11/25/97 - 1260

$120 Million Damage Award

USA (VNN) - The following letter is being circulated in the Internet based on a recent article in the New York Times. Several devotees have made comments on this as follows:

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Subject: Hand writing on the wall?

Dear Maharajs and prabhus:

Hare Krsna. I am sending the following, in case you didn't see it the first time, or thought it didn't impact your area of service. Sadly, if not for moral or spiritual reasons, then at least for financial ones, the following article gives some hint of what is potentially looming out there if we don't clean up the toxic pond of child abuse we have in ISKCON.

Imagine a class action with all our child abuse laundry in a court of law? What angered the jury in the following article the most was that the church knew and did not move strongly enough to prevent future abuse or care for the victims.

Get a judgment like this and we can say good-bye to the big Mayapur temple and everything else in between at least in N. America, for our lifetime. (Who can estimate the ramifications with the European governments who are already antagonistic?)

Sorry if this seems like scare tactics, that is not really my intent, but the danger is out there and being forewarned is being forearmed. We have a window of opportunity to fix this before the lid blows. Are we using it.....are you as temple presidents and GBC making sure that you have trained child protection teams in place, qualified teachers for academics and ashrams, carefully screening newly arrived devotees for any dark chapters in their closet, when in doubt restricting their access to children and to the temple in general?

For more information on how to set up child protection teams and what else you can do to fight abuse and deal with it when it happens in North America contact Muralivadaka prabhu at: <afn09663@freenet5.afn.org or Jahnavi dasi at <afn56839@afn.org

For the rest of the world: Dharmaraj prabhu at: <dharmaraja.hks@com.bbt.se

Just to point out that are far from having this all worked out and behind us, yes, we have a GBC appointed task force working on this....as the chair, I think it is my duty to let you know that I cannot even get funding for the one conference call our committee had...or an e-mail responded to from the GBC executive committee members (to his credit, Bir Krsna Maharaj did get back with me, but he was obliged to say that he was at a loss as to where to get any funding for the project...although it was voted on and approved by all of us.)

(I regret airing this in public, but I do so as a last resort; this is my notice that I fear losing the other members of the committee and the effort unraveling.)

Your servant, Badrinarayan dasa

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From: INTERNET:(removed)@aol.com, INTERNET:(removed)@aol.com DATE: 7/25/97 11:21 AM

$120 Million Damage Award for Sexual Abuse by Priest

By PETER STEINFELS

A Dallas jury awarded nearly $120 million in damages on Thursday after finding that the local Roman Catholic diocese had ignored evidence that a priest was sexually abusing boys and that it had then tried to cover up the scandal.

William Ryan, a spokesman for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that the award was "almost certainly the largest judgment that had been made against the church" in a sexual abuse case, but that the decision would probably be appealed.

The damages are to be paid by the Diocese of Dallas and the priest, the Rev. Rudolph Kos, 52, who was suspended five years ago. Kos, who now lives in San Diego, did not defend himself in the civil trial, but has publicly denied some of the charges against him. He still faces criminal charges of sexual abuse of two of the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs -- 10 men and the family of another who committed suicide at the age of 20 -- said that the abuse occurred between 1977 and 1992 while Kos was a student at Holy Trinity Seminary in Dallas and while he was assigned to three separate churches.

They charged that a reasonable investigation by church officials would have revealed that the seminary applicant had served a year in a juvenile detention center for molesting a neighbor. He had also entered a marriage that was annulled by the diocese's marriage tribunal, and his ex-wife said in a deposition that she had informed a tribunal official of her former husband's sexual interest in boys.

The plaintiffs pointed to a series of warnings and complaints about Kos's proclivities that came from other priests throughout the late 1980s. Despite these, the priest was made a pastor in 1988.

The diocese's lawyer, Randal Mathis, maintained during the trial that diocesan officials had made what they "thought were appropriate, fair and reasonable judgments." Kos was "a criminal who belongs in jail," Mathis said, but he was also "a very convincing man."

Diocesan officials have stated that that they could not mount a full-scale investigation without a direct complaint from a victim and that they suspended him promptly when the first such complaint came in 1992.

The diocesan marriage tribunal official, the Rev. Gerald Hughes, denied at the trial that Kos' ex-wife had told him that her former husband was attracted to boys.

Kos was accused of molesting altar boys, some as young as 9, in three Dallas parishes. One plaintiff reported being sexually abused several times a week for years, starting when he was 13. Another plaintiff had lived with Kos for two years in the priest's parish residence; the public explanation was that Kos had legally adopted him.

During 11 weeks of testimony, the jury heard extensive descriptions of the psychological damage that the plaintiffs said had been caused by the sexual abuse. The plaintiffs were asking for $146.5 million in damages for past and future medical care, lost earnings and mental anguish. The jury ultimately awarded them $100 million for such damages, and $18 million for punitive damages.

The jury devised a complex formula that split the blame between the church and the priest and determined the shares of the award that each would pay in each plaintiff's case. In different cases the diocese was judged to bear anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of the responsibility.

Kos, who works as a paralegal, is not expected to pay much of his share.

The painful nature of much of the plaintiff's' testimony was underlined Monday by the unusual conduct of Anne Ashby, the state district judge hearing the case.

After final arguments were heard and the jurors were dismissed for the day, Judge Ashby removed her robe, took a seat in the jury box and told the plaintiffs, "I've been so close to your tragedy it just breaks my heart."

"Everybody in this courtroom has been grieving," she said. "If anything like this can ever be positive, then let there be healing and let there be hope."

Although a number of cases have lingered in the courts, the question of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests has been less visible since 1995, when widely publicized accusations against the late Cardinal Joseph l Bernardin, archbishop of Chicago, were retracted and many people came to believe that the news media's treatment of the topic had become responsible.

But the judgment against the Dallas diocese, where two other cases of sexual abuse by priests are pending, is likely to revive concern that the problem is far from resolved.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times

Sadbhuj Gour das writes:

What I did not at all like on this letter was, Badrinarayana Prabhu did not care for the pain of the children, but he was scared for the money and temples which Iskcon could loose. As I understand the letter, the children must be protected for the sake that Iskcon won't loose any money, temples and good reputation, but not that the poor children would get around some traumatic experiences.