Real journalism: The Los Angeles Daily News exposes an epidemic of child sex abuse in L.A. public schools

Just in the last 15 months, some 600 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have either been fired, have resigned, or have been administratively "housed" due to allegations of serious "inappropriate conduct," much of it involving sickening child sex abuse.

Barbara Jones at the Los Angeles Daily News newspaper exclusively reported this shocking revelation this past Sunday.

Your tax dollars funding child sex abuse

Jones conducted a series of interviews with current LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy in which the pair reviewed cases where teachers were just recently fired. Among the jaw-dropping allegations:

• an elementary school teacher molested seven students, boys and girls;
• a high school teacher forced boys and girls to role-play sex acts between "master and slave," and would act out scenes in which he'd put his head on students' chests;
• after a girl complained that a high school teacher had sexually harassed her, the district confiscated his computer and found 22 films and 42 images of pornography, along with inappropriate emails to students;
• a female teacher took along a female student on a visit to a Hollywood sex shop, where the instructor purchased sex "paraphernalia";
• a female middle school teacher engaged in a years-long "salacious and inappropriate sexual" relationship with a former female student;
• a male middle school teacher had girls write poems about their buttocks (he had complaints in his file dating back to 1997 which were ignored);
• a male high school teacher was admonished at six schools for acts such as "ordering [girls] to stand up in class to exhibit the size of their breasts and making them do jumping jacks in the classroom";
• after a male middle school teacher accidentally projected hard-core pornography to his class, the district confiscated his computer and found two X-rated videos and 636 pornographic images.

These eye-popping charges are on the heels of the news just two months ago that LAUSD paid out nearly $30 million to settle lawsuits stemming from alleged abuse at just one elementary school. A teacher at the school is alleged to have spoon-fed semen to his students as part of a "tasting game."

And just last week, an attorney claimed that he had proof that LAUSD knew about abuse at yet another elementary school before parents reported the abuse to police.

Mainstream media: Missing in action

Kudos again to Barbara Jones
of the Los Angeles Daily News

Not one media outlet outside of Los Angeles has reported on these incredibly disturbing revelations, and even the attention in L.A. itself is negligible. 600 public school teachers are out abusing innocent children today, and the Los Angeles Times has yet to even report on this story.

While the mainstream media continues to hyperventilate over alleged episodes of abuse many decades ago in the Catholic Church – often involving priests who have long since died – it continues to turn a blind eye to these massive cases happening today in our taxpayer-funded public schools.

The glaring double standard never ends.

Kudos once again to Barbara Jones. If the journalism world knows what it's doing, there should be a Pulitzer Prize heading her way for her groundbreaking work in protecting children in Los Angeles. But don't bank on it.

• “Over 100,000 victims of clergy sexual abuse have come forward in the United States alone”: The 2004 John Jay study, the most comprehensive study ever done on the issue of Catholic cleric abuse in the United States, found that only one tenth of that number, 10,667, have made such allegations. And the study included all accusations going back to 1950, a period of over a half a century. And in that same period, there were less than 110,000 men serving as Catholic priests in the U.S. For the film’s outrageous claim to be true, there would be one victim for nearly every priest who ever served in that period. Berg’s claim is preposterous for sure.
• “President Bush granted the Pope immunity from prosecution”: President Bush didn’t “grant” anybody anything. The United States has recognized the Holy See as a state since 1984. As the head of state, the Pope cannot be called to a trial in another country in the same way that a lawyer in another country cannot simply call in our President. Heads of state have immunity.
• “Oliver O’Grady is still roaming free in Ireland”: The claim on its surface is true, but the implication is that the Church should have an eye on him. The truth is that the Church laicized O’Grady. (It means that he is no longer a priest, that he is just a regular citizen. This is a common request by abuse victims.) The Church has no oversight over O’Grady than it has over any other private citizen in the country. The fact that O’Grady is “roaming free in Ireland” should be a criticism of the Irish government, not the Catholic Church.
• “Cardinal Roger Mahony is still in office fighting sexual abuse allegations against 556 priests in his (Los Angeles) diocese”: “556”? Try 254, less than half of Berg’s claim. And those are 254 priests with accusations dating back to 1930. Nearly thirty percent of the 254 priests were deceased at the time of their accusation.
• “The Catholic Church declined to be interviewed for this documentary”: If the topic of the film weren’t so sickening, this line would be comical. “The Catholic Church”? “Declined”? Reviewer Grant Gallicho for Religion News Service rightly asked, “Which part?” The Pope? A cardinal? A bishop? Amy Berg doesn’t tell us. Gallicho asked the chairwoman of the Church’s national lay review board, which has spent as much time as anybody addressing abuse cases, if filmmakers had contacted the group. They had not. But judging from the final product of the film, any Church officials would surely have been portrayed unfairly and in the most unflattering way.

Yet probably the most unprincipled contrivance in the film is when the filmmakers and their accomplice, Fr. Thomas Doyle, cajole now-adult victims of O’Grady into thinking that they can travel to the Vatican unannounced and meet Church “hierarchy” (the Pope, maybe?). Preying on the terrible pain and awful abuse that O’Grady caused, Berg and Fr. Doyle lead the victims into thinking that they could simply write a letter to the Vatican, show up at the front doors, and possibly meet the Holy Father. Needless to say, this doesn’t happen. The film catalogs the disappointment, and the victims are pained even further.

