MINNESOTA
The Daily Beast
Justin Glawe
Jeff Anderson’s fight for justice has nearly bankrupted the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and helped bring criminal charges against its leaders over sexual abuse–and he’s not done yet.
“Greg” walked into Jeff Anderson’s St. Paul office one day in 1983 and began telling a story that was then virtually unheard of: he’d been raped by a priest as a child.
Father Thomas Adamson was the culprit, Greg said, a priest who would eventually admit to abusing children throughout his 30-year career. Greg couldn’t turn to the police, his family, or his church so he sought Anderson’s help. Over the next 30 years, starting with Greg’s case, Anderson won a series of devastating lawsuits against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, making a career out of outing priests for their misdeeds.
Partly as a result of that dogged pursuit, criminal charges were filed last week against the archdiocese, an unthinkable development to victims of abuse that span the better part of four decades. But it all started that day in 1983, with a man named Greg whose true identity Anderson has protected to this day.
“I went to the police and they said they couldn’t do anything because of the statute of limitations,” Anderson said, recounting his first foray into the murky legal territory of clergy sexual abuse. “Then I went to the archdiocese and asked them what they were going to do. They said ‘nothing,’ so I sued them.”
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