UNITED STATES
Minnesota Public Radio
By Madeleine Baran · July 21, 2014
· CHAPTER TWO OF FOUR ·
In the fall of 1984, with reporters and top church officials focused on the clergy abuse crisis in Lafayette, a lawyer in Minnesota received a phone call that would lead to the church’s next major scandal.
Jeff Anderson, then 37, had created a name for himself in the Twin Cities as a combative, ambitious trial lawyer who represented underdogs and outcasts. Tanned and trim at 5 feet 5 inches, often dressed in a three-piece suit, he projected a confidence and intensity that captivated jurors.
Anderson idolized Clarence Darrow, the famous crusading attorney who took on powerful institutions, and he decided to go to law school after reading a Darrow biography called “Attorney for the Damned.” He barely graduated. “I couldn’t really engage in the study of the past, which law requires you to do, because I was more interested in shaping the future,” he recalled.
One day, Anderson got a call from a colleague about a married couple who claimed their son had been abused by a Catholic priest. He didn’t want the case but thought Anderson might.
He was right. Anderson met John and Janet Riedle, who explained that their son Gregory had been sexually abused by a priest named Thomas Adamson. They said they’d met with Chancellor Robert Carlson, but he refused to remove Adamson from his parish.
Then the couple showed him a check for about $1,500 they’d received after going to the archdiocese. “Should we cash it?” they asked.
“Go ahead,” Anderson said. “But we also need to call the police, and I need to look into this.”
Anderson wasn’t sure where to start. He’d never heard of a priest raping a child, and a search of court records for lawsuits came up empty. He looked up the full name of the local Catholic Church and wrote it down: the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Then he prepared a lawsuit and walked it over to the chancery. The next day, he got a call from a church lawyer. As he recalled later, the lawyer asked, “What do you want?”
“OK,” the lawyer said. “We’re removing him today. What else do you want?”
“I want to know who’s in charge,” Anderson said.
“Archbishop John Roach,” the lawyer said.
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