LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles elementary school teacher accused of sexually abusing 20 students and one adult was arrested Wednesday, police said. Eight counts of continual sexual abuse and seven counts of lewd acts upon a child have been filed against Robert Pimental for abuse that took place at George De La Torre Jr. Elementary in the Wilmington area, police said. In addition to the 15 felonies, misdemeanor charges are expected, said Officer Christopher No. His bail has been set at $12 million, and an arraignment date hasn’t been set. Pimental, 57, left his fourth-grade teaching position i…
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An unlicensed therapist and respected member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn was sentenced on Tuesday to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman, beginning the attacks when she was 12. The therapist, Nechemya Weberman, 54, a member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, did not react as the judge sentenced him. The victim, now 18, who delivered an impassioned statement asking for the maximum sentence to be imposed, dabbed away tears.“The message should go out to all victims of sexual abuse that your cries will be heard and justice wil…
Prevention is nearly always preferable to treatment when it comes to our health, and the stakes are even higher in cases of child abuse. But is it even possible to identify children at risk of abuse before it’s too late? That’s the question the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) addressed, in a comprehensive review of the available data on ways to detect maltreatment of children. The task force is a government-funded group of independent experts that considers all the available evidence on a range of health topics, then grades studies on their reliability and validity before making …
A Roman Catholic bishop apologized Tuesday for “inadequate or mistaken” responses to clergy sex abuse when he served as a top advisor to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in the late 1980s. “Like many others, I have come to a clearer understanding over the years of the causes and treatment of sexual abuse,” Bishop Thomas J. Curry, who oversees Santa Barbara and Ventura counties for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said in a statement. Internal church files released this week show Curry and Mahony, who was then archbishop, discussed how to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement, incl…
Church abuse victims Tuesday made a renewed call for criminal prosecutions following the release of confidential files that show top Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials tried to cover up the allegations.”We’ve always been called ‘alleged victims.’ I think today the word ‘alleged’ will be left out and I think today you guys you will truly see and understand that we were victims — truly victims of manipulative men who made cold, calculated decisions as how to protect themselves and save face in the community,” said Manuel Vega, who was abused from age 10 to 15.The Survivors Netw…
Statute of limitations is the main stumbling block to prosecuting Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and aides in the sex abuse files from the 1980s released this week, experts say.
Standing a few feet outside the doors of the Los Angeles Archdiocese headquarters, clergy abuse victims who settled with the church in a landmark $660-million settlement called for the release of the documents it agreed to make public in 2007.The demands come in the wake of internal Catholic church records released Monday in a separate claim. Those memos, written in 1986 and 1987 by Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, displayed a concerted effort by officials to shield abusers from police.Flanked by people who said they…
LOS ANGELES — Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials maneuvered behind the scenes to shield molester priests, provide damage control for the church and keep parishioners in the dark, according to church personnel files. The confidential records filed in a lawsuit against the archdiocese disclose how the church handled abuse allegations for decades and also reveal dissent from a top Mahony aide who criticized his superiors for covering up allegations of abuse rather than protecting children. Notes inked by Mahony demonstrate he …
Ten months ago, defrocked Catholic priest Edward V. Avery began serving a sentence of 21/2 to 5 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexually molesting a 10-year-old altar boy from the Northeast.On Thursday, Avery, 70, returned to a Philadelphia courtroom and recanted his guilty plea – denying any contact with the alleged victim and tossing into turmoil the trial of a former St. Jerome’s parish priest and a schoolteacher charged with serially sexually assaulting the same boy in 1998 and 1999.Avery’s testimony could also affect last year’s landmark clergy sex-abuse trial that ended with the…
Since the Sandusky case we have all been made aware that sexual abuse of a young child by a coach is possible. Yet, more attention to the subject and types of sexual abuse in sports needs to be committed to addressing this topic and to developing an infrastructure that supports the needs of the athletes for a safe and positive environment in sports.The world of sports is complex in regards to the coach-athlete relationship. Although a large proportion of U.S. children participate in youth sport, we do not give appropriate attention to analysis of the four differing types of sexual abuse in spo…
Lawyers for sex-abuse victims in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee bankruptcy are asking the judge to make public all records involving credibly accused priests, depositions and other sealed documents, saying the move is needed to protect children.They accuse the archdiocese of using the bankruptcy’s broad protective order, which is intended to shield victims, to deny police detectives in an ongoing investigation access to information about a now defrocked priest.“This is exactly why the public is served by relief of the protective order,” said victims attorney Jeff Anderson, whose firm asked Bankr…
The Archdiocese of Milwaukee said Thursday it will allow a Fond du Lac police detective to review the file of a defrocked priest as part of an ongoing sex-abuse investigation there, in response to a motion filed the same day by sex-abuse victims in its bankruptcy case. That motion accuses the archdiocese of using the bankruptcy’s broad protective order, which is intended to shield victims, to withhold information about the former priest, Jerome Wagner, from a Fond du Lac detective in December. It asks U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Susan V. Kelley to make public all records, depositions and other sea…
Who is more deserving: victims of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests, or dead people moldering their graves? When he was Archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy Dolan chose the dead people, placing $55 million into cemetery trust funds and out of the reach of local abuse victims suing the Church. (They want compensation for the suffering caused by childhood sexual trauma.) Dolan left Milwaukee to take the most visible post in Catholic America — cardinal of New York City – but he could not escape his choice. The victims asked a federal bankruptcy judge to reverse him, and on Fri…
There is something about me that is happier when accompanied by a small boy…. Perhaps besides the sexual element, the child in me wants a playmate.— Father Robert Van Handel::Damian Eckert turned on the computer in his in-laws’ home office, a tiny, dim, book-strewn space. He left the door open so he could hear his 5-year-old daughter playing in the next room.He pulled up a website and scanned it for Father Robert Van Handel, the priest who led the community boys choir he and his younger brother sang in when they were growing up in Santa Barbara. There he was — receding hairline, bulbou…
PHILADELPHIA — A policeman’s son testified Tuesday that he withdrew from friends, sports and school clubs, and began a long descent into heroin addiction, after he was molested by two priests and a Catholic school teacher by age 11.The gaunt, troubled 24-year-old has become a key figure in the decade-long prosecution of priest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Tuesday marked the second time he’s testified in open court, but he’ll likely face his first cross-examination on Wednesday.His stunning complaint, filed in 2009, led to last year’s landmark child-endangerme…