MINNESOTA
Bemidji Pioneer
Stephen J. Lee
Forum News Service
CROOKSTON — A member of the White Earth Band of Chippewa sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Crookston on Thursday, alleging a priest working under the diocese’s authority sexually abused him when he was 8 and 9 years old on the White Earth Indian Reservation.
Jeff Anderson, the St. Paul attorney who has won hundreds of millions of dollars suing Catholic dioceses in sex abuse cases over the past 20 years, held a news conference at the Polk County Courthouse in Crookston, where the lawsuit was filed Thursday.
He said he has information that the Rev. J. Vincent Fitzgerald, who died in 2009, sexually abused at least four young people from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s while serving as a priest on Indian reservations in South Dakota and Minnesota.
The four alleged victims include two within the Crookston diocese: a boy on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation near Bemidji in the 1970s and “John Doe 19” at White Earth in the mid-1980s. He also has information that Fitzgerald sexually abused two youths in the 1960s in South Dakota, Anderson said.
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