UNITED STATES
TheMediaReport
In a stunning article that bravely veers from the media’s usual, tired coverage of the Catholic Church abuse story, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz has taken up the case of Fr. Gordon J. MacRae, who has been serving a 33½-to-67 year sentence in a New Hampshire state prison since 1994 on abuse charges.
Rabinowitz’s article in the Wall Street Journal reports that MacRae was wrongfully convicted in a grave miscarriage of justice.
TheMediaReport.com has thoroughly examined Fr. MacRae’s case before, and this is the second time that Rabinowitz has profiled MacRae, as she first reported about the priest for the Journal back in 2005.
In a nutshell, Fr. MacRae was convicted by a jury and imprisoned based on the claims of a single accuser named Thomas Grover, whom Rabinowitz aptly notes had “a considerable history of forgery, assault, theft and drug use.”
n a nutshell, Fr. MacRae was convicted by a jury and imprisoned based on the claims of a single accuser named Thomas Grover, whom Rabinowitz aptly notes had “a considerable history of forgery, assault, theft and drug use.”
In 1994, the then-27-years-old Grover claimed that Fr. MacRae sexually assaulted him over five consecutive weekly counseling sessions years earlier in 1983 when he was 15 years old. Asked why he would repeatedly return to a place where he had been brutally attacked the week before, Grover amazingly testified that he “had experienced ‘out of body’ episodes that had blocked his recollection” of previous abuse.
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