Posted on October 06, 2014 in Sexual Abuse

Two men are suing a former long-term substitute gym teacher at John Wallace Middle School alleging that he repeatedly sexually assaulted and abused them at the school 24 years ago.

The lawsuit also names the school system as a defendant, charging that officials failed to act on warning signs that gym teacher James Brown was abusing students.

In 2002, Brown was convicted of molesting boys when he was a gym teacher at St. Mary’s School in Newington and sentenced to two years in prison.

Superintendent William C. Collins said Wednesday that the lawsuit was a surprise and has been turned over to the school system’s lawyers.

"Nothing will be swept under the rug," Collins said. "Everything will be made public. We’re going to cooperate fully."

The alleged assaults took place in the locker room showers during the 1989-90 school year when the men were 12 and 13, said their attorney, of Tremont Sheldon P.C. of Bridgeport. Attorney said she believes there are more victims.

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 Posted on January 23, 2014 in Sexual Abuse

Two and a half years after he was removed as pastor of a New Fairfield church for allegedly sexually harassing a female church employee, Monsignor Martin Ryan was appointed pastor of a Stratford Roman Catholic church. Ryan’s appointment Saturday at Our Lady of Grace Church prompted numerous calls from parishioners who said they were shocked to learn that their new spiritual leader was a priest who not only had been removed from a prior job, but had previously been accused of molesting a teenage girl in Trumbull in the 1970s. In that case, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport agreed to pay a settlement to the complainant, even though Ryan denied the allegations.

Diocese spokesman Brian Wallace said Ryan has been working as an administrator at the Stratford church for more than two years and replaces the church’s former pastor, who died. "After the problem in New Fairfield, he did undergo counseling and spiritual therapy and he has been embraced by the parish," Wallace said. "He has worked very well rebuilding the parish." That’s little comfort for John Marshall Lee, spokesman for Voice of the Faithful, an organization of local parishioners brought together in response to the sex scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church. "This is the type of thing that erodes trust in the church," he said."In addition to supporting the victims of sexual abuse by priests, the second goal of Voice of the Faithful is to support priests of integrity, and anything that diminishes the role of the priest is difficult for the whole community." This comes just days after the Archdiocese of Chicago, one of the largest and most influential in the U.S., agreed to make public more than 6,000 pages of documents showing that it concealed sexual abuse by priests for decades, including moving priests to new parishes where they molested again. "This is another example of the (Bridgeport) diocese turning a blind eye to past history, which is very disturbing," said Attorney, whose law firm, Tremont Sheldon P.C., represented more than two dozen people and who won multi-million-dollar settlements from the diocese for abuse claims, including the one against Ryan. "It’s sad, considering they supposedly have all these policies in place," Atorney said. Ryan was unavailable for comment Wednesday. Ryan, who had been pastor of St. Edward the Confessor Church in New Fairfield since 1992, was removed from the church in June 2011 by diocese officials after acknowledging he had sent "inappropriate" emails to a female parish employee. At the time ,Wallace said there was no allegation or evidence of any sexual conduct. In an interview in June 2011 with the Connecticut Post, the 49-year-old woman, whose name is being withheld, claimed she first complained to diocese officials in March that Ryan was acting inappropriately toward her. Diocese officials confirmed Wednesday they did get the complaint in March 2011. The woman, who had resigned from her job with the church, said Ryan touched her inappropriately on a number of occasions in the church office and sent her inappropriate emails. She said she twice asked him to keep their relationship at an appropriate business level. "I had just gone through a divorce, and I guess I was an easy target for him," she said. She said she became frustrated when the diocese did not immediately remove Ryan, but instead offered to have him apologize to her. "They fully intended to sweep the whole thing under the rug," she said. "If the diocese had come forward and said `we accept what you say and we are taking immediate action,’ I wouldn’t be speaking to you now." Wallace said Wednesday that during that period, Ryan had experienced the death of his mother, his sister and a close friend. "At the time, he needed to reconstitute his priesthood and his life." The diocese previously settled a claim by a woman who alleged in a lawsuit that she was molested by Ryan in the rectory of St. Theresa’s Church in Trumbull in the 1970s when the woman was 15 or 16. In her lawsuit, the woman said she was in the rectory when Ryan called her into his office. "He said he had to show me something in his office," she stated in court papers. According to court documents, when she entered his office, the woman claimed Ryan grabbed her and began French kissing her. She said he fondled her breasts through her clothes, court documents state. When she tried to pull away, the woman said Ryan responded: "Isn’t this something you always wanted?" "I said, `No,’ and I was fighting to get away and he said, "This is all your fault, so you better not tell anyone." The woman said she broke free and ran away, finally stopping to sit beneath some trees where she began sobbing uncontrollably. She said she told a girlfriend, who then told her the same thing had happened to her. She said diocese lawyer Michael Dolan later told her he had located her friend, who, along with her sister, claimed Ryan abused them. She said diocesan officials told her Ryan was having "issues with celibacy, " court documents state. The Bridgeport Diocese also was roiled in early 2013 when Kevin Wallin, a cross-dressing, sexually active priest was indicted and pleaded guilty to federal charges involving dealing crystal methamphetamine.

