KANSAS CITY (MO)
TheMediaReport
David Pierre
The Kansas City Star may not have been officially listed as a party in the recent high-profile clergy abuse trial in Kansas City, but the credibility of the Star was certainly on trial. And by all accounts, it lost.
A splashy, three-part series in 2011, entitled, “The altar boys’ secret,” by the Star’s Judy L. Thomas, relayed the shocking charges of a man named Jon David Couzens, who claimed that an abusive priest, Msgr. Thomas O’Brien (who died in 2013), had forced Couzens and three other altar boys thirty years earlier to perform sex acts upon each other and upon him only minutes before Mass was to begin at the Catholic school where the boys attended.
And according to the Star, Couzens claims that this episode happened not just once, not twice, but on three separate occasions.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.