UTAH
Toledo Blade
By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER
PARK CITY, Utah — “I can’t let anyone know I am going through this right now.” Filmmakers Kirby Dick and Eddie Schmidt heard that a lot. When they first came to Toledo in 2002, they had decided to make a documentary about the sexual abuse allegations in Catholic dioceses around the country — initially in Boston and eventually, Toledo.
With the backing from HBO and a heralded track record as documentarians, they first met with a number of survivors in northwest Ohio. The response was receptive, they say, but hesitant.
Then abuse victim Tony Comes came forward, and they had the sort of story (first reported in The Blade) that any decent screenwriter would consider shamelessly contrived — if it weren’t true. Comes, a Toledo firefighter, filed a lawsuit against the Toledo Catholic Diocese alleging that former priest Dennis Gray sexually abused him repeatedly in the early ’80s.
What helped prompt the suit was, incredibly, the fact that Comes and his wife Wendy had moved into a neighborhood where Gray happened to live.