JEFFERSON CITY (MO)
Gorovsky Law
August 24, 2018
Dear Attorney General Josh Hawley,
On Wednesday, August 22, 2018, I stood outside your office with survivors of childhood sexual abuse to ask you to organize an investigation into abuses within the Catholic Church in Missouri. We asked for an investigation like the one that occurred in Pennsylvania which revealed over 300 perpetrators and likely over 1,000 victims.
You responded that you did not have the power to do such an investigation. Your response was somewhat of a half-truth given that the Attorney General of the State of Missouri has the power to coordinate all kinds of law enforcement and prosecution efforts in the state. For example, you are currently running an advertisement on television claiming that you coordinated a state-wide audit on the backlog of untested rape kits in prosecutor’s offices in Missouri and are now coordinating an effort to get funding for this issue, and you are publicly pushing state prosecutors to be more aggressive on sexual assault cases. You can behave similarly here.
After telling the public that you were powerless in the childhood sexual abuse situation, on Thursday, August 23, 2018, Archbishop Robert Carlson sent you a letter and held a press conference to say that he would voluntarily provide you with documents from his Archdiocese. You accepted his offer.
Unfortunately, this is exactly backward. Allowing the accused wrongdoer to pick and choose what will be provided in an investigation of his wrongdoing is not an investigation at all. It is certainly not what I was asking for as I stood outside your office on Wednesday, and I do not believe it is what survivors of clergy abuse want either.
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