Priest Sex Abuse Trial: Man Testifies Of Encounter During ‘Confession’

DETROIT (MI)
Deadline Detroit

October 3, 2019

By Michael Betzold

In the first trial of a priest swept up in Attorney General Dana Nessel’s May dragnet, a 31-year-old man man gave dramatic graphic testimony Thursday, detailing how he had sought to confess his sins to Patrick Casey but instead the priest shocked him by initiating oral sex in January 2013.

The victim testified that he was so convinced he was headed for hell, because of homosexual urges, that he broke up with his boyfriend of six years and attempted suicide just before the encounter in Casey’s church office in Westland. The man was in his mid-20s at the time.

The case is one of seven charged to date based on more than a million documents seized by the attorney general last October from all seven of the state’s Catholic dioceses. In May, Nessel rounded up priests nationwide and charged them with sex crimes in various Michigan courts. The Casey case differs from the others because it does not involve a minor victim and is based on a relatively recent incident. (The others involve priests who left the state after allegedly abusing minors decades ago.)

The John Doe who testified in Wayne County Circuit Judge Wanda Evans’ courtroom was converting as an adult to Catholicism and spent six months seeking spiritual and personal counsel from Casey, who was transferred during that period from St. Thomas a’Becket in Canton to St. Theodore in Westland.

He knew the church condemned homosexuality and became troubled, he said on the witness stand, just by looking at the bodies of strangers on the street or sitting in certain positions. Because Casey was aware of the victim’s anxious state, Assistant Attorney General Danielle Hagaman-Clark told jurors in her opening statement: “This case hinges on one word — coercion.” She charges Casey abused his authority in the case.

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