Teen Blames Catholic Church for ‘Forcible Rape’

ARIZONA
Courthouse News Service

By JAMIE ROSS

PHOENIX (CN) – After raping a teenager, a Catholic youth leader promised he would stop raping girls if she didn’t tell police, so she kept quiet – but he broke his promise and sexually assaulted her friend, his first alleged victim claims in court.

Maraen Foley claims in the lawsuit that Catholic youth leader Brandon Eckerson forcibly raped her two days before Christmas in 2012. She was 18.

Eckerson “convinced plaintiff not to say anything further to anyone about his sexual exploitation of her; in exchange he promised to never again sexually assault anyone. It was understood that if plaintiff discovered he violated this sworn promise she would go to the police,” Foley claims in the complaint in Maricopa County Court.

She says he broke that promise: that in June this year she learned that he had recently sexually assaulted another girl in the program, so she went to police.

She claims in the lawsuit that Eckerson’s bosses at the highest level of the Diocese knew of the rape but did not report it to law enforcement because Vatican policy threatened them with excommunication if they did.

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