LONDON (CANADA)
Windsor Star [Toronto, Ontario]
October 29, 2024
By Trevor Wilhelm
After 40 years, the lies had to stop.
If there was any question about whether movies can change lives, the documentary Prey by Windsor native Matt Gallagher is the answer.
Prey, chronicling a fight for justice by survivors of a pedophile priest, returned to the Windsor International Film Festival on Monday after causing a sensation there in 2019.
Monday’s screening included a Q-and-A with Gallagher and Chris MacLean, who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of his Windsor priest and barely spoke of it until he watched Prey 40 years later. Article content
On Oct. 8, MacLean settled a lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Diocese of London for the abuse perpetrated by Rev. Joe Nelligan in Windsor.
“The documentary really touched me,” MacLean told the Star. “It was time to stop lying. Not telling the truth is no different than lying.
“For years, I didn’t tell people I knew that were strongly Catholic because I didn’t want them to get hurt. But I got to a point where I couldn’t keep living the lie.”
Prey focuses on Rod MacLeod, a survivor of sex abuse by Rev. William Hodgson Marshall, and his lawyer Rob Talach as they take on the Catholic church.
Other survivors of Marshall’s abuse, including Windsor resident Patrick McMahon, also appear in the film.
Prey played to a sold-out audience at WIFF 2019 and won the LiUNA! People’s Choice Award. It also appeared at Toronto’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, where it won several awards, and has since played around the world.
Gallagher said Patrick McMahon still shows Prey annually to young seminarians in London.
“Prey is definitely the most powerful documentary that I’ve ever worked on,” said Gallagher. “But when we did it in 2019, I had no idea we would still be talking about it and screening it.Article content
“I think Prey asked a lot of questions and got people talking about the church, and some people even came forward about their own stories.”
MacLean, who grew up in Windsor, is among them. He was in the audience at the Toronto screening. From 1977 to 1980, MacLean attended Brennan High School in Riverside, where he met Rev. Joe Nelligan.
“We were very tight,” said MacLean. “I spent a lot of time with him.”
One night in 1979, MacLean and a few other guys were playing cards and drinking with Nelligan at the Most Precious Blood parish.
“I was the last to leave,” said MacLean, who was 16 at the time.
He said “Father Joe” took his keys, telling him he had too much to drink. Nelligan locked the door and dimmed the lights.
“He came up from behind me, put his hands in my pockets and he was fondling around,” said MacLean. “He grabbed my genitals.”
MacLean asked Nelligan what was happening.
“He goes, ‘It’s lonely being a priest,’” said MacLean.
After the abuse continued that night, he said it was a couple of years before Nelligan preyed on him again. He was sent to pick up the priest for a house party. Article content
MacLean said Nelligan, who was drunk, started fondling and kissing him in the car.
“He kept saying to me, ‘I’m sorry for what happened, you know I love you.’”
He said that was the last time he saw the priest until his funeral. Nelligan died by suicide in 1990.
MacLean said he tried a few times to tell friends about the abuse, but quickly learned to keep quiet.
“People don’t want you to destroy their institutions,” he said. “So I kept it pretty much inside.”
That changed in 2019 when he watched Prey. Shaken and inspired, he approached Gallagher, Talach, and MacLeod that night. A lawsuit eventually followed.
“It was an eye-opener,” MacLean said of the film. “It loosened the lid on the jar. It took me another few years to take the lid off.
“Then it took me two years to get the guts to take them to court.”