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	New Sex-abuse Suit Filled against Ex-priest By Jaweed Kaleem Miami Herald November 13, 2010 http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/13/1923366/new-sex-abuse-suit-filled-against.html A 39-year-old man claims Rev. Neil Doherty -- already awaiting trial for sex-abuse charges -- repeatedly drugged and raped him in the mid-1980s. A retired Roman Catholic priest, who is in jail in Broward County awaiting trial on sexual-abuse charges and who has been named in 24 sexual-abuse lawsuits, has been named in a new lawsuit. In a complaint filed Friday against the Archdiocese of Miami, a 39-year-old man identified only as ``John Doe No. 69'' says the Rev. Neil Doherty, 67, repeatedly drugged and raped him in the mid-1980s. The lawsuit says the accuser, who was 14 and 15 years old at the time, was a runaway and met Doherty at Keystone Trailer Park in Miami, where Doherty would don a priest's collar and ``cruise the area of the trailer park in his car.'' At the time, Doherty was assigned to St. Mary's Cathedral in Miami. ``The victim is still struggling,'' said his attorney, Jeffrey Herman, who said he will file two more lawsuits naming Doherty ``in coming weeks.'' The lawsuit says the archdiocese knew Doherty was abusing boys in the 1970s but ``continued to place Doherty in roles with access to minors.'' The archdiocese's knowledge of past accusations against Doherty surfaced in a 2003 memorandum by the Broward state attorney's office in which a sex-crimes prosecutor disclosed a $50,000 settlement in 1994 with a student who had been enrolled at Chaminade High School in Hollywood decades earlier. Herman has filed dozens of cases against the archdiocese, including most of the ones that name Doherty. At least half the cases involving the priest, who served in South Florida for three decades, have been settled. Doherty was assigned to St. Vincent's church in Margate in 2002 when the archdiocese put him on administrative leave. ``Rev. Neil Doherty retired in 2002 without faculties; he is not permitted to wear clerical garb, celebrate the sacrament, have an assignment nor is he listed on the archdioce-san website,'' archdiocese spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta said in a statement. On Friday, Herman said Doherty is listed as a retired Miami priest in the 2010 Official Catholic Directory, an independent publication that lists data for all dioceses in the U.S. The data is self-reported by each diocese and includes active and inactive priests. ``Since Archbishop Thomas Wenski's arrival in the Archdiocese of Miami, he has notified the Official Catholic Directory that priests not in good standing with the Church will not be listed,'' Agosta said in the statement. Agosta would not confirm if Wenski or the former archbishop, John Favalora, had requested for Doherty to be laicized, a process to defrock priests that goes through the Vatican. ``In general, the laicization process can take a few years. Any requests to the Vatican from a bishop for this process would be handled confidentially,'' Agosta said. Doherty, who lives in Lake Worth, was arrested Nov. 4 after violating terms of a pretrial release. Those terms were from a 2006 arrest on charges of sexually abusing a boy in the 1990s. The man, now 24, settled a civil case with the archdiocese in 2007. Doherty had been under house arrest with electric monitoring while awaiting trial, but his GPS monitor lost contact for 17 minutes last month, said Broward Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Veda Coleman-Wright. Doherty claimed he was attending a funeral at the time, she said. In a Broward court this week, a pre-trial release officer said Doherty had disconnected from his GPS device eight times since 2009. Because he had discon-nected from the monitoring system, a Broward judge jailed him until trial. No trial date has been set. Contact: jkaleem@MiamiHerald.com
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