MINNESOTA
St. Cloud Times
Karen Cyson, Times Writers Group February 18, 2016
This is not publicity for an attorney. It’s news reporting. Anderson is an attorney, and his responsibility is not to seek publicity for himself, but justice for victims.
A recent Times letter writer rekindled an oft-heard complaint that St. Paul attorney Jeffery Anderson was getting too much publicity in newspapers.
The majority of the Anderson firm’s work is helping victims of clergy sexual abuse seek justice, and his name is often mentioned in print when he is pursuing a case involving a child who has been raped by a Catholic priest.
Does this constitute publicity? Hardly.
An Associated Press article last week concerning a recent Anderson case, similar to other articles in the past few years regarding Anderson’s advocating for victims, clearly illustrates this.
The report is about 500 words and concerns a priest from India hired by the Diocese of Crookston to serve at a parish in northern Minnesota in 2004. In 2010 he was charged with sexually assaulting two 14-year-old girls. The priest fled the United States and was apprehended by INTEPOL in India, extradited, pleaded guilty to molesting one of the girls. He was sentenced to the year he’d served in jail while awaiting trial, returned to India, and has now been cleared by the Roman Catholic Church to return to parish work.
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