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 Posted on May 08, 2013 in Sexual Abuse

A Catholic priest faces five years in prison after he admitted in Superior Court on Thursday that he had child pornography on his computer and chatted about sex on the Internet with underage boys. The Rev. Michael Miller, 43, of Berlin, pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography, obscenity and three counts of risk of injury to a minor before Judge Hillary Strackbein. He is expected to be sentenced July 9 to a prison term of 20 years, suspended after five, followed by 20 years of probation. He used church computers for some of the crimes, his lawyer, William St. John, said outside the courtroom. But St. John said his client was never accused of touching boys. "He’s extremely remorseful," St. John said. "There are a lot of people who love this guy." He wouldn’t let the priest talk to the media. Miller will never function as a priest again, said Maria Zone, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Hartford. He was a pastor at St. Paul Roman Catholic Church in Berlin, and his victims were church members, students at the church’s school or both. He was suspended from public ministry as soon as police told the church about the allegations, Zone said. According to a warrant for Miller’s arrest, a woman contacted police on July 2, 2011, after learning about a Facebook conversation the priest was having with her 13-year-old son. The priest commented that some professional wrestlers had "nice butts," the mother said. She looked up past Facebook chats between the two and learned that the priest had made comments about the boy being in puberty and about how the priest is "addicted to porn" and pleasures himself, the warrant states. The priest also invited the boy to come over and watch a "dirty movie" so they could "have some fun," and also wrote in "extreme detail" about sex acts he would perform on the boy, the warrant says. Miller was arrested on July 11, 2011. Police also learned about a 16-year-old victim from a social worker. After interviewing that boy, police learned that the priest had emailed to the teen — from a church computer — videos of an unknown person masturbating, according to prosecutor Christian Watson and court documents. Investigators later identified more teens with whom Miller had inappropriate Facebook chats during an computer analysis conducted at the New Britain Police Department. There were seven all together. They learned that Miller called another teen — a 15-year-old, according to another warrant — "sexy," and also told the teen that he engaged in sex acts with members of the priest’s soccer team, Watson said. Miller told another juvenile that he was bisexual, the warrant states. That boy told police that the priest started out talking about online video games, school and sports, but gradually moved on to sexual topics. The computer examination also turned up five pornographic videos of children, including one with boys ages 6 to 10 performing sex acts on each other and another involving a younger girl and an adult. Miller was arrested again on June 14, 2012. In a joint statement, the archdiocese and Miller’s order, the Franciscan Friars Conventual, said Miller’s guilty pleas follow "many months of personal deliberation, reflection and prayer. During this time, Miller has received medical treatment and undergone therapy. "We hope that Miller’s plea will give some solace and closure to the minors he violated — and their families. We will continue to pray for them so that they will continue to heal from this regrettable experience." The Hartford Courant, Christine Dempsey

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 Posted on February 01, 2013 in Firm News

This article was a feature story in The New York Times Magazine last week. It speaks of victims of child pornography and possible restitution they may receive.  The story features 2 victims and their struggles into adulthood. The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixelation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her. Her mother, sitting next to her, burst into sobs.

The detective spoke gently, but he had brutal news: the pictures had been downloaded onto thousands of computers via file-sharing services around the world. They were among the most widely circulated child pornography on the Internet. Also online were video clips, similarly notorious, in which Nicole spoke words her father had scripted for her, sometimes at the behest of other men. For years, investigators in the United States, Canada and Europe had been trying to identify the girl in the images.

