MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio
Attorneys for a victim of clergy sexual abuse settled a landmark public nuisance lawsuit Monday against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona.
St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson filed the suit last year in Ramsey County on behalf of a man who said he was sexually abused as a child by the Rev. Thomas Adamson in the late 1970s. Adamson, who served in the Twin Cities archdiocese and the Winona diocese, is no longer a priest.
The lawsuit accused the Twin Cities archdiocese and the Winona diocese of creating a public nuisance by keeping information on abusive priests secret. Anderson and his colleague Mike Finnegan argued in court that the secrecy placed children at risk of abuse from unknown offenders.
Those claims were bolstered by MPR News stories last fall that showed how top church officials continued to protect priests accused of abuse.
The Doe 1 case
At the end of May 2013, an alleged victim of the Rev. Thomas Adamson sued the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Diocese of Winona and Adamson for negligence and creating a public nuisance that puts children at risk. It was the first suit brought under Minnesota’s new Child Victims Act.
The lawsuit alleges that Adamson abused the victim, Doe 1, while he was an altar boy at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in St. Paul Park, in 1976 and 1977. It says the victim’s father reported the abuse to the archdiocese’s chancellor, but that church leaders failed to report Adamson to police.
Unlike a standard negligence case, the public nuisance argument allowed Anderson to obtain more than 50,000 pages from the files of every priest accused of abuse dating back decades — over the objections of a team of church lawyers who argued that the information was not relevant and could ruin the reputations of innocent men.
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