When Shepherds Hunt The Sheep To Silence All The Bleating

SNAP may have been too good at going after the wolves in sheep's clothing

One story I have been following with a great deal of interest (and anger)  is the one involving SNAP and their battle with the Archdiocese of St. Lois and the Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph.  In both cases attorneys  have asked that SNAP directors, specifically David Clohessy and Barbara Dorris,  be deposed and internal SNAP correspondence be turned over to the court. The stated justification for this action centers on SNAP as a source of discovery for the defendants in civil trials in both dioceses.  There are an additional five cases where defense attorneys for priests in the Kansas City trial have filed a 'cross-notice' allowing these lawyers to also access SNAP files and depose David Clohessy.  The defense attorneys are diligently trying to make a case that SNAP has no rights to any claim for the legal confidentiality of their correspondence or contacts with abuse victims, that it is not in fact a rape crisis center, and so is not covered by Missouri's rape crisis center confidentiality protections.  It's important to remember that SNAP is not a party in any of these law suits.  The following excerpt is from an article by Joshua McElwee at the National Catholic Reporter.

.....Rebecca Randles, the attorney representing the plaintiff in the abuse case, said in a phone interview Thursday that she thought the motion's arguments that SNAP could not qualify as a rape crisis center were not "very weighty."

Referring to one of the arguments the motion makes against SNAP's qualifications to fit into that definition because Clohessy works out of his home, Randles said the determination for protections under Missouri law come from the substance of what an organization does, not where it is located.

"You have to look at the substance," Randles said. "The whole question really is: Do people go there because they're in crisis from sexual assault? And the answer is absolutely, yes they do."
"The vast bulk of what they do is support victims of rape and assault, so they have to be a rape crisis center," she said. (I suspect it's not the support issue that is really at stake here.  It is the advocacy issue, and specifically the advocacy done by David Clohessy.)

Following news of the subpoena requesting Clohessy's deposition in December, 10 victims' advocacy groups filed an amicus brief on behalf of SNAP to Missouri's Supreme Court, writing that Clohessy's testimony would amount to a "violation of the anonymity and confidentiality" of SNAP members and volunteers and is "plainly unconstitutional."

Included in that group of organizations were the Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse, the KidSafe Foundation and The National Child Protection Training Center.

Beyond claiming that SNAP should not be considered a rape crisis center under Missouri law, the motion also alleges that were the group to be considered such a center, its conversations with some survivors would not be covered by confidentiality privileges.
Noting that lawsuits filed on behalf of abuse victims regularly include language about how victims have suffered some sort of mental injury from their abuse, the motion alleges that SNAP is "not entitled to the protection of a privilege due to the alleged victims placing their emotional state and mental conditions at issue." (This is an interesting argument and a highly dangerous one for any organization that deals specifically with trauma and abuse.  People don't contact SNAP to discuss baseball scores.)

Specifically, the motion alleges that because several victims in the Kansas City cases claim their memories returned to them years after the abuse, the fact that Clohessy would not discuss the matter indicates they are "trying to shield the very information that would lead a jury to understand that person's medical history." (Of course the real story here is that these attorneys want to put the victim on trial, not their client.)

"The matter before this Court involves repressed memory, physical, emotional, and mental injuries," reads the motion. "The Plantiffs have placed their physical, emotional, and mental conditions at issue, and, therefore, the information possessed by SNAP on these issues is clearly relevant, and any privileges, if any, have been waived."....(This same criteria could be taken with AA or any other 12 step group with which any victim was associated--or for that matter, their favorite bar tender or hair dresser.)


******************************************


One comment following this article, of which there are a lot, came from Jim Jenkins.  Jenkins was on the San Francisco diocesan review board when Cardinal Levada was head of the Archdiocese, and is intimately familiar with how our leadership does it's business.  Jim is responding to this comment from Bill Lyndsey

I concur completely.

Unfortunately, from my time as SF review board chair I know that the Catholic Church's strategy in court against survivors was always "search and destroy." What is being done to SNAP is consistent with the hierarchs' legal strategy over the last two decades: Defend the church's assets, and the bishops personally, at all costs no matter who gets destroyed in the process.

The hierarchy has adopted a fully offensive legal modality for confronting in court survivors and their advocates, public apologies by popes, cardinals and bishops to survivors not withstanding. The apologies are only for the media in order to blunt and contain the public revulsion at the hierarchs' complicity and corruption.
The hierarchs' chief American legal strategist, attorney Jeffery Lena, once very threateningly asked me, "Do you just want to surrender to them?" when I challenged his plans for the "Catholic Church" to attack the credibility and personal history of survivors of rape and sodomy by priests in court in order to intimidate them into not going forward with their suits to seek justice and redress for their assaults.

Is this the same church to which Jesus entrusted the commandment, "Love one another"??? (Nope.)

The hierarchs can get away with these sleazy legal tactics because they have unfettered and unaccountable access to literally $billions in their investment portfolios. What is spent on the hierarchs' legal defense will just be restored by the hierarchs diverting more money from the charitable donations of unquestioning and unaware pew Catholics. All the hierarchs have to do is sell off more parishes, close more schools, in order to maintain the phalanx of lawyers and media consultants necessary for them to hold onto political power. Or as in the case in Kansas City, stay out of jail!
This kind of support for the congenital narcissistic hierarchs by Catholics must end. It is long past time that we Catholics separate the MINISTRY from the MONEY.

Sleazy legal tactics is exactly right, but then this campaign to destroy SNAP hardly began with these legal motions.  SNAP has been the favorite punching bag of Bully Bill Donohue for seemingly ever. As I slogged through the comments after the article it was amazing how many of those supporting the bishops took their information directly from articles Donohue had written for the Catholic League.  As good an advocate as David Clohessy is, he missed his chance at the really big bucks.  He could have been the director of the Catholic League, quadrupled his salary, worked for an organization which would always have big bucks for lawyers, and he wouldn't have had to work out his home.  He could have worked in a DC office right there with the USCCB. But then Jesus didn't even have a home, or a salary, much less an office in the Jewish High Temple.

If SNAP has made an error, it's that it has become too good at the advocacy end of what it does.  Do they sometimes get over the top?  Well, if you read any of Donohue's attacks, SNAP gets over the top all the time, but if you compare SNAP to Randal Terry's pro life advocacy, SNAP isn't even close to being over the top. It's all in the eyes of the beholder.

As to the legal arguments, these cases represent a serious threat to journalism, advocacy work, and rape and abuse crisis centers, especially those that are staffed by volunteers.  Professional therapists and counseling centers have their own protections, but volunteer agencies are more legally nebulous.  The truth is many of these SNAP type organizations do more good and give more help than any more formal therapy precisely because the volunteers understand the issues from a personal rather than educational point of view.  It isn't all theory for these volunteers.  It's as real as real can get, and presumed confidentiality is a critical component of their effectiveness. That's why this story really angers me, because in this pissing match between the Roman Catholic Bishops and their self defined 'arch enemy' SNAP, a really really awful legal precedent could get set that would harm a lot more organizations than just SNAP.

One last thought, there were a lot of comments suggesting SNAP is experiencing a form of 'just karma'.  The idea being that SNAP's demands for transparency and accountability from Catholic bishops and dioceses is just coming back to bite them in the ass.  The problem with this simple logic is that Catholic bishops and dioceses were protecting the criminal predators, and SNAP is protecting the victims of those predators and their bishop enablers.  This isn't about karma at all.  This is about the shepherds deciding to hunt down some of their bleating sheep in order to silence them once and for all.