MAINE
Portland Press Herald
BY SCOTT DOLAN STAFF WRITER
sdolan@pressherald.com | @scottddolan | 207-791-6304
Lawyers will make closing arguments on Thursday in the federal defamation trial of Paul Kendrick of Freeport who is accused of widely broadcasting a false claim that the American founder of an orphanage in Haiti sexually abused the boys in his care for years.
Kendrick, 65, has passionately defended his claim that Michael Geilenfeld is a “serial child molester” and testified at the trial in U.S. District Court in Portland that what he wrote in an ongoing mass blast email campaign starting in January of 2011 is true.
Geilenfeld, 63, has repeatedly denied abusing children in his care at St. Joseph’s Home for Boys in Port-au-Prince in Haiti and filed suit against Kendrick in 2013, claiming Kendrick’s email campaign had so damaged his reputation that an American fundraising group for the orphanage had lost about $2 million in donations.
Geilenfeld has also accused Kendrick of using his campaign to have Geilenfeld arrested by Haitian authorities on child sex abuse charges last September. Geilenfeld remained locked up in prison in Port-au-Prince for 237 days before a Haitian judge dismissed the case. Geilenfeld was arrested in Haiti just one month before his case against Kendrick in Portland had been scheduled for trial. The trial here was delayed until his release in April, after which he was able to return to the United States, though Haitian officials had seized his passport. Geilenfeld’s accusers in Haiti have since filed an appeal reviving the case against him there, regardless of the outcome of the trial against Kendrick here.
Geilenfeld told the jurors as he testified last week that he is gay and that Haiti is a “very homophobic” country. His sexual orientation has led to his being accused of child sex abuse several times in the past, though those allegations were quickly dispelled, he testified.
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