This Church accuser has zero credibility – are there many others like him?

I don’t know how many readers have followed the saga of former University of Virginia coed Jackie Coakley and her lurid claims of a horrific gang rape at a fraternity party on that campus in 2012.  She refused to report the matter to police for years, but attracted the attention of a Rolling Stone reporter with a history of fabulist creations.  The article that resulted created a firestorm in fall of 2014 when published, but just as quickly was refuted on any number of counts.  It turns out Ms. Coakley had created the entire tale out of thin air, in the hopes of attracting the romantic interest of a male UVa student.

That background is important for the report below, which casts grave doubts on a man who has successfully accused a number of priests of molesting/raping him over years, including incredibly debauched details that netted both several convictions and a $5 million settlement for the plaintiff.  However, it now looks as if the entire tale was fabricated, and that the priests were railroaded into prison unjustly.  One wonders just how many others, in the climate of hysteria the permeated the Church and country in the wake of many (it must be said clearly) valid claims of boy rape, were similarly unjustly prosecuted? I imagine it is more than a handful (note the source below is a libertarian site that is not a particular friend of the Church):

On October 9, 2015, a former Philadelphia altar boy reported to the office of Dr. Stephen Mechanick to undergo a court-ordered forensic psychiatric evaluation. It took nearly three hours because the two men had a lot of ground to cover. Daniel Gallagher is a slender 27-year-old with a wispy beard who is better known as “Billy Doe.” Under that pseudonym, he made national headlines in 2011 when he claimed to have been serially raped as a fifth- and sixth-grader at St. Jerome’s parish by two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher.

Gallagher subsequently became the Philadelphia district attorney’s star witness at two historic criminal trials. His graphic testimony helped convict three alleged assailants, as well as Monsignor William Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s former secretary for clergy, who was found guilty of endangering the welfare of a child. The monsignor became the first Catholic administrator in the country to go to jail for failing to adequately supervise a sexually abusive priest.

The Billy Doe rape story was so sensational it attracted the attention of crusading Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She described Billy Doe in a 2011 story, “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files,” as a “sweet, gentle kid with boyish good looks” who had been callously “passed around” from predator to predator. According to the charges recounted by Erdely, two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher “raped and sodomized the 10-year-old, sometimes making him perform stripteases or getting him drunk on sacramental wine after Mass.” [So, a female reporter has now twice been demonstrated to have concocted a lurid story based on an unreliable accuser, and in both cases she never once sought out contradictory views from those being accused, or even from disinterested third parties. This Erdely is quite a piece of work.  Note that her efforts are always oriented to help feed and inform the left-liberal agenda]

Erdely is the same reporter who later wrote about “Jackie,” a University of Virginia student who claimed she was gang-raped by seven men at a fraternity party. The 2014 story, which dominated headlines and cable TV news for weeks, was subsequently exposed as a hoax by “Jackie,” retracted by Rolling Stone and is now the subject of a couple of libel suits.

Judging from Mechanick’s report, Billy Doe has as much credibility as Jackie.  [Which is to say, less than none]

The Newsweek piece is long and detailed.  It contains so many revelations of inconsistencies in Gallagher’s stories, and such a long and checkered history of drug addiction, lying, rehab, more lying, bizarre behavior, and profound indications of double-dealing and such a narcissistic outlook as to make the man capable of anything, that it is incredible that his testimony was relied upon to send several men to prison.

This case contains many elements that highlight the witch hunt that plainly surrounded the Church/priesthood in those days, and which continues to this day:

1. Long past claims of horrific abuse, almost always relying on the testimony of one individual
2. The media seizing on and sensationalizing the claims of the alleged abused soul
3. A district attorney with a seeming animus against the Church looking to advance his career and later political prospects by bending some rules – or a whole bunch of rules – to insure a conviction
4. A climate of hysteria – one of many that has gripped this country periodically going back nearly to its founding (remember the claims of hundreds of children being sexually abused in California day care centers, resulting in a whole family being imprisoned, which were later found to be completely, totally false?) – which created an environment where normal due process was casually cast aside and only punishment for the perpetrators was sought, because everyone “knew” them to be guilty

Please do not misunderstand. I am not even a slight apologist for those genuinely guilty of boy rape, and there were many of those.  But I am equally convinced that in the process of coming to grips with this rampant and horrific abuse, there were a lot of miscarriages of justice, with which the Church hierarchy, under the influence of lawyers far more concerned with monetary cost than justice for priests, basically told the bishops to roll over and throw priests under the bus whenever necessary.  I’m am certain a large number of good men have been caught up in this nest of vipers.  Bishop Robert Finn was just one of them.