Md. Court Closes Another Door on Childhood Sex Abuse Cases
Statute of Limitations Bars Suit Against Catholic Church
Man Claimed Not to Realize Harm of Abuse for 20 Years

By Catherine M. Brennan
[Baltimore MD] Daily Record
December 11, 1996

A Prince George's County man who claims that he didn't realize that childhood sexual abuse damaged him until his marriage fell apart cannot now sue the alleged abusers, the Court of Special Appeals ruled.

The man -- identified only as John Doe -- said he knew that two priests sexually molested him from 1972 until 1978 but didn't realize he suffered injury from the assaults until 1994, the year his marriage ended.

Doe's attorney, Keith A. Rosenberg of Washington, D.C., argued that his client's lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Washington and two priests should avoid the three-year statute of limitations usually applied to such lawsuits.

He contended that his client's delayed awareness of the harm should make the molestation analogous to an undetected, latent disease.

The statute of limitations doesn't begin to run in the case of a latent disease until a plaintiff knows or reasonably should have known of the harm caused by the disease.

"While we sympathize with the plight of people who may have been sexually abused as children, and whose perceptions may have been skewed by such a reprehensible breach of trust the analogy is simply not useful," the court ruled.

Yesterday's decision affirmed the dismissal of Doe's complaint by Prince George's County Judge Darlene G. Perry.

In that complaint, Doe alleged that as an altar boy at the Church of St. Matthias in Lanham, Maryland, the Reverend Thomas Sebastian Schaefer and the Reverend Alphonsus Michael Smith sexually abused him, giving him money and gifts to gain his trust.

And Doe said that while he always knew and remembered what the priests had done to him, he didn't realize the offensiveness of the contacts or that he had been injured until age 33, his age at the time his marriage ended.

That's because, he claimed, his age and relationship to the priests led him to believe that the priests' conduct was " 'right and natural.' "

"If you are consistently taken advantage of because of your youth and the relationship between yourself and this priest and you're told that this is right you begin to think that it's right and natural," Rosenberg argued.

But the court rejected that reasoning, finding that Doe suffered legal harm at the time of the abuse, "even if his problems worsened over time."

Yesterday's action isn't the first time the court has disposed of a lawsuit filed many years after acts of abuse allegedly occurred.

In July, the Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit filed by two women who claimed a priest sexually abused them more than 20 years ago. The women said they hadn't remembered it until adulthood because they repressed the memories of the abuse.

That decision, Doe v. Maskell, marked the first time that any court rejected the scientific validity of repressed memory syndrome.

Court of Appeals Judge Robert L. Karwacki held that the women's lawsuits were barred by the three-year statute of limitations because repressed memory is not universally accepted in the scientific community as a valid phenomenon that would justify extending the time limit.

"We are unconvinced that repression exists as a phenomenon separate and apart from the normal process of forgetting," Karwacki wrote. "Because we find these two processes to be indistinguishable scientifically, it follows that they should be treated the same legally."

That means that the statute of limitations begins to run when the plaintiff knows -- or reasonably should have known -- that an actionable harm was done to them, Karwacki wrote.

That legal doctrine is called the discovery rule and in abuse cases, the date of discovery would be when the abuse ceased.

In yesterday's decision, the Court of Special Appeals declined to create an exception to the discovery rule for a victim who was aware of the abuse but didn't appreciate at the time that it was wrong.

It hinged that ruling on the Maskell court's refusal "to allow an exception that would delay the accrual date of a cause of action in situations in which the victim has no recollection whatsoever."

More than 15 states have legislative exceptions to the statute of limitations to account for repressed memories of sexual abuse.

House Bill 326, which would have created such an exception in Maryland, died in the House Judiciary Committee in 1994.