Render Unto Rome (49 page)

The energy that burned through him began before dawn on a blend of liquefied fruit with eighteen powdered vitamins—“the mush,” his three young sons called it. The life force that sent him hurtling into each day sometimes ran fourteen hours at a stretch. The years of meeting clients, their lives still raw long after the early trauma, taught him how predators buried the evidence in their victims’ psyches.
¹
The adult survivor yearned to reach back in time and protect the child victim. Jeff Anderson spent heavily on investigations to find perpetrators; most were never prosecuted, too much time had passed. He alerted cops anyway. Hammering out settlements on the civil cases that took, on average, three years to resolve, he routinely blasted bishops in announcing new cases via Web-streamed video from his office (originally a bank built by a timber baron) in downtown St. Paul. Talking strategy with his co-counsels in other states, he carried a mental map of the many cases, working the cell phone on the forty-minute drive back to Stillwater, where he lived in a Victorian mansion above the St. Croix River. Street jogs after dinner softened the manic edge as he crawled into bed for five hours’ sleep.

A wiry five foot four inches, Jeff Anderson had receding silver-blond
hair and a perpetual tan to soften his rutted brow. The Cheshire cat grin hinted at a natural ebullience that made an easy slide to flamboyance. “All roads lead to Rome,” he told the
Washington Post
on April 19, 2010. “We’re chasing them. We’re taking bites out of their ass.”
²
Three days later he filed a motion in federal court to put Benedict XVI under oath.
³
A Wisconsin priest named in several cases had molested two hundred deaf students over many years; Cardinal Ratzinger had refused to defrock him after extensive correspondence with Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee. Anderson and his associate Mike Finnegan obtained the correspondence in discovery and gave copies to reporter Laurie Goodstein of the
New York Times
. The
Times
report raised hard questions about the pope’s judgment while a cardinal, and embarrassed the Vatican.
⁴

“It all leads to the pope,” Anderson insisted to the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
. “Deposing [the pope] sounds bombastic, but it isn’t. He needs to be held responsible for the torture and mutilation of children’s souls worldwide.”
⁵

Torture, mutilation—inflammatory rhetoric, words that made him good copy for journalists. But he had absorbed too much factual tonnage on sex criminals whose white collars had given them a free ride to maintain a calm demeanor. Anderson had been suing the church since 1984, losing almost as many cases as he had won, picking himself up each time, coiled to fight again. In Wisconsin he had been forced to hire his own attorney when church lawyers filed punitive motions in Madison. The perpetrator was defrocked, but the abuse, legally, lay too far in the past. Defending himself had cost $40,000. A 1995 Wisconsin state high court decision had barred abuse lawsuits against the church. In time, Anderson found a way around the statute: he began suing Wisconsin bishops for fraud, on the grounds that passing off pedophiles as good priests was itself a tort—an approach that got him a foot in the door.

By spring 2003 he had about 150 clients. Over the previous twenty years he had settled claims for some five hundred victim-survivors for $60 million. He had won several high-profile trials that resulted in multimillion-dollar verdicts. Anderson was ecumenical in his way; he took cases against Protestant ministers, Hare Krishnas, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons, but, by far, most of his clients were Catholic victims. His take of each successful case was 40 percent, plus expenses, proportionally shared with his law partners, until 2002, when he split off from his
longtime firm. By 2003 the larger cases were settling for high six figures and up.

“It was never really about the money for Jeff,” his wife, Julie, a willowy blonde who had done heavy lifting in the department of patience, said in 2003. “He liked to play the scrappy little lawyer, a down-and-dirty sort … He was an actor on a stage. And he was very good at commanding an audience.”
⁶

