The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles will settle its clergy abuse cases for at least $600 million, by far the largest payout in the church's sexual abuse scandal, The Associated Press learned Saturday.
Attorneys for the archdiocese and the plaintiffs are expected to announce the deal Monday, the day the first of more than 500 clergy abuse cases was scheduled for jury selection, according to two people with knowledge of the agreement. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the settlement had not been made public.
The archdiocese and its insurers will pay between $600 million and $650 million to about 500 plaintiffs an average of $1.2 million to $1.3 million per person. The settlement also calls for the release of confidential priest personnel files after review by a judge assigned to oversee the litigation, the sources said.
The settlements would push the total amount paid out by the U.S. church since 1950 to more than $2 billion, with about a quarter of that coming from the Los Angeles archdiocese.
It wasn't immediately clear how the payout would be split among the insurers, the archdiocese and several Roman Catholic religious orders. A judge must sign off on the agreement, and final details were being ironed out.
Lead plaintiffs' attorney Ray Boucher confirmed the sides were working on a deal but would not discuss specifics. He said that negotiations would continue through the weekend and that there were still many unresolved aspects.
Tod Tamberg, archdiocese spokesman, declined to comment on any settlement details.
"The archdiocese will be in court Monday morning," he said.
Steven Sanchez, 47, was one of the plaintiffs set to go to trial Monday. He was expected to testify in the trial involving the late Rev. Clinton Hagenbach.
Sanchez, a financial adviser, said the past few months have been especially difficult because he had to repeat his story of abuse for depositions with his attorneys and archdiocese attorneys in preparation for trial.
"We're 48 hours away from starting the trial, and I've been spending a lot of time getting emotionally prepared to take them on, but I'm glad," he said. "It's been a long five years."
A spokeswoman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said at a news conference outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Saturday that the group had not been apprised of any settlement, and that no such deal would stop anyone's suffering.
"No matter what happens, no resolution, guilty verdict or settlement magically takes away the pain of having been raped or molested by Catholic priests in this archdiocese," said Mary Grant, the group's regional director.
The settlement would be the largest ever by a Roman Catholic archdiocese since the clergy sexual abuse scandal erupted in Boston in 2002. The largest payout so far has been by the Diocese of Orange, Calif., in 2004, for $100 million.
Facing a flood of abuse claims, five dioceses Tucson, Ariz.; Spokane, Wash.; Portland, Ore.; Davenport, Iowa, and San Diego sought bankruptcy protection.
The Los Angeles archdiocese, its insurers and various Roman Catholic orders have paid more than $114 million to settle 86 claims so far.
The largest of those came in December, when the archdiocese reached a $60 million settlement with 45 people whose claims dated from before the mid-1950s and after 1987 periods when it had little or no sexual abuse insurance. Several religious orders in California have also reached multimillion-dollar settlements in recent months, including the Carmelites, the Franciscans and the Jesuits.
However, more than 500 other lawsuits against the archdiocese had remained unresolved despite years of legal wrangling. Most of the outstanding lawsuits were generated by a 2002 state law that revoked for one year the statute of limitations for reporting sexual abuse.
Cardinal Roger Mahony recently told parishioners in an open letter that the archdiocese was selling its high-rise administrative building and considering the sale of about 50 other nonessential church properties to raise funds for a settlement.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge overseeing the cases recently ruled that Mahony could be called to testify in the second trial on schedule, and attorneys for plaintiffs wanted to call him in many more.
The same judge also cleared the way for four people to seek punitive damages something that could have opened the church to tens of millions of dollars in payouts if the ruling had been expanded to other cases.
2 Comments:
Mazel Tov! I just wish the state of Maryland would allow a two year window like they did in California. Unfortunately, Maryland is a sex offender friendly state. It's so great for offenders even Michael Jackson is considering moving here. He was looking at property on the eastern shore.
Bishop Accountablilty
The Monitor / Eight Quick Points about the LA Settlement
Dear Friend,
Like you, we've been absorbing the news of the long-awaited settlement with clergy sexual abuse survivors in Los Angeles. We wanted to share with you a few immediate thoughts.
The survivors have earned this settlement by courage and determination. The great wealth of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles (understated by Cardinal Mahony) makes this outcome a win-win - the survivors have won recognition and the means to pursue their healing, and the dollar amount is entirely feasible for the Archdiocese. A much more bitter pill for Mahony to swallow - and the crown of the survivors' victory in LA - will be the release of documents that Mahony has promised. It is crucial that he honor his commitment.
1. The final total of $660 million is lower than many expected. Predicted totals had ranged as high as $1.6 billion.
2. The smaller total may have resulted from survivors' determination to force release of priest files. The settlement requires the Archdiocese to release confidential personnel files of accused priests.
3. Of the $660M, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles will pay only $250M. The balance will be paid by insurance companies (reportedly dozens of them) and more than 30 religious orders.
4. The Archdiocese can afford this. With 1600 properties worth an estimated $4 billion, it is one of the wealthiest landowners in Southern California, according to a Los Angeles Times report published last December. While this sum includes parishes, it also includes $175 million in properties not classified for religious use -- commercial parking lots, single family homes, retail buildings, and oil wells.
5. It's a good deal for the Cardinal. For a mere $250 million -- just a third more than the $190 million he spent to build Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral -- the Cardinal has gained the cancellation of 15 civil trials that already had been scheduled and the end to possibly hundreds of additional lawsuits by the remaining plaintiffs. If cases had gone to trial, legal experts believe that juries would have awarded victims not just compensatory damages, but punitive damages -- something that bishops have used every trick to avoid ever since the landmark Kos case.
6. The Cardinal avoided perjury. Had trials occurred, Mahony himself would have had to take the stand repeatedly, forced to either expose the hierarchy's complicity or perjure himself.
7. The settlement leads us again to consider bishops' cover-up of finances. The LA Archdiocese's public financial reports have been incomplete and misleading. Despite land holdings worth billions, it publicly claims only $494 million in total assets. Other dioceses behave the same way. Bankruptcy proceedings in San Diego and an ongoing criminal trial in Cleveland reveal that both dioceses stashed monies in hundreds of bank accounts, making an accurate count of total assets nearly impossible.
8. Will we see another bogus "release of confidential documents?" In 2005, though ordered by a judge to release priest personnel files, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles managed to release instead highly edited "summaries of information" that were sanitized to the point of falsehood.
The Portland OR archdiocese also showed disingenuous "compliance" with a similar document-release commitment in their plan to emerge from bankruptcy. Bishop Vlazny released just a few hundred pages, a strange hodgepodge of incomplete files (compared to the 40,000-page archive forced out of Boston and the 9,000-page archive released by the Manchester NH diocese).
Finally, with Roger Mahony having the temerity to claim as recently as yesterday he "didn't know" pedophile priests would re-offend, we recommend you read this powerful article about his deposition in the Oliver O'Grady case. It reminds us of the incalculable harm to children that Mahony enabled. He knew.
Regards,
Anne Barrett Doyle
Co-Director
BishopAccountability.org
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