Abuse Victims Missed Timeline for Claims, Archdiocese Argues
By Annysa Johnso
The Archdiocese of Milwaukee will argue Thursday in court that victims of clergy sexual abuse had enough information on the church's handling of cases to have filed fraud claims years earlier, according to newly unsealed documents in the archdiocese's bankruptcy. The archdiocese, which has consistently denied wrongdoing in its handling of abuse cases, will argue the statute of limitations expired before those victims stepped forward. The argument is among several raised by lawyers for the archdiocese in motions seeking to bar claims by three victim-survivors who allege they were abused by parish priests and a choir director in the 1970s and '80s. The attorney for the creditors committee has characterized the church's strategy as a test case that, if successful, could be used to throw out the vast majority of the 550-plus claims filed in the bankruptcy. Victim advocates, including the archdiocese's own vice chancellor, on Tuesday called on Archbishop Jerome Listecki to withdraw the motions, saying the strategy would further victimize survivors and make impossible any resolution of and healing from the sex abuse crisis in the church in southeastern Wisconsin. If the wholesale elimination of claims has been the intent all along, "then shame on all involved for having raised the hopes of many people, survivors and non-survivors alike . . . and then shattering those hopes," Father James Connell, a Sheboygan priest and the archdiocese's vice chancellor, said as part of a news conference staged outside the federal courthouse by the advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Susan V. Kelley will take up the three disputed claims at a hearing Thursday when lawyers will debate, among other things, when the clock on Wisconsin's six-year statute of limitations for fraud started ticking. State law says it begins when "the facts constituting the fraud can be discovered upon diligent inquiry." According to their motions, lawyers for the church say that could have been as early as the year of the last incident of abuse - when the victims were 7 and 16 years old - and anytime over the next two decades as the sex abuse crisis unfolded in the media and the archdiocese posted the names of diocesan offenders on its website in 2004. It does not include the names of religious order clergy or nuns with abuse histories, arguing that they are not diocesan employees. "We're not saying there's evidence of fraud, but there was enough information out there about clergy sex abuse in 2002-'03-'04, that a reasonable person could have asked the question," said Jerry Topczewski, archdiocese spokesman and chief of staff to Listecki. Jeffrey Anderson, the attorney who represents the three survivors, argued in response to the motions that the archdiocese went to great lengths to conceal the fraud. He said the victims did not know they were defrauded until 2006 and 2009 - in one case only after records detailing the Milwaukee church's shuffling of offender priests were released as part of a settlement in California. "The bottom line is the statute doesn't run until they're on notice of fraud," he said. The three claims at issue involve victims of two now-defrocked priests, Franklyn Becker and David Hanser, both of whom appear on the archdiocese's list of offenders; and Robert Schaefer, a former choir director at St. Catherine Church in Milwaukee in the 1970s and '80s. In addition to the statute of limitation argument, church attorneys maintain that the archdiocese is not responsible for Schaefer because parishes are separate corporations with their own employees, and that Hanser's case should be thrown out because his victim already settled with the church for $100,000. Anderson argued that the settlement should be voided because the archdiocese misrepresented facts to the victim.
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