MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press
By Richard Chin
rchin@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 06/24/2014
[with video]
Jerome Kern, a Twin Cities priest accused in a 2013 lawsuit of sexually abusing a teenage boy in the 1970s, said he didn’t feel he was doing anything wrong when he had physical contact with children in the past, according to a deposition transcript released Tuesday.
“I never saw anything myself in terms of sexual abuse,” testified Kern, who worked in St. Paul and Forest Lake parishes and is accused by a man indentified as Doe 26 who says Kern “engaged in unpermitted sexual contact” with him in the 1970s when Kern was serving as a priest at Our Lady of Grace in Edina.
Over the decades, at least 20 individuals have alleged that Kern abused them when they were children, according to St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson, who is representing Doe 26 in the lawsuit against Kern and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Anderson’s office released a transcript Tuesday of a deposition Kern gave on April 15.
In his deposition, Kern, a priest since 1966, said his conduct with children was never reported to police as far as he knows, nobody from the archdiocese told him what he was doing was a crime or warned him he could go to jail for touching children, and he was never concerned that he would be arrested for his behavior with children.
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