SYRACUSE (NY)
Post-Standard - Syracuse.com [Syracuse NY]
August 25, 2025
By Jon Moss
[This article is now available in a full-text version, so we are including it again on Abuse Tracker.]
Dozens of people crowded into a courtroom this spring to reveal the lasting scars from childhood sex abuse by clergy and church employees in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse.
The diocese has organized a $176 million fund to compensate the abuse survivors. If it were divided evenly over 411 people with claims, after some lawyers get paid, each would receive as much as $400,000.
But it won’t work that way. Instead, a court-managed process will try to calculate a way to give the most money to the people hurt the worst.
This will turn the years of pain for each of the hundreds of abuse survivors into a specific cold, hard number.
How were you abused? For how long? Where did it happen? How have you coped with it over decades?
All these elements of shattered lives, and more, will be fed into a point system that ultimately decides a survivor’s compensation.
Roger Kramer, a lawyer from Minneapolis, has been hired to figure this out, as he’s done in other cities where dioceses were held accountable.
Kramer’s firm will review each claim and assign it a point value. A survivor’s percentage of the total points equals their percentage of the fund.
The fund is key to the diocese’s plan to exit bankruptcy, where the survivors would be paid if they end their lawsuits against the church.
Survivors have voted several times overwhelmingly in favor of the plan. The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case could approve the plan as soon as this week.
Once the plan is approved, Kramer will review each abuse claim through a process outlined in a six-page document called the Allocation Protocol.
Kramer will first ensure the claim is not fraudulent or a duplicate. The claim must be proven by a preponderance of the evidence, meaning it is more likely than not that the abuse took place.
They must fill out an involved form: Who and how many people committed the abuse, the nature of it and how old they were when it happened. The person can also submit additional information.
Each survivor’s claim is then scored and can be given up to 200 points. Kramer will generally use three factors:
- The nature of the abuse and the circumstances, including the duration and frequency of the abuse, the type of abuse, whether the abuser exhibited any grooming behaviors and the location of the abuse, such as a church facility.
- The impact of the abuse, such as whether the abuse led to issues with mental or physical health, spiritual well-being or interpersonal relationships.
- The involvement of the person filing the claim, such as whether the person filed a lawsuit or whether the person or their family has been subject to a deposition, mediation or an interview.
The bankruptcy of the Archdiocese of New Orleans shows how it can work. Sexual penetration equals 75 points. Oral sex is 56 points. Taking and publishing a video of the abuse is 20 points.Over the clothes or under the clothes?
The proposed payment to Syracuse survivors is likely to be decided two to three months after the judge approves the plan, according to Taylor Stippel Sloan, a lawyer representing some of the survivors.
A survivor can appeal to Kramer. That costs $425.
Kramer has worked as a mediator and claims reviewer in other diocese bankruptcy cases, including in California, Guam, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.
He declined a request for an interview, citing court-ordered confidentiality.
It has become common around the country for Catholic dioceses to declare bankruptcy as a way to get more control over a mountain of abuse claims. Thousands of priests nationwide have been credibly accused of abuse, a scandal that has rocked the church for decades.
The process of divvying up millions of dollars among the abuse survivors is essentially the last phase of the diocese’s bankruptcy case.
The Syracuse diocese, which covers seven counties, filed for bankruptcy in June 2020 as it faced a growing number of abuse claims. Lawsuits filed by survivors were frozen as the bankruptcy process got under way.
Another lawyer doing this work is Camille Biros, who works at a boutique law firm in Washington headed by Kenneth Feinberg, a nationally known expert on these kinds of funds. Biros has worked on mass claims cases ranging from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Biros was played by Amy Ryan and Feinberg by Michael Keaton in the 2020 movie “Worth.”
“The value of the claims depends on both the nature of the abuse — what exactly did the minor suffer from clergy abuse — and also the number of incidents, how often,” Feinberg said in a Colorado Public Radio story about his role in a Catholic abuse settlement there. “We have had cases involving a claimant who was abused once and that was it. And then we’ve had claimants who were abused a hundred times or more over a number of years. So those are the factors that enter into a valuing the claim.”
The law firm has been hired by dioceses, including in New York City and Pittsburgh, to run compensation funds. It is not involved in the Syracuse case.
Biros told syracuse.com | The Post-Standard that a point system wasn’t part of the diocese cases she handled, but considered factors similar to the ones Kramer will employ.
“We set amounts based on the seriousness, the length of time the abuse went on, how old the child was and other circumstances,” she said.