CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Tribune
By Meredith Rodriguez
Chicago Tribune
Seven men filed suit Wednesday against the Chicago Presbytery and related organizations, claiming they were sexually abused by a now-deceased minister whose trail of allegations led to a multimillion-dollar settlement.
The plaintiffs, three of whom filed one lawsuit and four who filed the other, allege that they were abused by Presbyterian minister Douglas Mason, whose alleged sex abuse led the Presbytery to settle with four accusers in 2007. The settlement was confidential, but church officials told the Tribune last year that the amount was $11 million. Mason died in 2004.
In one of Wednesday’s suits, three men now in their 40s allege that Mason abused them from 1982 to 1986 while he was pastor at Austin United Presbyterian Church, where the three attended.
The Presbytery at the time encouraged pastors to counsel young men in private and ignored warnings that Mason was a pedophile, the suit claims.
The three plaintiffs say in the suit that they didn’t remember their alleged abuse until they read about details of the Presbytery’s 2007 settlement early last year, when church officials voted to sell a campground in Michigan. That vote came as the Presbytery was navigating nearly $8 million in debt. The head of the local Presbytery at the time wouldn’t say whether the two were related.
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.