By Kay Ebeling
City of Angels
October 22, 2009
http://cityofangels5.blogspot.com/
[The article contains graphic language)
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| Escorted by two sheriff's deputies, convicted pedophile and former priest Gilbert Gauthe walks out of the Lafayette parish jail in downtown Lafayette upon his release in February 2002. Photo by G. Andrew Boyd |
Almost forty years after Father Gilbert Gauthe stuck a gun into his mouth and forced him into a violent sex act, Ted Lausche is part of the $5.1 million settlement for twenty-one persons this week in Louisiana, because of abuse at the hands of priests and nuns in and around New Orleans Archdiocese and Lafayette.
The charges from 1971 push the years of reported sex crime activity by renowned pedophile Catholic priest Gilbert Gauthe forward by several years.
"I woke up and Gauthe was doing me in the ass," says Lausche. "I couldn't breathe, because he had the pillow over my head. Then he said he’d kill me if I told."
That night when Ted got back to his Catholic boarding school near New Orleans, he still did try to tell what happened with Gauthe, but before he got the word "gun" out of his mouth, the nun at Madonna Manor was beating the anally injured thirteen-year-old in the face with her fist.
"At the orphanage you live in a world where the only touch you feel is violence,” Lausche said.
Recently, in the weeks before the October 13th settlement, the Catholic Church and its attorneys tried to claim Lausche was not even a student at their orphanage. Defendants finally turned over Lausche's school records with hundreds of pages redacted.
The crime survivor had to fly to New Orleans.
“They called me in so they could apologize,” Lausche said. ”I had to tell my story to a roomful of Catholic representatives.
“At least they didn't try to say it was not an admission of guilt."
City of Angels asked Lausche how his case involves Gilbert Gauthe, whose antics fill the pages of the 1992 book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation by Jason Berry.
"Gauthe was a seminarian who came to the orphanage for the summer," Lausche, a union carpenter in Wisonsin said by phone Thursday morning. "Without doing any kind of background check, they let him go out and play with us kids.
"This guy Gauthe was a kid’s size, he was five foot one, he was really short. I was bigger than him. I was almost six feet tall by that time, in 1971. I would have been about 13.
"They sent him out to supervise us while we were playing soccer and a couple of kids were giving him a hard time. I stepped in so we wouldn't get in trouble and he latched onto me.
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Gauthe pulled a 45 pistol out and stuffed it in my mouth and told me anything he wanted to do he was going to do.
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"Then one day the nuns said, you're going to go home with him, and he took me and another kid to a big house in Napoleonville. He and his parents lived in the Lafayette dioceses.
"He had a ham radio in his car there which I thought was pretty cool. He drove a Thunderbird, the one from the early 1960s that was a sports car.
"When we left the orphanage it was six o'clock, so by the time we got to the house, it was already dark. Ironically the house was next to a police station. Napoleonville is a real small Louisiana agricultural town along the bayou. Just a strip of road about a quarter mile long, with the original homes.
"He pulled a 45 pistol out and stuffed it in my mouth and told me anything he wanted to do he was going to do.
"We got to the house in Napoleonville and he separated us, put the other boy who was with us and I in different rooms. Then while I was asleep he put the pillow over my head, pulled the shirt over head to hold my arms back. He was restraining me, and then he-
"I woke up and he was f---ing me in the ass, I couldn't breathe, because he had pulled on my shirt pinning my arms with the pillow over my head, then he told me he’d kill me if I told. “
"When I got back to the school, I did try to tell what happened, but it didn't do any good. Gauthe had ripped my asshole apart, I was bleeding, and the nun didn't do anything,
"I told her what happened and without warning, I had no indication, she just slugged me in the face.
"That was her thing,
"She loved beating up on kids, this five foot one 190 pound female.
"I told her Father Gaute had a gun and had threatened me and that's as far as I got."
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"She loved beating up on kids, this five foot one 190 pound female.
"Her name was Sister Martin Marie."
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City of Angels asked Lausche he had any more interaction with Gauthe after that incident?
"Not with him. I stayed away from him after that.
“Gauthe happened just before I ran away. At those orphanages you were living in a world where the only touch you feel is violence.”
Named as defendants in Lausche’s 2005 lawsuit that settled this week are Catholic Charities, the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese, the Archdiocese of New Orleans, School Sisters of Notre Dame, and Hope Haven-Madonna Manor.
After a five year legal battle, Lausche is part of the settlement announced this week, where $5.1 million is to be shared between 21 adult victims of pedophile from primarily Madonna Manor and Hope Haven orphanages in Louisiana.
"I had to go down there around a month ago. I don't travel well so they had to sedate me, my son had to fly out from California, to be with me," Ted told me from the phone where he lives in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
"The Salesians staff were there, people from the archdiocese, 15 or 20 people."
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"They tried to tell me I wasn’t even at the orphanage, they had blacked out and withheld over a hundred pages of my personal records."
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Lausche said the Archdiocse first tried to claim he was not even a student at the school.
"They tried to tell me I wasn’t even at the orphanage, they had blacked out and withheld over a hundred pages of my personal records."
Now that he's part of the settlement, the money is not the issue for Lausche:
"I want a public apology
"I want a chance to address the community that raised us thanking them for their charity, but also to remind them to hold those who manage your resources accountable so this can never happen again.
"And I want to put up a cell phone number any place where these predator priests are working today unsupervised, so people can call me, if they need to report sex crimes."
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