PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Crux
By Michael O’Loughlin
National reporter January 20, 2016
Did a Philadelphia priest die in prison, falsely accused of sexual abuse by an unreliable witness who was desperate to please overzealous prosecutors?
That’s the suggestion of a Newsweek cover story whose author obtained a psychiatric evaluation of Daniel Gallagher, who in 2011 said two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher had raped him in the late 1990s.
His testimony led to a child-endangerment conviction for the Rev. William Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s former secretary of clergy and the first Church official to go to jail for child endangerment. It also led to the imprisonment of the teacher and the two priests.
One of those priests, the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, died in prison in 2014 after being denied a heart operation.
Gallagher was the subject of a 2011 Rolling Stone story written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the reporter who wrote the now discredited story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia.
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