To a lawyer’s mind, Carlson’s behavior was an invitation to a lawsuit. How could a senior executive at a corporation with the wealth of an archdiocese admit to such a cavalier response to an underling’s criminal activity? However, Anderson was hardly an expert in litigation involving churches. Actually, he had never even considered the issues that would arise with a civil case against a religious institution. But like anyone who knew the Constitution, he understood that religion enjoyed special status under the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Courts had generally read the First Amendment to protect religion from state regulations, and religious institutions had frequently avoided lawsuits under its protection.
The power and stature of the Catholic Church had played a major role in Tom Krauel’s decision to decline John and Janet’s request for representation. Krauel also knew that Jeffrey Anderson wouldn’t be intimidated, and he was right. As he considered moving forward, Anderson realized he was dealing with an institution with influence at all levels of society. Much like the government, the Church had almost limitless resources. Suing the Church would require several different weapons, including the threat of public scandal, to pressure bishops to do the right thing.
And what was the right thing? In this case the lawyer and the clients agreed that children should be protected from Adamson and that the police and church could both play a role in making this happen. Beyond this public safety concern, Janet and John Lyman wanted compensation that would pay for the psychological care of their son and recognize the pain and suffering visited on their family by Adamson and his superiors. Finally, they hoped to inflict a bit of financial pain on the institution, enough to make bishops everywhere think twice about covering up for pedophile priests and leaving them in positions where they can continue to commit crimes against children. All this could be accomplished, said Anderson, and he would do the work on a contingency basis, for a percentage of any payments made by Adamson, the Church, or insurance companies.
Before the Lymans left his office, Anderson tried to allay their worries about suing an entity as vast and powerful as the Catholic Church. He reminded them that, at least theoretically speaking, no one in America is above the law. And while he had never heard of anyone filing such an action, there was a first time for everything. Since the check sent by the bishop had no strings attached he told them to go ahead and cash it and use the proceeds to help their son. Summoning up his best bedside manner, he shook hands with the couple and promised to start work immediately, with a call to the police. Greg had been the victim of a crime and it should be reported.
As his new clients departed, Anderson felt a combination of shock, sorrow, and rage. He had never contemplated the idea that a priest might abuse a boy in his congregation, or that the Church hierarchy would hide the crime and protect the perpetrator. At the same time, he had rarely seen a couple as grief-stricken as John and Janet Lyman. Their faith had been destroyed by a priest who had transformed their son from an ordinary thirteen-year-old into a shame-bound sex offender. Greg’s parents said their son felt profoundly guilty for what he had done and could barely look at himself in the mirror. Would he ever be able to recover his sense of self-worth? Would he be able to have a trusting relationship? What about having children of his own?
The questions were disturbing but they also compelled Anderson to reflect on his role in this drama, and here he felt a rush of adrenaline. Although he was intimidated by the prospect of challenging the Church, he was also excited. Ever since he considered becoming a lawyer he had preferred the idea of representing the powerless against the powerful. This interest had drawn Anderson to represent victims of police brutality and racial discrimination. In this case, he would take on an institution connected to the elite at every level of society, possessing almost unlimited funds with which they could hire the very best lawyers available. The Church was also wealthy enough to pay significant damages.
Any trial lawyer would wish for a less compromised client, but Anderson believed he could present the unseemly parts of Greg Lyman’s background as proof of the damage done to him by a priest who should never have been permitted to work with young people. He also suspected that others had been sexually abused under similar circumstances. The publicity around Lyman’s case would inspire others who had been victimized to come forward with their own claims. In a few years’ time, the exposure of the depth of deception practiced by bishops would change public attitudes toward church authority.
Of course the law, especially statutes of limitation and the First Amendment to the Constitution, would present obstacles to anyone seeking to develop sex abuse claims against the Church. And in Anderson’s case the prospects were complicated by a lifestyle that seemed almost designed to create personal problems. Easily bored and craving excitement, he found it hard to turn down the offer of an after-work drink, which invariably led to six more. A true reckoning could have come on one of those nights when he drove his black Mustang through St. Paul at eighty miles per hour, navigating for home with a mind soaked in alcohol. The cops actually stopped him just once. On that occasion his blood alcohol level was well over the legal limit. But this was a time before society had turned decidedly against drunk drivers. Anderson was steady enough to persuade the officers that he wasn’t a danger to himself or others and they let him drive home.
On the nights when he didn’t come home at all, Anderson’s wife Patti worried and then seethed. When she suspected he was involved with another woman she began voicing her fears and challenging his denials.
“Where were you?” she would shout. “Who is she?”
As he deflected Patti’s questions, Anderson felt flashes of shame and then anger. More drink and drugs freed him from his conscience and allowed him to take what his ego said he deserved. In the back of his mind he knew what he was doing was wrong, but he stubbornly indulged himself. On the rare occasions when he was caught out he would apologize and promise to change. Sometimes he even cried.
