DETROIT (MI)
Detroit Free Press [Detroit MI]
December 20, 2023
By Tresa Baldas
After decades of battling debilitating depression, Brian McLain says he made a crucial connection in his late 30s as to why he was in pain for so long: His priest had molested him as a teenager.
To the chagrin of the Catholic Church, 41-year-old McLain is now suing over his childhood trauma, and the Michigan Supreme Court has agreed to hear his case.
In a legal feud that could open the door to scores of new clergy abuse lawsuits, McLain is testing for the first time a revised 2018 law that gives adult victims a retroactive right to sue for sex abuse they endured as minors. Here’s what has changed:
Under the old statute of limitations, Michigan sexual assault victims could file civil lawsuits for up to three years after the abuse occurred. But under the new law, passed in the wake of the Larry Nassar scandal, victims are now allowed to sue over their childhood sex abuse up until they turn 28 years old, or, up to three years after connecting the assault to their trauma.
Depression and isolation for a ‘couple of decades’
This latter criteria is the crux of McLain’s case. He was 38 when he and his therapist connected the dots between his abuse as a teen, court records show, and the trauma and crippling mental illness that followed.
I totally went into a depression,” McLain said at a news conference Tuesday. “I isolated myself for the next couple of decades. I was scared. I didn’t have an outlet.
“Unfortunately, someone who I thought was a higher authority from God was abusing me,” McLain said. “I went into darkness.”
McLain says he made this connection in November 2020 after numerous psychotherapy sessions. Five months later, he filed his lawsuit in Livingston County Circuit Court, alleging a priest began sexually assaulting him after he went to him for confession as a troubled youth during his time at juvenile detention center in Whitmore Lake.
According to court documents, the priest “found ways to be alone with him and induced him to perform masturbatory acts.”
Alleged abuse occurred at juvenile detention facility
McLain is suing the Diocese of Lansing, The Rev. Richard Lobert and the Archdiocese of Baltimore, where Lobert was ordained in 1975 and served until 2021, when the archdiocese stripped him of his priest duties pending an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse in Michigan. Lobert, 75, has not been criminally charged and no other alleged victims have publicly come forward. He did not return calls seeking comment.
According to court documents, Lobert moved to Michigan in 1995, worked for decades as chaplain of Father Gabriel Richard High School in Ann Arbor. He provided other services under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Lansing, including counseling residents at the now-shuttered W.J. Maxey Boys Training School, a juvenile detention facility in Whitmore Lake for males ages 12-21. That’s where Lobert would meet McLain, whose allegations would upend the Catholic priest’s career.
Ten days after McLain filed his lawsuit, Lobert resigned from his chaplain job at the Ann Arbor high school. By then, he had already been placed on ministerial leave pending an investigation by the Lansing Diocese, and the state Attorney General’s Office.
In court documents, the Diocese of Lansing and Archdiocese of Baltimore have argued that McLain’s lawsuit is barred by the statute of limitations and that the revised law does not cover individuals like McLain. While Livingston County Judge Suzanne Geddis disagrees, the church entities convinced the Michigan Court of Appeals to dismiss the case on those grounds.
So McLain appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear the case.
The backstory leading to the lawsuit
In a statement to the Free Press on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Diocese of Lansing said:
“Because the ruling of Michigan’s Court of Appeals correctly applied Michigan law, we are asking the Michigan Supreme Court to uphold that ruling. As the matter is in litigation, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.”
The defendants have 30 days to file their arguments to the Michigan Supreme Court. The case will not be heard for another six months.
According to court documents, McLain and his lawyers, here is the backstory to this potentially precedent-setting legal case:
In the spring of 1999, while McLain was a 16-year-old at the W.J. Maxey Boys Training School, he met a priest known as Father Lobert, who regularly visited the school to provide religious services and counseling to its residents.
McLain says he went to Mass on a weekly basis at the training school, and one day, sought the priest out for confession.
“I spoke with him about something I had done as a juvenile, and I wanted to repent,” McLain recalls.
But instead of helping the teen find redemption, McLain says, the priest took advantage of his vulnerabilities and began to “devise situations” to be alone with him so he could molest him.
“McLain asserts he felt powerless to refuse Lobert’s demands,” Geddis wrote in a Jan. 22 order. “McLain later became dependent on alcohol and opiates, and suffered from bipolar disorder and ADHD. … In November of 2020, through psychotherapy, McLain alleges he first connected his significant mental health and drug dependency issues with the sexual abuse trauma inflicted by Lobert.”
The church’s fight against the suit
In court documents, the Archdiocese of Baltimore sought to have the case dismissed not only on statute-of-limitation grounds, but claiming Michigan courts have no jurisdiction on the organization because it is located in Maryland, not Michigan. It also asserted that Lobert had nothing to do with the Baltimore Archdiocese since leaving for Michigan in 1995.
But McLain, the judge noted, produced a statement from the archdiocese indicating that in January 2021, Lobert remained a “priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.”
The judge also cited an official 2021 news release from the Baltimore Archdiocese, issued in the wake of the Lansing scandal, which stated: “Father Lobert, is a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and in light of this information, the Archdiocese of Baltimore has removed the archdiocesan priestly faculties of Father Lobert. (He) is not permitted to minster in the Archdiocese of Baltimore while the Diocese of Lansing is conducting its investigation.”
Geddis concluded that McLain’s lawsuit was timely under the revised law and allowed it to proceed, noting in her order: “The statute allows a victim to bring a claim ‘at any time’ before turning 28, or within three years of connection with assault with the injury, whichever is later.”
Delayed disclosure is common
While the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the church deities, attorney Ven Johnson, who is representing McLain, says he’s optimistic for his client, given the Supreme Court decided to hear his case.
“We are absolutely ecstatic,” Johnson said at a news conference Tuesday. stressing the revised law was meant to help people exactly like McLain: adults who have long been suffering in silence over abuse they endured as children.
“Child sexual abuse victims often say nothing, and when they do … they don’t disclose it until adulthood,” said Johnson, who called his client a brave “hero” for coming forward and proclaiming: “You can’t do this to me and get away with it.”
McLain’s case highlights what lawyers refer to as the delayed-disclosure phenomenon, where victims wait for years, often decades, before disclosing their abuse to others.
Data shows that this is the norm, rather than the exception.
According to a 2020 Delayed Disclosure report by national think tank Child USA:
- The average age a person reports child sex abuse is about 52 years old.
- Nearly 83% of adults say they never reported any rapes they experienced in childhood.
- 62% of child sex abuse victims remain silent forever.
McLain, meanwhile, hopes he inspires others suffering with childhood trauma to come forward, too.
“I know it’s hard. I know they don’t want to talk about it,” McLain said. But, he added: “Talk about it. … Tell somebody. People need to know about these things.”
After addressing the media, McLain hugged his mom, then his ex-wife — both of whom came to support him as he broke his silence about a painful childhood experience.
McLain says he has not seen a priest since then.
Contact Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress.com