LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times
January 30, 2020
By Colleen Shalby
The Los Angeles Archdiocese has settled a sex abuse case for $1.9-million.
The kids in the parish knew him only as Father Larry.
That’s how he was known to one boy, referred to in court documents as John BR Doe, while he was an altar boy at San Gabriel Mission Church in 1982-84, years during which the priest sexually abused him, he said, from ages 9 to 11.
As a teen, Doe told church officials what he’d suffered. Years later, he would learn that Father Larry — Lawrence Lovell — had been convicted of child molestation in 2003 and sentenced to 14 years in prison. And he would find a redacted version of his own account on the internet, detailing the abuse he said Lovell enacted when he was a child.
He’d also learn he wasn’t Lovell’s only victim.
“It’s been 35 years since I’ve been dealing with this,” he said.
On Tuesday, attorneys representing Doe, now 47, announced a $1.9-million settlement with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Lovell and the Claretian Missionaries, where Lovell served as a priest. The complaint, filed in September 2018, is the first case settled with a Catholic diocese in the state since the passage of AB 218, a law that expands the time frame for filing child sexual abuse allegations.
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