CONNECTICUT
The Hartford Courant
By EDMUND H. MAHONY, emahony@courant.com
The Hartford Courant
2:31 p.m. EST, February 7, 2012
WATERBURY—
A psychiatric expert called to testify Tuesday in Superior Court by the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford disputed an earlier diagnosis that an adolescent victim of sexual abuse by a priest would likely suffer from mental health problems for the rest of his life.
Dr. J. Alexander Bodkin testified that the most significant mental disorder suffered by the victim — depression — was not the result of the sexual abuse he experienced in the early 1980s, but is the result of stress caused 26 years later by litigation associated with the abuse.
The victim, a former altar boy identified in legal papers as Jacob Doe, claims in a lawsuit against the church that he was sexually abused by a priest from 1981 to 1983 and that the church allowed the abuse to take place because it knew the priest had molested other boys two years earlier.
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