Pedophile Priests: True Crime Video Web Series Proposal

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(Originally mailed to several TV production groups in L.A. in 2009-2010 with no response, proposal is updated here:)

Mainstream media has barely reported the story of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church.  Most coverage is little more than a surface headline and paragraphs from press releases.  As a result most of the stories of hundreds of thousands of children abused by thousands of Catholic priests have not yet been told. 

An indepth look at cases in each city, such as in online videos based on reports at City of Angels Blog, would highlight patterns in these crimes, maybe even lead to a deeper investigation of the hierarchy's cover-up of these crimes and federal prosecution.  

After interviewing hundreds of pedophile priest victims for this blog since January 2007, and after watching the shallow coverage of these crimes in mainstream media, I know we could produce original episodes for years about these crimes, and never run out of new material.   Here is a sampling of stories I published at City of Angels Blog in recent years, that lend themselves to true crime series coverage:

From Boston: First Posted at City of Angels January 16, 2010:

*6000 is number of Pedophile Priests in U.S. Catholic Church since 1950. Found so far. And still counting

"This year the number will go over 6,000," Terry McKiernan, president of Bishop Accountability in Boston, emailed me early this month. After we posted “The Public Has a Right to Know how Six Thousand Priests Got Away with Pedophilia” Jan. 2, people

From Santa Barbara: First posted at City of Angels Tuesday, January 26, 2010:

Predator Franciscan describes years he ran Santa Barbara Boys Choir, 'A constant supply of attractive little boys' (5 pages scanned here)

While reading through his Probation Report, we scanned five pages from Sexual Autobiography of Robert Van Handel Pedophile Franciscan and posted them here, for our readers to click enlarge and read, as a preview of upcoming stories. These tight single-space typed memories cover the time Van Handel was Director of Santa Barbara Boys Choir, which, he writes "was clearly my choir, and the fulfillment of one of my fondest dreams.  “Now I understand that it was also a constant supply of attractive little boys.”

From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: First Posted Monday, January 18, 2010

I took my son to the bishop. I said, you broke him you fix him. They said, not our problem as perp a Franciscan. Now my son is dead 
The day Pennsylvania passed a law that worked against most victims of pedophile priests in the state including Arthur Baselice III, he left the house for an NA meeting. Next morning police found him dead in a drug house in nearby Camden, New Jersey.  "When my son was an altar boy, (Fr. Charles) Newman gave him opiods so he’d go into a haze while the priest raped him, sodomized him," Arthur II said. "Then for about a decade, the priest gave the boy wads of cash.  My son became a hopeless drug addict, and now he is dead now, of an opiod overdose." 

From Upstate New York: First Posted at City of Angels October 26, 2008

30 more victims of 1 priest found when book published. Just the tip of the iceberg 
"I’ve sent the bishop eight survivors of Neary and each one said the bishop told them they were the only person that had come forward about Neary," said Charles Bailey. He is getting justice today for brutal sex crimes committed against him at age ten by Father Thomas Neary, by putting his story out in the public. His book In The Shadow Of The Cross gives graphic shocking disgusting PTSD-inducing detail of the serial felonies, and you cannot put it down. More alarming, Bailey went on a small book tour, in venue after venue, people came up after he spoke and said, "my brother was also raped by Neary," or my uncle, my husband, my dad. Dozens of people with the same horrid story  of the same…

From Orange County, CA: First Posted at City of Angels November 3, 2007 

It terrified me, I knew it was going to happen again. Ryan DiMaria, in his own words, about his 1997 case and Michael Harris, Hollywood priest

Ryan DiMaria held a gun to his head. He was 25 years old in a college dorm his head reeling. Father Harris had said he wouldn't really go to hell if he killed himself, but Father Harris, in that same role of priest and counselor, had also assaulted DiMaria sexually over and over again from his sophomore to senior year at Santa Margarita High School. Somehow DiMaria put down the gun that day and instead called his parents and told them everything. As devoted Catholics would do, they contacted the diocese.  Six years later Ryan DiMaria's 1997 case in Orange County settled for $5.2 million and DiMaria became a plaintiff attorney himself