Anderson was a major benefactor of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an activist group that pushed the bishops, week after week, to disclose the names of perpetrators. SNAP disseminated leaflets outside churches, naming names, attacking negligent bishops. Media coverage expanded the self-help network. SNAP included parents who had lost children to suicide, ex-cops, a cabdriver, a university professor of English, an office secretary, twin brothers each with a master’s degree from Harvard, a portrait painter, computer programmers, real estate agents, a nurse, a subway train driver, an accountant, a physician, teachers, stay-at-home moms, firefighters, several priests, nuns, and recovering addicts or alcoholics of many stripes. SNAP had nine thousand members in 2010. Other plaintiff attorneys donated to SNAP, which relied on donations from victims who received settlements, too. SNAP had a budget exceeding $900,000 in 2006. By 2009 it had fallen to $420,000 against expenses of $490,000. Critics said SNAP should disclose its contributors’ list; many survivors wanted privacy, countered the founder, Barbara Blaine.
⁷

Anderson’s friendship with SNAP leaders Blaine in Chicago, David Clohessy and Barbara Dorris in St. Louis, and Peter Isely in Milwaukee, among others, formed an emotional rudder in his life. Their cause was his cause, their outrage his outrage. He had represented Clohessy, one of three brothers abused by the family priest, in a Missouri case that was thrown out for statute of limitations. One of Clohessy’s brothers became a priest who later abused youngsters; he left the ministry. Across the gulf of suffering, the two brothers had not spoken in years. The family was deeply splintered.

“I wouldn’t know how much I’ve given SNAP,” Anderson told me, “or how much I have made or lost. I don’t focus on my own money … I’m committed to the same goals and purposes as SNAP. I help them do their advocacy because they help support our survivors in recovery and deliver a message in the court of public opinion. In these parallel universes our
goals intersect. If they were another nonprofit, I’d do the same thing. It’s evolved into a loose collaboration.”

Anderson had several times pushed his bank credit limit to the brink for the heavy costs in investigations and travel, and to lobby legislatures to open state laws on the time frame allowing victims to sue. Bishops attacked such legislation, arguing it would bankrupt their dioceses; defense lawyers accused Anderson of self-enrichment strategies. He had a gladiatorial approach. “From the New Deal to civil rights, the bishops were allied with social justice,” he continued. “Now they’re allied with the Republican Party, the insurance industry and U.S. Chamber of Commerce in trying to shut down legislative reform”—meaning laws to extend the statutes of limitations. Insurance companies paid heavily in many church settlements, though dioceses since the 1990s had resorted to self-insurance risk pools. Closing parishes to fund settlements, in his view, was a dodge: the church could raise funds to resolve these cases.

“When a bishop testifies at a committee hearing, the politicians imagine 235,000 Catholic voters. Then the insurance representatives come in and they worry about rates going up. The Chamber of Commerce says these cases will kill business. Martin Luther King said the moral arc of time bends toward truth and justice. I see us trending toward greater awareness with attention on the Vatican.”

His wife had a point: it was never really about the money. Battling the church was more about Jeff. He enjoyed what wealth brought—the vacation home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; the elegantly appointed Rivertown Inn with the wraparound porch and Victorian porticoes he and Julie had renovated just up the street in Stillwater; the collection of religious art he had acquired in a spiritual awakening. But money was more of a means, a weapon to batter corrupted power. “You have to be kind of nuts, or willing to take an enormous amount of risk,” he opined on the phone between meetings in Chicago. “From a business standpoint, no one would have thought you could do it this way. I’ve taken a tremendous number of cases knowing the odds were against us. Of the cases I’ve filed, 40 percent have been knocked out for statute of limitations.”

Born in 1947, he was raised outside St. Paul in a comfortably middle-class home with older and younger sisters. The family attended a Lutheran and later a Congregationalist church. “It made me feel constricted,” he recalled. His father, a furniture buyer, was deeply humanitarian, but quietly
so; he recalls his mother as emotionally distant. “I don’t remember my childhood. I remember being cared for, but there was a lack of bonding I somehow internalized. Maybe some missing element in childhood explains my compulsive behavior.”

