Late Pedophile Priest Maurice Grammond Spurs Yet Another Lawsuit, This Time for $8.1 Million

By Aimee Green
The Oregonian
June 24, 2014

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/06/pedophile_priest_maurice_gramm.html

A man in his mid-50s who says he was abused as a boy by Oregon’s most prolific pedophile priest -- Maurice Grammond -- filed an $8.1 million lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Portland in federal court Tuesday.

The man, who now lives in California, says that when he was age 6 to 9 he was raped at his home and at the rectory at Seaside's Our Lady of Victory by Grammond. He estimates he was sexually assaulted 10 to 20 times from 1969 to 1972.

Grammond grew close to the boy and his three brothers after their mother died, said Portland attorney Kristian Roggendorf, who filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Portland.

Roggendorf said this latest victim to come forward brings the number of Grammond’s victims to about three dozen.

Roggendorf’s client is identified in the suit under the pseudonym Martin Voe. Roggendorf said that as early as the mid-1950s, the archdiocese had received a credible report about Grammond molesting a child.

Father Maurice Grammond (undated photo)

“Unfortunately, Fr. Grammond saw this family of four boys that had lost their mother and pounced; he was a diabolical and relentless predator,” Roggendorf said in a news release about the suit. “The Archdiocese owed it to Catholic families to warn them about the danger Fr. Grammond posed to vulnerable children.”

Grammond stopped abusing Voe when the boy was 9 because he drank communion wine until he was drunk and became belligerent, the suit states. When Voe was a teenager, he confronted the head of religious education at Our Lady of Victory while drunk, saying that Grammond “messes around” with boys, according to the suit. He was arrested, and the archdiocese didn’t investigate Voe’s statement of the claims of other victims.

From 1950 to 1985, Grammond was allowed to work in parishes in Seaside, Oakridge, Mill City, Sublimity and the Portland area, including Our Lady of Sorrows in Southeast Portland and St. Mary’s Home for Boys in Beaverton.

By 2007, he’d cost the archdiocese $33.4 million in settlements with 54 victims -- far more than the next costliest priest, Thomas Laughlin, who spurred $20.7 million in settlements with 34 victims.

Grammond died in 2002.

Contact: agreen@oregonian.com