WINDHAM (ME)
Portland Press Herald [Portland ME]
October 30, 2026
By Emily Allen
Kimberly Watkins Stevens and her attorney, Mitchell Garabedian, said the Maine diocese didn’t ask them to participate in a process that resolved more than 100 other civil claims of child sexual abuse.
When she was 8 years old, Kimberly Watkins Stevens said, she was sexually abused by a Catholic priest in Windham.
More than a dozen other adults have reported they were abused by the same priest, the Rev. Lawrence Sabatino, in the 1950s and 1960s. They recently resolved their civil claims against the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland through a settlement process — except for Stevens, now 68, whose attorney says she was not invited to participate.
“There is unfortunately nothing unique to this claim from Ms. Stevens,” her attorney Mitchell Garabedian said Friday.
He said he brought her case to the Roman Catholic bishop of Portland in 2021, when the state changed its law to allow anyone to sue for child sexual abuse, regardless of previous statutes of limitations. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court overturned that law last year after an appeal by the diocese.
Stevens, a Maine resident, can’t sue the diocese for child sexual abuse under current law. Garabedian said the diocese has refused to engage with settlement requests for more than five years.
A spokesperson for the Roman Catholic bishop of Portland declined to comment on Friday.
Stevens said she met Sabatino when she was a child through friends who were Catholic. Standing outside the chancery in Portland on Friday morning, with Garabedian on the phone, she recalled how Sabatino used to pick the children up and bring them to St. Peter’s Parish. She said she would wait until he finished Mass, and then he would take them to get a treat from a bakery.
She said Sabatino hung on to the treats until he took them to a property in Windham, where he would play “hide and go seek” with Stevens and the other children. During the visits to the property, she said, he would sexually abuse her. Stevens said she was abused five times before Sabatino invited her to a sleepover, which is when her parents said she couldn’t see him anymore.
Garabedian, a Massachusetts attorney who specializes in sexual abuse cases, said the diocese should have known at the time that Sabatino had been accused several times of abusing children. In 1958, a girl’s mother tried reporting him to police. Sabatino was assigned to nine different parishes over more than 30 years before he died in 1990, according to previous reporting.
He was later included on a list of 20 “credibly accused” clergy that the Office of the Maine Attorney General released following an investigation into the diocese in 2004.
The diocese recently resolved more than 100 claims against the church, involving allegations against several different clergy. Some of the claims were filed as lawsuits, others were never made public. Many included claims that were no longer able to be brought following the high court decision in 2025.
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Maine’s Catholic diocese settled older claims only when others agreed not to sue, lawyers say
Attorneys for some of the plaintiffs said the diocese only agreed to settle the older claims if all of their clients with active claims agreed to participate. At least one woman also had to agree she wouldn’t sue a different religious order, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, which employed a priest who pleaded guilty in 1988 to two counts of unlawful sexual contact with a 15-year-old girl.
Attorneys who were involved in the settlements declined to say how much was paid, but one attorney said it was a seven-figure amount.
Garabedian said he had asked the diocese for $2 million for Stevens.
Stevens said on Friday she learned about the settlements from news coverage. She said she wanted to share her story to bring attention to how that diocese has treated her case. She sought help through counseling and has struggled through many low periods, she said. Stevens said she was recently baptized and is a practicing protestant and has found some comfort in her faith.
She said she prays daily.
“But I did go through a time where it was like, how can a priest do this to me?” she said. “And how can I believe in anything?”