This is Hollywood exploitation at its ugliest. As a Catholic priest, Fr. Doyle would know more than anyone that citizens cannot merely show up at the Vatican without an appointment and meet high-level administrators. This would be about as likely as walking up to the White House uninvited, being escorted inside, and being able to meet with the Vice President. When Doyle’s maneuver fails, he claims that the Church “rejected [the victims],” “abused them,” and “[made] them out to be enemies of the Church.”

The obvious goal of Berg was to anger viewers further in their distaste for the Catholic Church for “turning away” abuse victims. But any clear-thinking viewer would direct his or her anger at Berg for exploiting people’s hopes, vulnerabilities, and pains.

PART I: Serious Problems With Facts

PART II: A Fallacious Attack on Cardinal Mahony

The Times profiled the hero of these undercover busts, Lila Rose, a 20-year-old student at UCLA ("Antiabortion movement gets a new-media twist"). Rose's pro-life mission that has been conducting these hidden-camera operations is called Live Action.

Yet, rather than directing any real outrage at Planned Parenthood for concealing the despicable crimes of statutory rape and child abuse, the Times seemed more perturbed at the "conservative" personalities behind Rose and her efforts. From the article:

• Last month, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to suspend a grant worth nearly $300,000 to Planned Parenthood that was earmarked for sex education, not abortions. A conservative Tustin businessman raised the issue with Supervisor John Moorlach after meeting Rose and seeing her videos.
• "They are on the lookout for me," [Rose] told an audience of conservative Christian activists at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit in Washington in September.
• David French, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund … appeared at [Rose's] side during an interview with conservative TV talk-show host Bill O'Reilly. She also receives guidance from CRC Public Relations, a Washington-area firm that represents conservative clients and had a hand in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that targeted Democrat John F. Kerry during the 2004 presidential race.
• Between 2006 and 2008, Rose attended four workshops at the Leadership Institute, a Virginia-based educational foundation that teaches conservatives how to polish their communication skills.
• In fall 2006, when she was a UCLA freshman, [Rose] and fellow conservative activist James O'Keefe came up with the idea to infiltrate clinics.

The Times also went out of their way to omit a lot of information that would be unflattering to Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. For example, from the article:

Rose, by e-mail, and O'Keefe, in a phone interview, said they were inspired by the work of Mark Crutcher, a Texas antiabortion activist who in 2002 taped fake calls to hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics around the country featuring women posing as pregnant minors.

What the Times failed to tell their readers is that Crutcher's investigation found that a whopping 91% of the abortion businesses did not comply with child abuse reporting laws(!).

The Times also wrote,

In May 2007, Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles accused Rose of breaking state privacy laws when she secretly taped her interactions. It demanded she remove the videos from her website, which she did, though they are still easily found on YouTube. (Arizona, Indiana and Tennessee, where she went next, have less restrictive privacy laws.)

The Times didn't bother to inform their readers that a Planned Parenthood worker is heard on the tape telling a girl that she believes to be 15, "You could say 16…well, just figure out a birth date that works. And I don’t know anything." Such advice appears to be a clear violation of California's penal codes regarding the reporting of child abuse.

And as we reported at the time, the Los Angeles Times did not publish a single article about this outrage, even though it happened right in their backyard.

Rather than shine some light on the actions by Planned Parenthood workers that seem so illegal, the Times appeared more concerned about Rose and her operations.

For this story, Rose would answer questions only by e-mail. When contacted in December, she agreed to meet a reporter the next day but canceled, citing schoolwork, and refused to reschedule. She was subsequently advised by a publicist to communicate only in writing.

She did not answer a question about who funds her work, saying only that she operates "on a very low budget" and uses "mostly student volunteers." Federal tax records for Live Action Films, created in 2008, are not yet available.

The Times wants their readers to forget about Planned Parenthood concealing statutory rape and child abuse. They'd rather try to marginalize Rose and shine light on Live Action's "federal tax records." Gee. What about Planned Parenthood's tax records?!

By the way, the author of the Times' awful piece is staffer Robin Abcarian, who also penned an October 2008 hit piece on Sarah Palin (title: "Sarah Palin's college years left no lasting impression").

(See also Matthew Balan's 4/27/09 NB post regarding this issue and US News' Bonnie Erbe. My take: It seems Erbe is more outraged at the crime of "trespassing" and so-called "fraud" than concealing child rape. If these were Catholic bishops or priests on these tapes concealing this awful crime, would it matter to Erbe, the Los Angeles Times, or anyone in the media who made the tape or what their agenda is? Of course not.)

