BishopAccountability.org
	Caritas Head Ran out of Options By Walter V. Robinson Boston Globe May 26, 2006 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/ 2006/05/26/caritas_head_ran_out_of_options/ After four hours parked away in a secretary's office with just water, soda, and two glum advisers, Dr. Robert M. Haddad finally got the inevitable ultimatum. At 12:30 a.m. yesterday, Thomas H. Hannigan, the cardinal's principal legal adviser, pulled Haddad's lawyer out of the room and laid out Haddad's limited options: It was jump or be pushed. Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley and the Caritas Christi Health Care System board had voted to fire the Caritas president for serial sexual harassment, but left him the choice of resigning with 10 months' severance pay, about $830,000, and agreeing not to sue the archdiocese. Haddad huddled with his lawyer, Donald W. Schroeder, and his spokeswoman, Nancy Sterling, and then called his wife, Margaret, to discuss his choices. Now he was ready to resign, but he wanted the official announcement not to mention that he would have been fired otherwise. The church lawyers said no. With no leverage left, Haddad agreed to step down. At 1:30 a.m., he left the chancery, his reputation and career in tatters. The end game could not have been a surprise. During Haddad's longest evening, O'Malley and the board of governors listened intently to three hours of testimony from those who had gathered, reviewing and double-checking the evidence against Haddad. When Haddad finally got his opportunity to speak, he was granted barely 15 minutes of the board's time and was not asked a single question, according to church officials, Sterling, and other participants in the session. The drama played out, they said, in O'Malley's conference room, where issues of faith sometimes dominate discussion. But Wednesday night, it more closely resembled a grand jury room, where 13 board members and one cardinal in his workaday Franciscan friar's outfit and sandals focused intently on evidence that received scant attention just six nights earlier, when the board acquiesced to O'Malley's recommendation that a "severe reprimand" was punishment enough. After all the witnesses were heard, O'Malley, who had had little to say during the protracted testimony, invited each board member to speak. All did. Then O'Malley urged the board to fire Haddad. The board agreed. At last week's meeting, the board heard just a 15-minute summary of the evidence, with key details omitted, from Stephen B. Perlman, another of the cardinal's lawyers. They heard nothing from the two people who had exhaustively investigated the accusations that Haddad repeatedly hugged and kissed, often on the mouth and in private, four women who worked for him in the vast Caritas Christi system he had run for nearly two years. Board members were offered an opportunity to read a 30-page report on the investigation, but none did. On Wednesday night, in a sweltering conference room crowded with nearly 30 people -- including Wilson D. Rogers, the church's longtime lawyer, who flew back from his Bermuda vacation home -- the board was eager to hear directly from those who investigated the allegations. Jean A. Musiker, the outside lawyer who spent a week in late April interviewing the victims, then Haddad, and reviewing the evidence, spent nearly 90 minutes at one end of the oval conference table. Musiker gave a detailed presentation of her findings, and then answered numerous questions from the board. At 9 p.m., Musiker left. In came Helen G. Drinan, the Caritas senior vice president who oversaw the initial internal investigation that prompted the hiring of Musiker. Drinan had pleaded with O'Malley in a May 8 letter to fire Haddad and accused the cardinal of giving Haddad preferential treatment when he opted for the reprimand. Drinan and Musiker were excluded from the board's meeting last week. On Wednesday night, the board listened intently to the evidence they had gathered. Drinan took the board through a detailed chronology of her inquiry. "The questions from the board members were intense. They were thorough. They wanted much detail," Drinan said yesterday. The board, she said, asked about verbal warnings Haddad received from two hospital officials about similar inappropriate behavior when he was president of Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center before 2004, information withheld from the board a week ago but reported earlier this week by the Globe. Drinan told the board that two additional Caritas employees had come forward this week to say that they too had unofficially cautioned Haddad about his behavior when he was at St. Elizabeth's. With Perlman sitting in the room, Drinan took issue with the lawyer's comment to the Globe last Saturday that likened Haddad's behavior to "effusive warmth." Not so, Drinan explained, telling the board how the recipients were humiliated by his treatment, fearful of coming to work, and often seeking ways to avoid Haddad. "It was no one's idea of warmth and friendliness," Drinan said she told the board. She concluded at 10:15 p.m. The cardinal told her, "God bless you," and thanked her for her time. After the board took a break, it heard, briefly, from Scott C. Moriearty, an employment law attorney who had reviewed and validated Musiker's work. Finally came Haddad. The board and O'Malley listened in stony silence as he asserted that he had not been allowed to tell his side of the story, to respond to specific allegations, or to view any report about the accusations against him. He talked about his accomplishments at the helm of the church's six-hospital system and told the board about the horrible impact of the accusations on him, his wife, and their five children. Then he stood, shook O'Malley's hand, and returned to the secretary's office to wait with his advisers. The board then turned to deciding Haddad's fate, according to two members. Everyone was invited to speak his or her mind, and everyone did. Then came two votes, first to terminate, then on a motion by the board's compensation committee to offer Haddad about 10 months' severance pay, with the stipulation that anything he earns elsewhere during that period will reduce the severance. When Haddad left at 1:30 a.m., "he was unquestionably relieved," said Sterling. Michael Paulson of the Globe staff contributed to this story. Walter Robinson can be reached at wrobinson@globe.com.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.