A Catholic Church diocese in Baltimore is trying to get bankruptcy protection as the laws are changed to remove the statute of limitations for lawsuits brought by sexual assault survivors. This seems like a fairly clear admission of guilt by the Church. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Well, a Catholic church diocese in Baltimore is trying to get bankruptcy protection as laws are changed to remove this statute of limitations, of course, for lawsuits brought for sexual offenses. The survivors should have a right to go to court. They’re going to court. And now the church is seeking protection in bankruptcy. This is a new trend, by the way, in the last three years, I’ve had to fight it several times. Johnson & Johnson, of course, trying to seek bankruptcy when they have $500 billion, they’re in bankruptcy court after killing thousands of women with their products. Thousands and will continue to kill more because there’s a latent aspect to it. They know that. It’s gonna go on for 30 years. The other one is the DuPont case on PFAS. When I was in trial with them, they saw things were bad. We had five cases and beat the hell out ’em five times, and they kind of saw the writing on the wall. So they sought bankruptcy protection, and they were worth billions. So now the church is saying, hey man, let’s try it. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. You’ve got a diocese there in Baltimore that is facing, I think there’s at least 600 allegations of abuse in the one diocese, 600, and Baltimore recently did away completely, not even just a temporary suspension, but did away with the statute of limitations. So these people who are now grown adults, say, listen, when I was in my younger years at the church, I was abused by this clergy member. So you’ve got 600 potential lawsuits. So the church says, ah, we’re outta money. Judge, you gotta save us. I know we’ve got $500 million right now. But the liability we’re facing is gonna wipe that out.
Mike Papantonio: You know, one major reason they do it, Farron, is because the stories are never told. The bankruptcy is very sterile. I mean, it’s the most sterile process. No claimant tells how they were sodomized and abused by this priest. None of the children get to talk about how they became captive in a series of years where they were abused year after year. They don’t talk about the suffering that these kids go through because, so one move for the bankruptcy court is, so nobody hears the story. We saw that, for example, on Johnson & Johnson. Nobody, Johnson & Johnson didn’t want the story told again in court how they set out to make a product knowing that the product had the ability to cause cancer in women. Outrageous cervical cancer. And so you go to bankruptcy court and that’s where you can hide it. DuPont, when I was in trial with that, go to bankruptcy court, and nobody tells the story about how these companies, how DuPont and 3M clearly knew that the product that they were making PFAS would cause cancer, would cause testicular cancer, kidney cancer, gastrointestinal issues. A whole host of problems. And so if they could get to bankruptcy court, they could keep that quiet. That’s a big reason that this Catholic church wants to do this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. Because then, like you said, everything just kind of stays strictly to the numbers. Right? You come in, were you abused? Okay. Yeah. All right. We’re gonna put you in this box. Thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it. How many years were you abused? Well, it went on for three years. No, no, no. Okay, fine. Three years. We gotcha.
Mike Papantonio: That’s it, exactly.
Farron Cousins: So everybody becomes just a statistic. Right. So how big of a piece of the pie do we get? And it could also be, you know, hey, let’s make ’em sign agreements. Like, you don’t get to go out there and tell your story to the press. You don’t get to talk to the media.
Mike Papantonio: An NDA. Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So it is terrible for the victims. Not only because it could limit the restitution that they get, but because the more important part is that we do not get to expose the abusers. We do not get to expose the system that allowed the abuse to happen in the first place and that’s the bigger part than just the abusers.
Mike Papantonio: You should read the opinion of how all this started. It started with something called the Texas two step, the most regressive Supreme Court, appellate court I have ever seen. If you were to line up, let’s get the dregs of conservative thought that come from corporate America, that all their careers as lawyers have protected corporations, all the years as judges have protected corporations. They wrote an opinion called the Texas two step that provides how this can be done. And if the Supreme Court doesn’t get it under control, it’s gonna be an absolute sham. Our justice process is gonna be a sham. We’ve been able to fight it off and I’ve fought like hell, and I’ve got some friends that have fought like hell to make this whole thing not affect consumers like corporate America would like it to. But it’s still a fight, you know.