• A high school athletic coach was charged with 12 felony counts of sexually assaulting an underage girl, including "five counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object while the victim was unconscious and one count of possession of child pornography." "[P]olice said they believe there may be other victims." The man was also a special education assistant (link).
• A former Special Education high school teacher was sentenced to three years in prison after charges of lewd conduct, child molestation, and abuse. The alleged crimes involved four of his "particularly vulnerable" students (additional link).
• A high school principal was arrested for child pornography on his home computer. Authorities also discovered that he "had posed as a 12-year-old girl in an online chat room and engaged in sexually explicit talk."
• A high school teacher pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail for having sex with a minor. County deputies found the teacher and the underage female student in the back of a car in a parking lot.
• A band teacher was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography on his laptop computer.
• A high school girls' volleyball coach was fired after a lawsuit surfaced alleging he had a sexual relationship with a female student at his previous school.

But there's more: Steve Thomas Rooney, a former assistant principal at an LAUSD middle school, was arrested last week – again (Thu. 9/18/08). After already being charged for molesting three students, Rooney was arrested on charges for molesting a fourth. Rooney now faces as many as 18 felony counts (LAT/NB). Rooney was assigned to his job at the middle school in August 2007 even though the District knew that police had investigated him about an alleged sexual relationship with a student at his previous job at a high school. That former high school girl has since testified that Rooney impregnated her. (LAT coverage) LAUSD removed two senior administrators from their posts in May for mishandling the case. But guess what? The district quietly returned the pair to work. Then a third administrator, a high school dean, surrendered to face charges that he withheld evidence regarding Rooney and one of the underage female students.

Earlier this year we wrote how KNX reporter Steve Feldman exclusively reported that "21 teachers and administrators have been yanked from [LAUSD] schools in the past year because of allegations of inappropriate sexual contact with kids." That was in May. What is the total number now? We also wrote of how Feldman questioned LAUSD Deputy Superintendent Ramon Cortines over the phone about the scandal. Cortines became agitated by the questioning and actually hung up on Feldman (must-hear audio). In discussing the scandal with KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, Cortines defiantly responded, "This is not out of the ordinary for school districts all over the nation. These things happen."

"These things happen"? Where's the outrage? Where's the media coverage?

Since 2002, the media has frolicked in covering decades-old allegations of sexual abuse by clergy of the Catholic Church. In fact, they still take joy in hammering the Church, even with misinformation and falsehoods (as we've chronicled here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Let's say it again: When it comes to the abuse of children, it sure seems like the national media doesn't get too worked up unless the words "Cardinal," "bishop," or "priest" is in someone's job title.

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Previous: Not the Catholic Church? MSM Mum About Huge L.A. School Sex Abuse Scandal (NB, 5/19/08)

But what about the priests who have adamantly denied the charges made against them and whose cases may never have had any evidence against them? This past week the Los Angeles Times and others have been largely silent in this regard.

For example, Msgr. Manuel Sanchez from Sacred Heart Church in Pomona, CA has been accused of brutally raping an 8-year-old boy in 1981. His accuser came forward in 2003.

The Los Angeles Times first covered the case in February of 2004, and here's what the Times wrote at the time :

[Rev.] Manuel Sanchez of Sacred Heart Church in Pomona said Friday that he did not even know his accuser. "I am completely innocent of the charges," the priest said. He said he learned of "this terrible accusation" six months ago and believed that his accuser was either "looking for money or he sincerely confused me with another person." (link)

A couple of years later, in March of 2006, the case was covered in Southern California's Daily Bulletin:

[Msgr.] Sanchez read a brief statement declaring his innocence during a Sunday service.

In the statement he denounced the accusations as "100 percent untrue."

"I repeat to you, with God as my witness, that I am completely innocent of this claim of totally immoral and repugnant behavior," the statement said. (source)

Most notably, in 2003-2004, a review board studied the allegation and found that "the evidence did not support the charges." Msgr. Sanchez was allowed to continue in his service. Despite the board's finding in 2004, it appears that the man continued with his suit against the Archdiocese and will be receiving a settlement. Indeed, the accuser is the only individual to ever come forward with an allegation against Rev. Sanchez. (See a list of the accused here.) (I found a bit of information on the life of Msgr. Sanchez in this 2004 article.)

By no means am I challenging the veracity of the accuser's claim. (My fear in writing this article is that people will say that I am "calling the victim a liar" or "defending a child rapist.") The abuse of any child is simply vile. The abuse by priests upon those in recently decided cases has been real, angering, and contemptible. (The actions by Michael Wempe, for one, have been nothing short of abominable.)

But what I am saying is that claims of innocence by accused priests have been virtually invisible in the recent coverage by the Los Angeles Times and other media. (If there's been anything in the last week, I've missed it. If you've found such a report, please leave it in the comments below.)

The tone of the recent coverage has been so that there is a presumption that each and every accused priest from the recent settlements is unquestionably guilty.

Since 1930, about 244 individuals (priests, deacons etc.) in the Los Angeles archdiocese "have been accused of sexual misconduct involving a minor" (source). In all certainty the majority of the accused priests are guilty of their heinous crimes. However, about 25% of the accused are deceased and have been unable to defend themselves. In addition, the vast majority of alleged incidents go back decades.

As disgraceful as these reported crimes have been, it would be enlightening for the media to report that there are priests like Msgr. Sanchez who have vehemently denied their accusations and have proclaimed their innocence. Considering the immense scale of this story and the length at which this has gone on, wouldn't that only be a fair thing to do?