* * *
While Anderson’s personal life spun wildly from crisis to crisis, his friend Grant Hall had gotten sober. It took a month at the Hazelden clinic, which was fifty miles away, and about a year of occasional slips before the cure set in. During that year he hadn’t said much of anything about Hazelden, or his affiliation with Alcoholics Anonymous, but they clearly worked. When he reached a crisis point in his marriage Anderson was willing to give rehab a try but not as an in-patient. He signed up instead for a day program at a place called Twin Town Treatment Center, where thirty days of sobriety earned a patient a clean bill of health.
Like most, the program at Twin Town leaned on AA and its famous Twelve Steps, which require more sincerity than many addicts can muster the first time around. Anderson had trouble with the very first step, which required him to declare he was powerless over drink and that his life was “unmanageable.” He could and did stay sober for days and even weeks, which didn’t seem like powerlessness to him. As for his life being “unmanageable,” Anderson thought his success at work proved he was managing most things well. Finally there were those steps related to “God as we understand him.” He didn’t believe in a conventional God and wouldn’t pretend that he did.
Anderson made it to the twenty-ninth day and then made a deliberate choice—some would call it a “fuck you” decision—to get high and forthrightly report his condition to the staff at Twin Town. In payment for his honesty he was dismissed without whatever ceremony would have accompanied successful completion of the program. Having blown his shot at redemption, Anderson quickly returned to his self-indulgent ways. In a year’s time Patti would leave him and begin the long process of divorce. Most of his friends and colleagues, who preferred the fun-loving, generous, and entertaining Jeff Anderson they knew under the influence, rallied around him. But the few who had gotten sober, like Grant Hall, didn’t come around as much as t
hey once did.
At work it did occur to Anderson that more than half the criminal cases he saw involved drugs or alcohol or both, but this knowledge did little to change his behavior. Despite his deep-seated sense of right and wrong, he carved out exceptions in his personal life that allowed for a return to drinking and drugs and women who were not his wife. He did feel guilty, but there was something about taking the risk that made him feel good. It wasn’t the sex, but rather the feeling that came with a complex and dangerous challenge. The calm sense of focus that he felt when taking a big risk even led him to carry cocaine, secreted in an empty Chapstick tube, when he left the office for appointments.
In the mid-1980s, cocaine was practically a marker of the legal profession across America. A stimulant, it could have the paradoxical effect of calming hyperactive minds, and many lawyers were hyperactive in the extreme. For some, like Anderson, the illegality of the drug added a bit of excitement to life. He actually felt better when living dangerously. In order to keep feeling good, he justified his behavior with the idea that he was special in a way others wouldn’t understand.
It was this seemingly invulnerable ego that moved Jeffrey Anderson from case to case and courthouse to courthouse, certain that he could keep every one of his criminal defendants out of prison or win enough money to keep his civil clients happy and pay his own bills. Most of the time he succeeded and his confidence grew. Julie Aronson heard it in his voice when he called the Minneapolis Trial Lawyers Association, and she felt it when she first met him, in February 1982, at a bar at the airport. As staffer for the MTLA she was shepherding a dozen lawyers to Aspen, Colorado, for a conference.
* * *
Although she looked and acted like a far more mature person, Aronson was just twenty-one years old and the poise she showed was mostly an act. Born when her own mother Rosalie was just seventeen, Julie was ten when her parents divorced. As a teen she was a lonely girl who claimed no clique or close friends. At the end of the school day she went home to care for her siblings or to work. She studied Glamour and Seventeen magazines and noted the ways of women on television. (Farrah Fawcett and Marlo Thomas were favorites.) Her father, who read Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie, helped with the occasional words of wisdom that went into her mind and stuck. “Hold your shoulders back and be proud,” he would say. But more often James Aronson would say he was disappointed in his daughter. She never measured up to his expectations.
On the day after she graduated from high school, Julie Aronson found an apartment, salvaged a bed frame left outside as trash, and began an independent life. With careful shopping she put together a professional woman’s wardrobe to support a personality—part Marlo, part Farrah—that she also constructed herself. In order to get the job at the MTLA she lied and said she could type. Hours of drills, conducted into the night, helped her sustain the bluff until she actually could type well enough. But behind the polish, this seemingly well-bred and confident woman was wary, worried, and naive. Alone on Sundays she thought about families sitting down to dinner together. She remembered a recurring fantasy she had as a girl. In this daydream she was the mother of one child and pregnant with another and she sat beside her husband at a Christmas Eve church service.
The dream was about convention and security but Julie was also, at twenty-one, eager to see more of the world before she settled down. In Aspen she went out every night with the MTLA group and was all but swept off her feet by Jeff Anderson. She considered his job in the growing field of trial law, his clothes, and his personality and judged him “completely legit.” By the time they went back to St. Paul, she and Jeff were a couple. By year’s end she would move into his house, a huge, halfway restored Victorian landmark that occupied a hill overlooking St. Mary Catholic Church, downtown Stillwater, and the St. Croix River.
During this time Anderson and his partner Mark Reinhardt were flush with money from their thriving legal practice. Both men started dressing in tailor-made suits. Reinhardt bought a full-length fur coat to wear when they went out on frigid Minnesota nights. The firm moved into new offices in a building called the Conwed Tower on Cedar Street. Although the space was modern/bland, the high-rise address had cachet. The views from the tenth floor took in the Mississippi River and the massive dome of the Catholic Cathedral of St. Paul.
