Alleged abuse victims conflicted over deal

LOS ANGELES - Alleged victims of clergy abuse said Monday that they were conflicted over their historic $660 million settlement with the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, tempering their yearning for their day in court with compassion for deeply scarred victims who need help now.

The settlement is the largest ever in litigation over sexual abuse by clergy. The 508 alleged victims in the litigation will, on average, receive about $1.3 million apiece before court costs, far more than plaintiffs in Boston received five years ago.

For some, however, the money is immaterial.

“I’m not so sure that we can necessarily call it justice,” said one of the plaintiffs, Carlos Perez-Carrillo, who accused the Rev. John Anthony Salazar of repeatedly molesting him at St. Bernard High School in Playa del Rey during the 1980s.

“Mostly what I’ve gone through is being shunned by Catholics and the Catholic Church,” Perez-Carrillo said in an interview with MSNBC. “I’ve always felt that I’ve been viewed as a pariah because I actually came forward and actually denounced what was happening.”

Apology falls short for many
Perez-Carrillo and other victims said they regretted that archdiocese leaders, especially Cardinal Roger Mahony, would not appear in court to acknowledge under oath what had happened to them and others over the past 70 years.

NBC News video Apology July 16: The Los Angeles Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church apologizes to victims. NBC's Jennifer London reports. Today show

Many victims accuse Mahony of having swept the abuse problem under the rug by transferring accused priests from parish to parish.

Mahony offered an apology at a news conference Sunday, but Perez-Carrillo dismissed it as inadequate.

“When you’ve been dealing with this and going through the process and dealing with spin doctoring and covering up, you’re really quite skeptical about whether an apology is genuine,” he said.

“It’s just a little bit too little and a little bit too late,” added Perez-Carrillo, whose alleged abuser, Salazar, later moved to Texas and was convicted of sexually abusing an 18-year-old man. He is serving life in prison.

Esther Miller, who has accused Michael Nocita, who later left the priesthood to marry, of having abused her at St. Bridget’s of Sweden in Van Nuys during the 1970s, insisted that “in no way does it come close to apologizing.”

But Miller, who said the trauma of her abuse led her to develop an eating disorder, said many of her fellow victims were in dire straits and had nowhere else to turn.

“Many of us have secondary issues,” she said. “Obviously, my drug of choice was food, [but] some of the other survivors have opted for alcohol addiction, for cocaine addiction.

“So now what we can do with that settlement money is to apply it do self-care and try to make our lives a little bit better.”

Mahony reiterated his apology after the hearing Monday, but he declined to comment further because “this day in particular is a day for the victims to speak.”

Can archdiocese make the payment?
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Haley Fromholz approved the landmark settlement Monday morning at a dramatic hearing marked by the sobs of victims and their attorneys.

The archdiocese itself is on the hook for a quarter-billion dollars, more than a third of the final settlement, raising questions about whether the archdiocese could meet its obligations without going into bankruptcy.

The rest will be paid by insurance carriers, other church sources and litigation with religious orders that did not participate in the arrangement.

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