PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
BY JOSEPH A. SLOBODZIAN
Inquirer Staff Writer
THROUGH ALMOST 20 years of disputes with church superiors over his addiction to pornography, the Rev. Edward M. DePaoli inevitably returned to a last defense: It was fantasy; he had never sexually touched another person.
That defense crumbled in 2002, after a Bucks County woman came forward to tell church officials that DePaoli fondled her breast when she was a 12-year-old catechism student at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Doylestown.
“I jabbed him and looked at him like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” the woman, now 56, told a Common Pleas Court jury. “I was 12 years old and no one had ever touched me like that before.”
The woman, whose name is being withheld, was the final witness Tuesday to testify about DePaoli’s clerical career before he was defrocked in 2005 at age 60.
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