Good friends as well as partners, Anderson and Reinhardt began taking three-day weekends in Las Vegas, accompanied by their women friends. Not yet the family-friendly Vegas of the twenty-first century, the town was nirvana for people who loved risk and flash, and Anderson played it to the hilt. He bought a white suit, and a pair of white leather boots decorated with red flames that started on the heel and rose up the shank. Add the heavy gold chains he took in payment for some legal work for a drug dealer and he was the picture of Vegas style circa 1980.
Like many gamblers, Anderson fell under the spell of the very real, but also unpredictable, payouts at the blackjack tables. Psychologists call the tantalizing ways that games of chance reward players “random reinforcement” and note that it’s the best way to turn a lab animal into an addict. In Anderson’s case, it turned him into a dazzling showman who could entertain not only himself, but a score of strangers at the Riviera Hotel. Watching him, Julie thought she had never seen anyone so confident.
5. THE CATHOLIC STATES OF AMERICA
While Minos Simon had leveraged the publicity and facts of the criminal case against Gilbert Gauthe to win $1 million from the Diocese of Lafayette for the Gastal family, Jeffrey Anderson found himself blocked by the criminal law in Minnesota. The police wouldn’t accept Greg Lyman’s complaint against Fr. Thomas Adamson because the offenses took place beyond a three-year statute of limitations and he was no longer a minor. In the meantime the Church did whatever it could to slow Anderson’s efforts to discover the facts and context of his civil case. They responded to his requests for documents only when he was able to name the precise papers he was seeking and explain why they were relevant.
This is the catch-22 in the process called “discovery.” Litigants are permitted to ask for information and defendants are required to produce it. However, they may also withhold files if the wording of the request is the least bit off, or if the records can be deemed irrelevant. These exceptions meant that Anderson had to imagine which documents might exist, and guess how they were catalogued. Both sides knew his purpose. He wanted to show that Adamson had abused his client, and wasn’t a lone actor but rather an agent of the Church who was supervised by higher authorities. This context was vital to the story Anderson would tell a jury, in order to claim compensation, and perhaps punitive damages, from not one diocese, but two.
Anderson was able to pursue two dioceses because Adamson had been sent to St. Paul, where he abused Gregory Lyman, by the bishop of Winona, who covered the state’s twenty-two southern counties. Adamson’s employment record showed a pattern of sudden transfers within the Winona district. Then suddenly, in 1975, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul to study, of all things, marriage counseling. In the records Anderson received as part of the discovery process, bishops in both dioceses noted that Adamson needed treatment at a church counseling center, but they never mentioned the specific nature of his problem. Typical was this passage in a memo sent by St. Paul archbishop John Roach to a member of his staff in January 1976:
For reasons which Bishop Watters was unwilling to discuss on the telephone, but which he is promising to share with me later, he is asking that Father Adamson continue to work in the diocese for another year or year and a half.
Reading between the lines, anyone would surmise that Bishop Loras Watters of knew the “reasons” at the time he sent Adamson to St. Paul. It was also reasonable to guess that at some point Watters and Roach discussed the details, which would lead any responsible supervisor to keep a close eye on him. But no note in the files delivered in discovery showed that the men actually had such a conversation. They do refer to his ongoing treatment by a priest/psychol
ogist named Kenneth Pierre. Two years after he sent Adamson away from Winona, Watters told Pierre that despite the psychologist’s positive assessment of the priest’s progress, Adamson still failed to grasp the seriousness of his situation. Wrote Watters:
I am convinced that he doesn’t even begin to appreciate the numbers of people in at least five different communities across the entire diocese who have finally pieced together incidents across a five-year span and now openly raise questions about the credibility of all priests. Obviously I am writing to you in confidence. You would only have to struggle through the painful sessions I have had with heartbroken and bewildered parents who only now have come to discover the source of the some of the problems of their sons.
Going on to note that he had consulted fellow priests who agreed that Adamson had to be kept out of the Winona diocese, Watters expressed some sympathy for the man. Adamson had begged to come home to the familiar region where he was born and raised. However, Watters was firm in his refusal. Adamson needed more treatment, he wrote, and he needed to “honestly face the fact that he cannot accept an appointment in the diocese now or even in the immediate future.”
As Watters and Roach studiously avoided putting words like “sex crimes” or “misconduct” in writing, they also said nothing about preventing Adamson from abusing young people he would encounter while working as a priest in the St. Paul area. These gaps in the record suggested questions for a lawyer who wanted to prove negligence. What did Watters know of Adamson’s specific problems? Did he share what he knew with Roach? Who were the parents who had brought their disturbing questions to the bishop?
Armed with these questions, Anderson lined up a series of depositions. The two big ones, interrogations of Watters and Adamson, were set for consecutive days near the end of March 1986. The first took place in a conference room at a bank building in Winona where six lawyers who represented various Church entities crowded around Watters, who, at seventy years old, had thinning white hair and sloping shoulders. Peering from behind thick black-rimmed glasses, he looked to Anderson like an animal frozen in the beam of a high-powered light.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 8