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	Priest's Sex Trial Shows Church's Changed Stance toward Accusers By Pat Schneider Capital Times December 10, 2011 http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/grassroots/priest-s-sex-trial-shows-church-s-changed-stance-toward/article_e8f32efa-22b8-11e1-8c46-0019bb2963f4.html A woman who accused a priest of molesting her when she was a teenager had her day in court this past week when the Rev. J. Gibbs Clauder -- whose sexual involvement with adult women led to a landmark state Supreme Court ruling 15 years ago -- became the first priest from the Madison Diocese ever tried on a sex charge. A Dane County Circuit Court jury on Monday acquitted Clauder, 65, of a charge of second-degree sexual assault of a child after a weeklong trial and 10 hours of deliberation. Despite the jury's verdict of not guilty, advocates for priest sex victims are applauding the fact that a criminal charge was brought in the case involving the alleged touching in 2004 of the then 14-year-old girl. The prosecutor in the case, Assistant District Attorney Robert Kaiser, says while he doesn't know how the case was handled within the diocese, once law enforcement authorities were notified, church officials were very accommodating. "We couldn't have had any more cooperation than we did," he said. "They denied us nothing." Both statements are a marked change from past years when church officials were careful to say as little as possible, thwarting civil and criminal prosecution. That's not to say that victims' advocates don't think the church could have done more sooner in this case -- they do -- but the change is noticeable. And Clauder's troubles aren't over. Next for him is a trial before church officials on the allegations brought by the young woman, which was put on hold during the criminal proceedings. A guilty finding could mean defrocking for the priest, who has been on administrative leave from the diocese since 1999 for his involvement with adult women. That was how I first heard about Clauder. It was 1993 when Laura Nyberg, a young wife and youth minister at St. Bernard's Parish, filed a lawsuit against him and the Madison Diocese in Dane County Circuit Court. Nyberg claimed that Clauder had misused his position as a priest to sexually exploit her in a relationship that developed after he counseled her at a hospital where she was treated following a miscarriage. It was not a criminal charge, but a civil one under the same statute that bars therapists from having sexual relationships with their clients. The diocese, the lawsuit claimed, should have been aware of and prevented what he was doing. Nyberg brought her story to The Capital Times, and I wrote an article about what then seemed like lurid allegations involving the priest and a culture ready to look away from blatant violations of vows of celibacy. Nyberg told me that for more than a year the two had sexual encounters at the rectory of St. Bernard's Church on the east side. Court papers in her lawsuit quoted the man who was pastor then recounting how he once entered Clauder's room to find the priest, bleeding from a bite on the wrist, straddling another woman whom he had pinned to the floor. Church officials had been claiming they had no idea Clauder was having sexual relationships and so couldn't be held responsible for any harm they caused. I knew sexual activity by priests was something that happened, of course. I even was aware of news reports in the mid-1980s of widespread clergy sexual abuse in rural Louisiana. But in 1993, the depth and breadth of the priest sex abuse scandal that would rock the nation a decade later could hardly be imagined. Catholic dioceses were just starting to set up policies to respond to allegations of sexual misconduct. An auxiliary bishop with the Madison Diocese at the time declined to discuss its policy with me in connection with the Nyberg case, although an attorney for the diocese did say that any priest engaged in pedophilia would immediately be stripped of his priestly duties. Beyond that, nothing seemed to be in writing -- at least not in a form the diocese was willing to make public. Nyberg, who attended each day of Clauder's recent trial, recalled that she decided to sue the diocese after the late Bishop Cletus O'Donnell shrugged off the concerns she laid out in a letter to him. "He did nothing," she recalls. Nyberg's lawsuit and four others against the diocese filed between 1993 and 1995 offered chilling revelations of the diocese's response to complaints of sexual misconduct by priests, including deriding accusers and their families as "evil." But the portal into church practices -- and access to the courts -- was slammed shut in 1997 when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in the Nyberg case that the diocese could not be sued for negligent supervision of its priest employees because of the constitutional separation of church and state. That landmark ruling ended other pending lawsuits brought against the diocese by some 20 men who had accused local priests of molesting them when they were boys. The portion of Nyberg's lawsuit making claims against Clauder as an individual was settled out of court in 1999 for an undisclosed amount. In the years since the state Supreme Court ruling, lawsuits brought against Catholic Church officials from Boston to Los Angeles have revealed widespread cover-ups. But Wisconsin's unique legal barrier for victims of child molestation by priests has stood, blocking civil compensation to victims and information about how churches handle sex abuse charges. There's no question the Madison Diocese is more open today about such allegations. Diocese officials in 2003 abolished secrecy as a condition of settlement for victims of priest sexual abuse, identified four priests against whom documented accusations were made, and disclosed that $1.6 million in settlements had been paid to victims in the past several decades. The