TEXAS
The Texas Law Journal
‘Wake up the Pope’: The North Texas verdict that shook the Catholic Church two decades ago – WFAA
By Bruce Tomaso
(July 20) – After the Rudy Kos case, plaintiffs’ attorney Sylvia Demarest went on to represent another dozen or so victims of sexual abuse in lawsuits against the Catholic Church.
She could have kept that lucrative practice going forever; with thousands of priests accused of having molested children, there was no shortage of potential clients.
But in 2004, Demarest retired from active litigation. She’d had enough.
“After a while, I just couldn’t take another abuse case,” she said. “There’s only so much sadness and suffering you can tolerate.
“Emotionally, it took a toll. I went all in for my clients. It took me a long time to move beyond what had happened to them—what their church allowed to happen to them.”
The Dallas lawyer found a way for her work to live on: She donated a trove of records she’d collected over 11 years—information on 2,600 priests accused of pedophilia, plus her litigation files from the Kos case and others—to BishopAccountability.org, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit project dedicated to documenting the Catholic crisis.
Today, that database, augmented by records from other sources, is online and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
“What Sylvia did was momentous. She was a visionary,” said Terry McKiernan, a co-director of BishopAccountability.org.
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