PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
By Ralph Cipriano
for Bigtrial.net
When I was a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer and had a story to pitch, I used to go editor shopping.
Back in the 1990s when the newspaper had 600 journalists, there were so many departments to shop in — news, features, sports, the projects desk where they did long, investigative stories, and the Sunday magazine. And so many different editors to pitch a story to. If one editor said no it was on to the next one until I made a sale.
Sadly, one rule applied to too many editors I dealt with. If you told them something they already knew, something that squared with the prevailing wisdom, you were in good shape. But if you told those same editors something new, especially something that might challenge the prevailing wisdom, that’s when the trouble started.
On this blog for the past two years, we’ve been dealing with the ultimate contrarian story. A junkie criminal scheming to get out of prison poses as a victim of clerical sex abuse. A politically ambitious district attorney drafts that junkie criminal as his star witness to put men in collars behind bars while the media and public cheer him on. Even though people in the D.A.’s own office privately agreed with defense lawyer Michael J. McGovern’s characterization of star witness Billy Doe as a “lying sack of shit.”
It’s the story nobody wants to hear because it runs counter to the cult of victimology and current, pervasive prejudices against Catholic clerics. But in Philadelphia, with three courts prying into the local district attorney’s self-described “historic” prosecution of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the truth is lurking out there. Especially in the civil case beginning next month when certain current and former members of the district attorney’s office are placed under oath and have to answer some tough questions about a bogus investigation rigged from day one.
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