From North Carolina and Georgia: First Posted at City of Angels February 8, 2009

Mom would drop us off with the priest for the weekend. He would get us drunk. He called it bug juice. Then he would start taking off his clothes
The affable priest convinced the mother of five it would be better to leave the children with him when she came to Ward, South Carolina, to visit her family, who were Methodists. The priest served a mix of Kool-Aid and alcohol he called “bug juice” and I know I’ve heard of that concoction before in other stories, maybe in New Orleans? Does anyone else remember?   “One thing my sisters and brother and I have all talked about is we know he had alcohol in there. We’d feel dizzy and kind of sick feeling, sick.” 

From Pennsylvania-Iowa: First Posted at City of Angels Wednesday, January 14, 2009 

This story makes me so angry it will take at least three posts to even begin to tell it. Here is part one of Peter Dunne, Flagrant Pedophile Priest 
Peter J. Dunne could be yet another "worst pedophile priest ever," as his series of crimes stretches one's already over expanded capacity to absorb. Here yet another predator maneuvers himself into the role of priest so he can use the sacraments and other resources of the Catholic Church to gain access to children.   In Philadelphia, Rev. Peter Dunne had several assignments that put him in the company of young boys.  Dunne ran the Boy Scouts, St. Francis vocational school for troubled boys, he taught in several parish schools, he counseled at summer camps, he had his own cabin in the woods where he took his victims. . . . .

From Santa Barbara, first published Monday, September 22, 2008
When 24 pedophile priests from one town rape 60 children, it is a Public Nuisance. SOL Breakthrough suit filed against Franciscans in Santa Barbara

{End of Story Samples}
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These online videos would include fascinating locations for B-Roll, Compelling interviews and OTFs.   The crimes took place on Catholic Church grounds in sacristies, confessionals, rectories, at campgrounds, on acreage still owned by Archdiocese corporations, there are documents that are yet to be discovered. 

The priests used Sacraments of the Church as well as lavish trips to get to children.  This was an epidemic of perversion and Today there are thousands of adult victims of pedophile priests all over the country stunned at the way the Church has managed news coverage of these crimes.  City of Angels Blog and your production company could end a great injustice by producing and web-casting this true crime video series.

Even though pedophilia can be found anywhere adults interact with children, what other organization than the Catholic Church is allowed to operate with no oversight or accountability in America while continuing to have trusted access to children?  What organization other than the Catholic Church would be allowed to handle serial sex crimes internally, with credibly accused perpetrators continuing to live in American communities, continuing to have access to children? 

Compare the coverage of Jerry Sanduski, one Pennsylvania perpetrator coach at one university, with coverage of Monsignor William Lynn’s trial, concerning the Philadelphia Archdiocese.  Both cases went through the courts at about the same time last month, but Sanduski’s charges dominated national news every day for months; the trial of Monsignor Lynn was a footnote, only making page one around the country on three occasions, when the monsignor indicted, convicted, and sentenced.  Yes, Sanduski’s crimes were horrendous, but they were nominal compared to the decades-long serial pedophilia that took place in the Philadelphia Archdiocese.

The patterns of crime from Philadelphia are the same modus operandi as the pedophile priest crimes in every archdiocese in every city in the United States. 

This post today is a proposal to produce such a web series here at City of Angels Blog.

You can financially support this endeavor; in fact, this post of July 30, 2012, is a request for funds.  Click the PayPal links in the left hand column of this website to help keep City of Angels Blog in operation.   

Close to seven thousand Catholic priest perpetrators have been identified so far from the United States, with valid enough accusations for them to be included in the bishopaccountability database.  These priests preyed on families in parishes all over the country from at least 1940 to the present, and they left behind tens of thousands of crime victims, many of us damaged individuals.  

