Los Angeles man’s claim says priest and bishop raped him as a child at St. Anthony Catholic Church in Kailua, Oahu
New law allows former altar boy to file lawsuit for sexual abuse
(Honolulu, Hawaii) Nationally prominent clergy abuse law firm Jeff Anderson & Associates, announced today the filing of a civil lawsuit on behalf of Los Angeles man who says he was sexually abused in between 1973 and 1978 by two different priests when he was a catechism student and altar boy at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Kailua, Oahu Hawaii.
The plaintiff, identified in the complaint as John Roe 2 to protect his privacy states that he regularly attended mass and catechism classes at St. Anthony’s in Kailua, Oahu where he and other children frequently played and often talked with priests on the grounds, but was unaware he was being groomed for sex abuse by a parish priest.
The complaint, filed in Circuit Court in Honolulu, Hawaii, alleges that after a period of time Roe was brutally raped by Father Joseph Henry in the choir loft of St. Anthony Church. Later, after confessing the sexual assault to Father Joseph Ferrario, the former Bishop, under the guise of befriending and counseling, forced the child to perform oral sex in a building on the church grounds.
The lawsuit claims that because the diocese’s leaders were aware of previous complaints of sexual misconduct and had a practice of concealing and harboring offenders, they were grossly negligent in their supervision of and could have prevented the sexual abuse.
Defendants named in the lawsuit are the priest’s’ orders; the Society of Priests of Saint Sulpice of the United States; the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America (Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers); and the Roman Catholic Church in the state of Hawaii.
John Roe 2’s lawsuit is the second filed under a new law allowing adults who were victims of sex abuse as a child a two year “window” to seek justice in Hawaii’s civil courts. The legislation was approved in by Hawaii’s legislature in May and subsequently signed into law by Governor Neil Abercrombie
A copy of the complaint is available at: www.AndersonAdvocates.com or www.AbusedinHawaii.com