Attorney: Diocese of Duluth should pay millions to child abuse victim

MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

Madeleine Baran Oct 21, 2015

Attorney Jeff Anderson asked jurors in Ramsey County Wednesday to award $11.7 million to a man who says he was sexually abused by a priest in the Diocese of Duluth when he was a teenager in the late 1970s.

The case is the first clergy sex abuse lawsuit to be argued in front of a jury in Minnesota since state lawmakers passed the Child Victims Act in 2013, according to available court records. The law opened a three-year window for people to file lawsuits for older incidents of abuse.

For decades, most clergy sex abuse cases in Minnesota had been settled privately or were tossed out of court. Earlier this year, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis prevented hundreds of cases from going to trial when it filed for bankruptcy.

Anderson has represented thousands of victims of clergy sex abuse across the country, but his cases are rarely decided by a jury. Two of his cases that went before juries in Minnesota attracted national attention — one in 1990, the other in 1996.

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.