diocese's policies to protect parishioners are detailed under the heading "Safe Environment" on its website, where a printable form in English and Spanish to report sex abuse by clergy, employees or volunteers is posted. Efforts to give alleged victims greater access to justice continue. In 2007, state Supreme Court justices endorsed as legitimate the claim of fraud against church officials who misled parishioners about the supposed reliability of known sex-offender clergy. Several civil lawsuits making that claim are pending against the Milwaukee Archdiocese, but have been stalled since the church in that city, anticipating costly settlements, filed for bankruptcy early this year. A similar claim of fraud was brought in a lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court involving one of the priests identified as being under investigation by church officials in the Madison Diocese's 2003 revelations. That case against the Rev. Kenneth Klubertanz was dismissed that year because the deadline to bring a lawsuit had passed on the 30-year-old alleged incident. The window in which child sex assault victims can bring civil suits has been extended since, and a bill now in the state Legislature would remove the statute of limitations in such cases. The deadline to bring criminal prosecutions in child sex assault cases also has been liberalized in recent years, and removed entirely for the most serious assaults. The Madison Diocese's evolved practices were in evidence in Clauder's latest case as well. The diocese issued a news release in August 2009 reporting that after its Sexual Abuse Review Board found the allegation credible, Bishop Robert Morlino referred the case to the Vatican. Nyberg contacted the diocese after she read about the new allegations against Clauder and told me she was pleasantly surprised by the reception she received. Chancellor Kevin Phalen, the diocese's victims assistance coordinator, heard her out, Nyberg says, and two decades after she first approached the church, offered to pay for counseling. "I was happy to meet Kevin, happy that the diocese published news about Clauder's case, that they have a process to hear complaints and that they informed the victim of her right to report to civil authorities. Those things are very different from what I experienced," Nyberg says. Not everyone is satisfied with how the church handled the case. Advocates at Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), a national advocacy group, wonder whether the diocese's failure to report the case to law enforcement officials, and questioning by church officials in their investigation, might have weakened the criminal case. When the diocese announced in 2009 it was sending a case to Rome, without identifying where in its 11-county region the accuser lived, SNAP pressed the state Attorney General's Office to investigate whether church officials were complying with state laws requiring clergy to report cases of suspected child sex abuse to police. The Madison Diocese said through its spokesman Brent King that Clauder's accuser at that point did not want to report her charges to law enforcement authorities, and since she was by then an adult, the diocese did not do so on its own. The diocese encourages all allegations of sexual misconduct to be brought to the attention of law enforcement officials, King says. It was her regard for Clauder, who was close to and respected by her family, that made his accuser in the recent criminal case struggle with coming forward, prosecutors told jurors this past week. Clauder took advantage of that, telling his victim: "If you tell, you will go to hell," Kaiser said in closing arguments Monday. That priests command a level of deference was on display even at the trial. Clauder may have barred from wearing the Roman collar more than a decade, but he still is a priest, and court officers called him "Father." Despite discouragement from some people close to her, Clauder's accuser stuck by her allegations "to see that he could never do this to anyone else because he could call himself a priest," Kaiser said. The young woman's accounts of what had happened were inconsistent, defense attorney Stephen Eisenberg argued. "This case is filled with doubt," he told jurors. He described the accuser as "a very troubled young lady" with a long history of mental health problems whom he claimed was vulnerable to created memories planted in her mind by psychotherapy and introductory classes in psychology. The defense also claimed that the alleged victim's four-year delay in reporting the alleged incident made it less believable. Another girl who originally corroborated her story later recanted after distress in the witness' family over getting involved in the case. Eisenberg told me he doesn't think the notorious scandal of sexual abuse by priests and the cover-up by the Catholic Church makes priests the target of unfounded charges. But jurors come to the courtroom knowing something about it. "It was something I had to overcome," he said in an interview. "Sandusky too ... you're always going to have some national story about child abuse, unfortunately," he said, referring to recent child sex abuse charges against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, which have led to a massive scandal at that university. Clauder told the Wisconsin State Journal after the verdict that he felt "vindicated and stronger." He did not return my phone message asking to talk about the case. Nyberg says she is disappointed in the verdict in the Clauder case, but hopeful that the opportunity to adjudicate it brings some measure of peace. "I have survived the last 20 years knowing that I spoke honestly about my experiences with Father J. Gibbs Clauder and I did everything I could to prevent it from happening to someone else. I hope that the same quest for justice will also free the victim in this case." Contact: pschneider@madison.com
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