. She segued into the occasional directing job with 1991's "Little Man Tate," and got behind the camera (and in front of it) for 2011's "The Beaver." Over the years, she showed a fearlessness with her no-genre-barred script choices, including the eerie "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane" (1976), comedic western "Maverick" (1994), sci-fi "Contact" (1997) and suspense thriller "Panic Room" (where she played opposite a young Kristen Stewart).

But it was her vulnerable-yet-strong roles in films like "Silence of the Lambs" (1989) and "The Accused" (1992) -- both of which earned her best actress Oscars -- that ushered her in as a formidable, talented adult actress who remains today one of Hollywood's least-known, yet enduring performers.

Still, Foster wasn't done with the almost-revelations for the night, using her platform to address her mother Evelyn, who managed the young Jodie early on. Her comments seemed to indicate that her mother might be ailing; Foster noted, "Mom, I know you’re inside those blue eyes somewhere and that there are so many things you won’t understand tonight, but this is the only important one to take in: I love you, I love you, I love you…. You did good in this life, and you’re a great mom. Please take that with you when you’re finally OK to go". 

 

 

Many thought the two-time Oscar winner seemed to be also saying farewell to acting, though she later clarified to The Hollywood Reporter that she was not retiring from the profession.
"This feels like the end of one era, and the beginning of something else," she said. "Scary and exciting, and now what? Well, I may never be up on this stage again, on any stage for that matter.... I will continue to tell stories ... it’s just that from now on I may be holding a different talking stick. Maybe it won’t be as sparkly ... but it will be my writing on the wall: Jodie Foster was here, I still am and I want to be seen, to be understood deeply and to be not so very lonely..... Here’s to the next 50 years."

http://todayentertainment.today.com/_news/2013/01/12/16431311-jodie-foster-golden-globe-speech-drives-audience-to-tears-with-intimate-revelations?lite

Stevie Nicks 2013

Stevie Nicks: 'I always wanted to be a songwriter: I told my parents when I was 15 and a half.' Photograph: Jason Bell/Camera Press

Before I meet Stevie Nicks, I hear her. She is downstairs somewhere in the house she's renting on the beach in Malibu – a short drive, traffic allowing, up the Californian coastline from the two homes she owns in LA – and looking for her dark glasses. It's early evening in December and has long since turned dark outside, but if you're the ultimate rock goddess – NME's recent description, testament to an ongoing revaluation of interest in Fleetwood Mac among the younger generation – wearing shades at night goes with the territory.
Scented candles are spaced throughout the room and there's a well-thumbed copy of the first book in The Twilight Saga on a side table – signs that suggest that the 64-year-old singer is comfortably in residence. Plus there's her Yorkshire terrier, getting stuck continuously under my feet. But, as Nicks says, when all five feet one-and-a-half inches of her does emerge at the top of the stairs, she can't seem to settle.
In fact she shouldn't be here at all (and wasn't planning any interviews), but on holiday in the Florida Keys she was getting bitten to death by bugs and, besides, felt bored. Going home to either of her places in the city wasn't an option because right now she's "making a molecular change": parking her solo career, which saw her tour the world with her solo album In Your Dreams for the past two years, and getting ready for the return of the Mac.

Instead she asked to see if this place, which she'd rented previously, was available. "I'm trying to rest and it's really hard to rest because in either one of my own houses I feel like I should be working," she explains. "I've been coming here off and on for nearly 10 years and there's absolutely nothing for me to do except draw or sit and write poetry or bring the electric piano down." Problem is, "I've been here since Tuesday and I haven't managed yet to actually come up here at three in the afternoon and go sit on that miserable couch and draw for a few hours – because that's when I know I've made a change."