After high school he entered Simpson College in Iowa. He was nineteen and deeply in love when his girlfriend, Patty, who came from a sprawling Catholic family, got pregnant. They married and had a son. Anderson left school, worked, then transferred to the University of Minnesota just in time for the revolution. His hair grew long, he smoked weed, he marched against the Vietnam War, hungering for a larger part in the 1960s social rebellion. After graduation and several low-wage jobs, he began night classes at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. By then they had an infant daughter, too. He flunked a course, scrambled for readmission, and found his stride in a criminal law class taught by Rosalie Wahl, a future justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. He thrilled to the idea of fighting the establishment by defending people on the margins. In a faculty-supervised poverty law clinic, he took the case of a black man accused of exposing himself in a church basement. Anderson argued that his homeless client was only looking for a place to pee. The judge agreed. “And I got something that day I’d never felt before,” he told me in his elegant office, flanked by pictures of Clarence Darrow and Dr. King. “A
feeling of power
, that
I
could make a difference in how society treats people.”

Starting out as a criminal defense attorney, he established a practice with a former law professor that included personal injury work. In 1983 a blue-collar Catholic couple asked his help. Their twenty-five-year-old son, in prison for molesting a youngster, had revealed to them that he was abused as a boy by Father Tom Adamson. They had met with Auxiliary Bishop Robert Carlson, the chancellor of the Twin Cities archdiocese. Carlson offered mild compassion, and then sent a check for $1,500. “Cash it,” said Anderson. “And let me visit your son.”

Gazing at the young inmate through the glass partition, he was touched by his sad naïveté, a quality he detected in many criminal clients. Anderson called the cops; they were powerless, the statute of limitations on Adamson’s crimes had lapsed. He knew of no lawyer who had sued the Catholic Church.

Minnesota law allows a plaintiff to serve a complaint on a defendant before filing court papers. Discovery proceeds as an inducement to settle a
case without notoriety or court costs. He sent his complaint to the archdiocese. Church counsel called immediately: what did he want? He wanted the priest removed from his parish. He soon got assurance that Adamson was yanked. The church wanted to settle. Anderson wanted to take the deposition testimony of Archbishop John Roach. His opposing counsel said no. Anderson threatened to file suit and call the media. He got the deposition, along with church files containing letters that documented how Adamson had crisscrossed dioceses and parishes trailed by sex abuse complaints. He took the deposition of a second bishop, Loras Watters of Winona. Convinced that both bishops had lied to him under oath about their knowledge of Adamson’s history, he probed deeper.
⁸
The archdiocesan lawyer offered a settlement “in the usual way,” a signal to him that Adamson was not unique. The offer was $1 million to be paid in a structured annuity, a steady paycheck over many years.

“Sick, scared, upset, and unable to sleep,” he says now of the offer as if it had been made yesterday, “I saw it as a huge amount of money.” His client had gotten out of prison when Anderson went to see him. He recalls crying as he explained the settlement offer, which carried a nondisclosure clause: hush money. Anderson asked him not to agree to that condition. “Jeff,” said the man, “turn it down—but turn it down quickly, before I change my mind.”

He returned to his office, drafted a complaint, went to the courthouse.

Filing the case made major news in St. Paul. The fall 1984 criminal indictment of Father Gilbert Gauthe in Lafayette, Louisiana, made bigger news. Gauthe accepted a twenty-year plea bargain in 1985; the diocese settled a dozen cases with the families of boys he had abused. Gauthe and Adamson were opposite faces of the same coin. Adamson was never prosecuted. The early Gauthe cases (many more would follow) settled, on average, for about $400,000 per victim. Anderson settled his case for $1.2 million as a structured annuity. Other Adamson victims called him. He settled those cases in the late 1980s for an average of $550,000, some $10 million in all, of which insurance companies paid about a third of the costs. Eventually he persuaded the Minnesota legislature to extend the statute of limitations for child abuse. Along the way, his marriage died because of his drinking and infidelity. Later, he met and married Julie Aronson, who was fourteen years younger than he. In 1992 Jeff Anderson had a year-old son, a lovely wife, a beautiful house, and a surging practice
when his eighteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage revealed that she had been abused at age eight by her therapist, an ex-priest. The man had since gone to prison. Throttled with guilt, Jeff Anderson resolved to be a better father. But he was rolling down a jagged hill, drinking so voraciously that on his fiftieth birthday he crashed: blacked out after a dinner with friends. When he awoke his second marriage was on the rocks.