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 Posted on March 06, 2012 in Sexual Abuse

Parents don’t want to further traumatize young victims, but handling things "discreetly" merely displaces the problem to another school or community When Bud Spillane was a school superintendent in New Rochelle, N.Y., he had to deal with removing an elementary school teacher suspected of sex abuse. "It was pretty evident he had done something," Spillane recalls. The biggest obstacle to removing him from the classroom? "Parents came out of the woodwork…against me," he says. They loved the teacher, the afterschool time he put in, and the weekend trips he liked to take students on, so they fought to keep him in school.

Later in Spillane’s career, while he was leading the Fairfax County Public Schools outside of Washington, he had a teacher’s attorney demand a public hearing in a dismissal action involving multiple instances of alleged sexual misconduct with students. It was a shrewd move; instead of letting the school board handle the action in a private executive session, the lawyer wanted to force children to testify in court. Several parents understandably refused to put their kids through that spectacle. Welcome to the complicated and ugly world of sexual abuse in schools. School shootings like the one this week in Ohio happen very rarely, but they understandably generate a lot of media coverage. By contrast, sexual abuse in schools happens much more frequently, to the point where the allegations have to be particularly egregious in order to make headlines. Miramonte Elementary in Los Angeles caught the nation’s attention the other week when a teacher was charged with a series of grotesque acts involving more than 20 kids, including allegedly photographing blindfolded students and spoon-feeding semen to some of them in his classroom. (Remember that the next time someone tells you that there is no way bad teaching could persist in school year after year without being noticed.) That teacher and two others at the school have been accused of sexual misconduct, leaving parents to wonder just how pervasive this problem is and why school districts seem to have to take such unusual measures to deal with it. The Los Angeles school superintendent John Deasy responded to the Miramonte scandal by removing the entire staff, janitors and cafeteria workers included, to other positions in the district as investigators look into the school’s culture of silence. News of this dramatic move wasn’t helped by reports that the Los Angeles school board had agreed to pay the alleged blindfolder $40,000 to drop his appeals and leave the district. A $40,000 payment seems nuts, but it was actually the most expeditious and cost-effective way the board could fire the teacher, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Miramonte is an extreme case. More common are allegations of teachers sleeping with older students or groping younger ones. How common? There is no reliable central database, but according to a nationwide investigation by the Associated Press in 2007, 2,570 educators were found to have engaged in sexual misconduct between 2001 and 2005 and more than 80% of those cases involved children. That’s a lot, particularly when you consider that total undoubtedly was not inclusive of all incidents. At the same time, there are more than 3 million teachers, the overwhelming majority of whom work hard and are as revolted by these acts as the rest of us. Still, here’s the uncomfortable reality: people who want to molest children go where children are, and schools are an obvious place. After the last decade, anyone who is surprised that big institutions are vulnerable to sex-abuse scandals — think the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church — just hasn’t been paying attention. But what should alarm parents is not the likelihood that their child’s teacher is dangerous — that probability is almost negligible. Rather, it’s the lack of a systematic backstop against these problems. One California teacher is now on the run in Mexico after reportedly being investigated multiple times by different school districts and moving around between them. A story that made headlines in New York City recently involved a teaching aide who was accused of molesting kids after allegedly being removed from another school for the same kind of activity. The 2007 AP investigation showed just how porous state procedures intended to screen out abusers really are. I was on the Virginia Board of Education back then, and the AP story prompted reviews of licensing procedures because it was clear that a significant number of licensed teachers had problematic backgrounds that should have been flagged. Other states responded similarly. That’s good, but states still need to do more. To make sure abusers cannot get teaching positions, statewide data systems — and a national clearinghouse that states participate in — are dependent on vigorous reporting of abusers. Yet abuse cases are frequently not reported for a variety of reasons, including a well-intentioned but flawed effort to protect victims from the trauma of public disclosure. Unfortunately, handling these issues "quietly" merely displaces the problem to another community. Repeat offenders are hauntingly common. Not too long ago people suspected of or even involved in abuse could still get a letter of recommendation — if they agreed to leave without a fuss. Thankfully, growing awareness of the repeat behavior is making practices like that rarer. In the end parents should be vigilant but not paranoid. Communicate with your child, and if you suspect a problem, take action. If something doesn’t seem right, trust your instincts. If a school official dismisses your concerns without looking into them, the next step is to contact the police. But maintain perspective. The reports out of Miramonte are ghastly, and sexual abuse of students is not a marginal issue, but thankfully it’s far from the most prevalent problem facing American schools. Eric Rotherham, Time Ideas, March 1, 2012

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 Posted on February 27, 2012 in Firm News