Despite the homely touches, the house looks perfectly nondescript from the outside, and it's modestly apportioned by the standards of LA rock aristocracy. But then Nicks doesn't play the diva either – kooky fan of fantasy, yes (her fondness for the oeuvre of Stephenie Meyer and liking for US fantasy TV series Game of Thrones fits right into that), but not the figure who insisted during Fleetwood Mac's Tusk tour that every hotel room she stayed in be painted pink and must house a white piano.
It is now 40 years since her first album, Buckingham Nicks – the fruit of her relationship, both musical and romantic, with Lindsey Buckingham – and life is coming full circle. Later this month, the most classic of all Fleetwood Mac albums, Rumours, gets the full reissue treatment, and the band will hit the road again for a US tour that will also likely come to Europe. (Of the rumours that they'll headline Glastonbury, Nicks is noncommittal, though she does say she'd love to do it.)
There is also the likelihood of the first new Fleetwood Mac record in 10 years – and even the prospect of a second Buckingham-Nicks album. For fans, this news is as exciting as it might sound improbable. Nicks once said herself that "to be in Fleetwood Mac is to live in a soap opera. And it has been pretty scandalous and incestuous…" And of all relationships, it's been that between her and Buckingham that has provided the richest story lines of all.
Fleetwood Mac in 1974 with (from left) Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, and Christine and John McVie. Photograph: Herbert Wiorthington for the Observer
Born in ARIZONA, Nicks was in her senior year in high school in San Francisco when she first met the budding athlete a year younger than her. She already knew she wanted to be a songwriter – "I told my parents when I was 15 and a half" – and he was in the folk group Fritz that she then joined before they formed a duo. For their debut album sleeve he insisted she pose topless (half hidden behind him), even though she was in tears and told him: "This is not art… this is taking a nude photograph with you, and I don't dig it."
On New Year's Eve 1974, the pair joined Fleetwood Mac at the invitation of Mick Fleetwood, following the departure of late guitarist Bob Welch. The group's history was tortuous already, and the new arrivals introduced a new dynamic, with Nicks dressed in flowing chiffon and channelling the spirit of the "old Welsh witch" (her phrase) in her hit "Rhiannon". But the album on which that song appeared, the eponymous Fleetwood Mac, proved the band's breakthrough, hitting No 1 in the US and selling over 5m copies.
The recording of its follow-up, Rumours, saw the soap opera at its most lurid: Fleetwood had discovered that his wife was having an affair with his best friend; bassist John McVie and keyboard player and singer Christine McVie had split up after eight years of marriage, and Nicks and Buckingham's relationship kept hitting the rocks – all this played out in a blizzard of cocaine. "Christine and I refused to be the second-class citizens," says Nicks of the prosaic business of actually making the record. "But it was different for her, because she was one of the musicians – absolutely as big an influence as Lindsey or John or Mick; the four pieces were equal. I'd sit around and crochet or draw while they were out there working stuff out. And that's fine, because I wanted to be a lead singer – I didn't really want to carry around a 21lb Les Paul."

She is modest about her own songwriting abilities. Nicks contributed "Dreams" to Rumours (an upbeat song about splitting up directed at Buckingham), which became the group's only US No 1 hit single, while Buckingham was responsible for the evergreen "Go Your Own Way" (a venomous kiss-off directed back at her), but she insists that "Christine wrote most of the hits for the group – she was the major pop songwriter, not Lindsey or me."
"It's hard to do that," she continues. "I can't sit down and write a hit single and plan it, and no amount of listening to other people's records or music is going to make you a different songwriter." She's a fan of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe "– "I walk around singing it all the time" – and would love to emulate it, but "I don't think that's really ever going to happen because I'm more Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliffe and Edward and Bella" – the characters from Twilight – "I'm more serious, dramatic… Shakespearean."
Nicks always thought she was supposed to be the person in the band who "spreads a little fairy dust here and there", and it was a painfully literal interpretation of that role that saw her succumb to addiction in the years that followed the huge success of Rumours and subsequent albums, such as Tusk. In 1986 she was admitted to the Betty Ford Clinic because of her coke habit, but then became hooked on the prescribed tranquilliser Klonopin for a further eight years. She had entered into a relationship with the Eagles' Don Henley and then dated Mick Fleetwood before briefly marrying Kim Anderson in 1983, the widowed husband of her close friend Robin Anderson, who had died of leukaemia – an episode she has subsequently described as "insanity".