Many of us never made it to adulthood.  

The real felons, the bishops and other hierarchy who allowed serial sex crimes against children to take place in their parishes, still run archdioceses all over the world, and still hold influential positions all the way up to the Vatican.  They dictate public policy on sexual morality issues when they themselves are guilty of covering up one of the worst child molestation eras in history.  Only a handful of the perpetrator priests, and as of last month one monsignor from Philadelphia, have seen prison time.

But then God revealed to humans the Internet, so to speak. If there was ever a topic that needs the internet and webcast formats to get out its truth, it's the story of pedophile priest crimes in the Catholic Church. 

There are tens of thousands of victims of pedophile priests alive in the United States today, a few of us have experienced a modicum of justice in the form of cash, but settlements with the Catholic Church have been paid to only a fraction of the survivors.  A good 85 percent of us get no cash settlements because our cases are outside statutes of limitations, and the church only resolves cases when required to by civil law. 

Meantime, we watch mainstream media misreport the story, and wonder if the total extent of the crimes will ever really get told.  We watch corporate media print a few headlines, then go on acting as if nothing happened, quoting the Church as an authority on American sexual politics, in most cases printing and broadcasting whatever the Church wants released with no investigation.

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KAY EBELING, PRODUCER, 
of City of Angels Blog
Background

In January 2007, I began attending pretrial hearings in Los Angeles as some 700 child molestation lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Church began their way through the Superior Court system.  I was a victim whose case took place in another state, and I went to the hearings at first to try to find other survivors. 

In L.A. Superior Court I found teams of corporate lawyers working for Cardinal Roger Mahony and the Los Angeles Archdiocese, performing astounding abuse of the justice system, abuse that continues today in new lawsuits.  The shenanigans in the Courtroom was going completely unreported. 

City of Angels Blog became the lone source of reporting on the L.A. Clergy Cases that settled in late 2007 with a $660 million payout to 510 victims, with dozens more cases resolved in the ensuing years. .

After the L.A. settlements, City of Angels Blog continued to investigate the cover-ups of pedophilia and other sex crimes in the Catholic Church around the country and later around the wordl. 

These are stories that have never been written before, about true crimes, where the perpetrators are dangerous and walking the streets of America today.  The subject of Catholic pedophile priests is not only often ignored by the mainstream media.  These criminals who enabled the sex crimes hold unparalleled influence in most American communities, so they're always able to prevent the story from even getting into the news. 

I’m part of a population of American crime victims that did not exist until the mid-1990s. 

We're adult victims of pedophile priests and there are tens of thousands of us still walking the planet looking for a way to find justice.  Posting our stories one after the other in video on the internet would bring about a kind of human justice not dependent on any promotion other than our desire to know and transmit the truth.

As I started to research our thousands of stories, I realized the criminal behavior of pedophile priests and the bishops who enabled their crimes was eerily similar in city after city.  Hierarchy figures in the Catholic church across the country have destroyed documents, obstructed justice, and lied under oath, to prevent the public from finding out the entire story.

There are enough stories about the epidemic of pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood and its effects on American society in city after city across the country to keep us in new material for the next thirty years.

I believe that once hundreds of these stories are written, other writers, researchers, and hopefully law enforcement, will be able to see patterns in the crimes and recognize where the real criminal activity took place, at a high level in the hierarchy of each individual local diocese, men who have as yet been untouchable by different institutions of justice.  These crimes call out for national level hearings, perhaps in the United States Senate.  But first the stories have to get past the roadblocks of the Catholic Church’s centuries of influence.

For the first time in human history we can prove that close to ten thousand  pedophile priests acted as if access to children for sex was an entitlement, and the commission of these crimes would be quietly protected by the monsignors and bishops. 

The rest of this story needs to be told.

-Kay Ebeling



Photo at left: John Wojnowski in his near fifteen-year-long demonstration in front of Vatican Embassy in Washington D.C.