FLORIDA
Daily Commercial
Staff report
An organization that advocates on behalf of clergy sex abuse victims has asked the Florida Baptist Convention to reconsider plans to appeal a $12.5 million award to a man sexually abused in Lake County by a minister convicted of molestation in 2007, the ABPnews/Herald is reporting.
“By appealing, at best you’ll be postponing, at a great moral and financial cost, an eventual day of real reckoning,” David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said in a letter to Florida Baptist Convention Executive Director John Sullivan. “At worst, you’ll be hurting not just the victim in this case, but all other victims who have been violated and betrayed by Southern Baptist clergy.”
ABPnews/Herald , created after a merger of the Associated Baptist Press and the The Religious Herald , is the only independent news service created by and for Baptists. It is reporting that Clohessy, an abuse survivor who testified before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, warned Sullivan that even if successful, “your appeal will only delay the inevitable.”
“Over 25 years of SNAP’s history, we have found that those responsible for injustices are eventually held accountable, not only through the justice system but also through the court of public opinion,” Clohessy said in his letter.
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