Now clean and sober, she also insists that she is happily single, but until not so very long ago the flame she carried for Buckingham still burned. There is, for instance, a song on In Your Dreams called "Everybody Loves You", co-written by her collaborator on the album Dave Stewart but based on one of 40 poems in her journals that she concedes is about Buckingham. "No one really knows you," Nicks sings. "I'm the only one." To one interviewer at the time the album was released she said she only admitted that their love affair was over when he had his first child with future wife Kristen Messner in 1998.

In February last year, Buckingham, Fleetwood and John McVie went into the studio to record a handful of new songs, but Nicks was in mourning for her 84-year-old mother Barbara, who died after a battle with pneumonia in late December 2011. "I couldn't do anything – I didn't leave my house, I didn't even talk to my really good friends," she says now. "I just went underground to try to deal with the fact that she wasn't supposed to go… she had emphysema after smoking for 60 years, but we all totally thought she was going to pull through. It was like: 'What? Did that really just happen?'"
In her absence from the studio, Buckingham said he'd try to look at things through her eyes – "and I said: 'Well, you probably can do that, Lindsey, you certainly know me well enough"' – then when she did make it there, there were two new songs waiting for her. "I put vocals on them and they came out great. And they really do sound like I was there." The result is likely to be a new Fleetwood Mac album at some point this year, but perhaps after that also a Buckingham Nicks record, because the pair also recorded an old song that was originally intended for their 1973 debut. "For some reason it just got swept under the carpet. I mean, maybe it was going to be track one on our second album, which we were actually making when we joined Fleetwood Mac."
Nicks isn't sure exactly how all this new material will manifest itself. "I don't know – I don't have a computer, I'm not on the internet, so I don't know how exactly the record company will decide on what to do," she says, slightly bafflingly. "But we do have product."
The Nicks fix: Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in concert in Baltimore, 2009. Photograph: Owen Sweeney/Rex Features More important than this, though, was that Buckingham and Nicks were able to relax in each other's company. "We spent 80% of our time talking just like this, telling my assistant Karen all the crazy stories of everything that's happened to us from 1966 until now. We laughed and we laughed – and we probably cried a couple of times. It was very cathartic. And I think that we came a long way during those four days."
The result is that the band promise they won't just be going through the motions when they hit the road this year – unlike last time around. "I'm thinking," Nicks says, "that this is going to be a very different tour. The audience is going to see a very different Fleetwood Mac up there – we talked about how we really need to appreciate what we have and who we are and how far we've come. I said to Lindsey: 'I wish your mom and dad were still alive – they'd be just like: Way to go, Lindsey Buckingham! Boy, damn we're glad you dropped out of swimming – you know, he could have been a famous swimmer – We're so glad you stopped and went for rock'n'roll.'"

For sentimental fans, the highlight of any Fleetwood Mac show is still that point at which Buckingham and Nicks join hands together on stage: it's a very human moment, one that rekindles a sense of what's been and might be yet for all parties involved. Or as Nicks herself puts it: "People love to see people in love. Not that we're in love, but we have been in love and we have that on stage. And if we're getting along and we're happy with each other, that part comes out.
"I think we've got to a place now where we're both: 'Why not? Why can't we be those two people on stage?' It doesn't carry on after you walk down the stairs and go back to your hotels and rooms, it's never going to carry past that. But what it does do is allow you to walk up on stage and be dramatic with each other. And we have walked up on stage and been absolutely the other side of dramatic – we have been like waiting-for-a-bus undramatic. Like, you know: 'Lindsey, what am I going to get for room service later? I think I'm going to get a grilled cheese sandwich and some tomato soup.' Because that's what happens in bands if you're not happy. This is not going to be that tour."

If there is one regret, it's that Chris McVie won't be with the band, after quitting in 1998. "We all did everything we could do to try and talk her out of it," Nicks says, "but you look in someone's eyes and you can tell they're finished. It's like when somebody breaks up with you and says: 'We're done.'" Or, she helpfully points out: "As Taylor Swift would say: 'We are never ever getting back together ever!' That's what Chris was saying… But I'd beg, borrow and scrape together $5m and give it to her in cash if she would come back. That's how much I miss her.
"I miss her," she adds, "like flowers need the rain."

from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jan/12/stevie-nicks-return-of-fleetwood-mac