PORTLAND (ME)
Portland Press Herald [Portland ME]
September 2, 2026
By Emily Allen
The settlement process resolved roughly 100 claims, brought by people who said they were sexually abused as children by clergy of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland.
Lawyers say Maine’s Catholic diocese agreed to settle claims brought by people who said they were sexually abused by clergy as children but were unable to sue, following a ruling from the state’s highest court, only if dozens who could sue agreed to drop their cases.
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court struck down a state law in 2025 that made it possible for people with decades-old claims to sue for child sexual abuse, following an appeal by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland arguing that the diocese and other entities had a “vested right” in being protected from the older claims.
Dozens of people who had come forward before then, saying they had been abused by Maine clergy as far back as the 1950s, were again barred from taking their cases to court. So were those who had used the new law to sue other organizations whose employees were accused of abuse.
The diocese announced the recent settlements in a public statement on July 30 without specifying how many claims were resolved or how much money was paid. Attorneys for the plaintiffs said more than 100 clients were involved, and that roughly half were covered by a seven-figure payout.
Keith Amato, who spoke at a news conference about the settlements on Aug. 20, told reporters he chose to settle in solidarity with those who can’t bring their claims to court under Maine law. Amato’s claim related to abuse he said he experienced at a parish in Van Buren when he was a child. Like other people involved in the settlement process, Amato hadn’t filed a civil complaint in court against the diocese and he was not directly affected by the high court’s ruling.
Attorney Jessica Arbour said during a news conference on Wednesday that the diocese required one of her clients, who said she was sexually abused by a priest at St. Dominic’s in Lewiston in the 1980s, to drop her claims against a separate religious order, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, as part of the agreement to settle dozens of other claims.
That priest — Brother Shawn McEnany — pleaded guilty in 1988 to two counts of unlawful sexual contact with a 15-year-old female student in Maine. After that he worked at another Catholic school in New Hampshire, where Arbour said “he continued to abuse children.”
“How messed up to put it on a survivor, that these other people can’t heal because of your decision,” Arbour, who is one of the lawyers representing people who reached settlements with the diocese in the past year, said.
A spokesperson for Bishop James Ruggieri declined to comment on Wednesday.
Attorneys said on Wednesday that the diocese has not responded to repeated requests for apologies.
“We just wanted accountability and justice, and we had to fight tooth and nail to get that,” said Ann Allen, one of dozens of people who sued the diocese in 2022 before the high court’s ruling.
In her lawsuit, Allen said she was sexually abused by the Rev. Lawrence Sabatino when she was about 6 years old, at St. Peter’s Parish in Portland in 1960.
Allen’s lawyers said she was abused two years after the mother of a different girl, Patricia Butkowski, tried reporting Sabatino to the diocese for abusing her daughter in 1958. Butkowski attended and spoke at the news conference with Allen via Zoom.
Their attorney, Michael Bigos, said Butkowski’s case should have put the diocese on notice more than 60 years ago, but that the church continued to move Sabatino to different parishes.
“And for decades, dozens or hundreds of more were abused and injured as a result of the diocese’s choices,” Bigos said. “That was completely preventable.”
At least a dozen people who were abused by Sabatino were included in the recent settlements, according to their attorneys.
There was also a group of people who had brought claims for sexual abuse by the Rev. John Curran, and several members of the Penobscot Nation who said they were abused as children by different church employees at St. Ann church on the Indian Island reservation, from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Curran, Sabatino, and several other adults who were referenced in the decades-old lawsuits were included in a list of “credibly accused” clergy that resulted from an investigation by the Office of the Maine Attorney General in 2004.
Most of the clergy referenced in the various lawsuits are dead, including McEnany, who died in 2017. Bigos and Arbour said that by settling, their clients signed standard agreements dropping all civil claims against members who were employed at the diocese at the time of the reported abuse.
At least two members of the clergy who were referenced in civil complaints are still alive and nothing in the settlement agreements prohibits the plaintiffs from speaking with police or others for potential criminal charges, the lawyers said. None of the plaintiffs signed nondisclosure agreements preventing them from discussing the abuse.
Roughly 10 people who had brought claims against the diocese died before the settlements concluded, and, in those cases, the diocese paid the estates, Bigos said.
Bigos has been involved in child sexual abuse cases against the diocese for more than five years, and he was an early supporter of a law that took effect in 2021, allowing anyone in Maine to sue for child sexual abuse, regardless of when it occurred.
Following the high court’s decision last year, which reinstated Maine laws barring anyone who was abused before 1987 from pursuing a civil claim, Bigos said advocates are not giving up on changing Maine’s statute of limitations.
Allen said she plans to continue advocating for people who have experienced child sexual abuse.
“We have the right to tell our stories, in our own words, and on our own terms,” Allen said during the news conference. “I want any survivor who hears this to know, what happened to you was not your fault. You deserved to be protected, you deserved to be believed, and you deserve support and healing.”
IF YOU or someone you know has experienced sexual abuse, you can call Maine’s Sexual Assault Crisis and Support Line at 1-800-871-7741 to talk to someone who can help. You can learn more online here.
OR you can call National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or chat at online.rainn.org
Emily Allen covers courts for the Portland Press Herald. It’s her favorite beat so far — before moving to Maine in 2022, she reported on a wide range of topics for public radio in West Virginia and was… More by Emily Allen