Kamala Harris Failed to Prosecute Priest Sex Abuse Cases
Despite Victims’ Pleas
California Attorney General Kamala Harris listens to questions about a settlement with Volkswagen during a news conference Tuesday, June 28, 2016, in San Francisco. AP Photo/Eric Risberg
DR. SUSAN BERRY, Breitbart
Joe Biden announced Tuesday he has chosen Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate, a person the presumptive Democrat nominee described as a “fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants.”
During Harris’s tenure as San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, however, she showed no signs of fighting for “the little guy” when she failed to prosecute any of the sexual abuse claims brought against Catholic priests in the city, despite outcries from victim groups.
In fact, as Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, observed in his book titled Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, during her 13-year tenure as district attorney and then attorney general, Harris failed to prosecute even one case of priest sexual abuse, though during that same period at least 50 major cities had brought charges against priests.
At the same time Harris failed to pursue prosecution of cases of priest sexual abuse, her office “would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred,” Schweizer revealed.
The bombshell details show that while Harris’s predecessor, former San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, had launched an aggressive investigation into priests of the Archdiocese of San Francisco accused of sexual abuse, Harris’s campaign to unseat Hallinan showed an unusual influx of unparalleled donations from high-level officials of the Catholic Church.
Schweizer wrote:
Harris had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in large, unprecedented sums. Lawyer Joseph Russoniello represented the church on a wide variety of issues, including the handling of the church abuse scandal. He served on the Catholic Church’s National Review Board (NRB) of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The purpose of the NRB was to review Catholic Church abuse cases. Russoniello was also a partner in the San Francisco law firm Cooley Godward. Russoniello donated the maximum amount by law to her campaign, $1,250, and his law firm added another $2,250. He also sat on Harris’s advisory council when she was San Francisco district attorney. Another law firm, Bingham McCutcheon, which handled legal matters for the archdiocese concerning Catholic Charities, donated $2,825, the maximum allowed. Curiously, Bingham McCutcheon had only donated to two other candidates running for office in San Francisco before, for a total of $650. As with Russoniello, their support was unusual.
In addition to campaign donations from multiple law firms defending San Francisco priests against abuse claims, Schweizer observed that “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”
As Schweizer noted, Harris’s ties to those working to block exposure of the archdiocese’s secret documents containing information about priests accused of sexual abuse were extensive.
The author explained that attorney Paul Renne of Cooley Godward was the husband of former San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne, a mentor to Harris. Paul Renne worked with lawyer Joseph Russoniello, who, as Schweizer wrote, “negotiated the agreement to bury the abuse records from public view.”
Though Harris has touted her early career as a sexual crimes prosecutor, after she won her run-off campaign against Hallinan, her office actually worked to cover up the records of claims of sexual abuse by priests of the San Francisco archdiocese.
According to Schweizer:
Hallinan’s office had used the archdiocese files to guide its investigations and talked publicly about releasing the documents after removing victims’ names and identifiers. Harris, on the other hand, abruptly decided to bury the records. For some reason, she did not want the documents released in any form. Harris’s office claimed that the cover-up was about protecting the victims of abuse. “District Attorney Harris focuses her efforts on putting child molesters in prison,” her office claimed. “We’re not interested in selling out our victims to look good in the paper.”
Victims’ groups, however, were quite eager for the documents to be released.
“They were outraged by her actions,” Schweizer noted. “Far from protecting victims, they argued, the cover-up was actually protecting the abusers by keeping their alleged crimes secret.”
“They’re full of shit,” Joey Piscitelli, the northwest regional director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said, reported Schweizer. “You can quote me on that. They’re not protecting the victims.”
Similarly, attorney Rick Simons, who represented victims of clergy sexual abuse, said Harris’s action of covering up the documents “shows a pattern and practice and policy of ignoring the rights of children by one of the largest institutions of the city and county of San Francisco, and in the Bay Area.”
When Harris attempted to shift the blame for hiding the records to Hallinan, her predecessor responded that she engaged in “the kinds of deals that have allowed the church sex scandal to go on as long as it has.”
As a result of Harris’s efforts to cover up the documents, Schweizer wrote that psychologist James Jenkins, who founded the archdiocese’s Independent Review Board – which oversaw the methods to handle abuse claims – “abruptly resigned from the board”:
He accused the church of “deception, manipulation and control” for blocking the release of the board’s findings. Jenkins argued that Harris’s deal with the archdiocese not only denied the rights of known victims, it also prevented other possible cases from coming forward.
In April 2010, Schweizer reported Harris’s office denied a request from a San Francisco Weekly journalist who sought the archdiocese’s abuse records. Similarly, Schweizer wrote he requested the same documents in 2019, through an attorney in California.
“The San Francisco district attorney’s office responded they no longer had them in their possession,” he noted.
“Were they destroyed? Were they moved somewhere else?” Schweizer asked. “It remains a disturbing mystery.”
Ex-Labour MP Eric Joyce gets suspended jail sentence
over child abuse image
Simon Murphy Political correspondent, The Guardian
The former Labour MP Eric Joyce has been handed a suspended sentence after admitting to making an indecent image of a child.
The former shadow minister had a 51-second film on a device depicting “penetrative sexual abuse of very young children”.
Joyce, of Worlingworth, Suffolk, who was on bail after being arrested in 2018, had pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing at Ipswich crown court to the offence, which took place between August 2013 and November 2018. Joyce was ordered to sign the sex offender register after his admission.
Sentencing on Friday, Mr Justice Edis said: “You have pleaded guilty to an offence which involves the possession of a category A film of a little less than a minute’s duration.
“That film showed the penetrative sexual abuse of very young children. That these acts of abuse happened is because there are people like you who want to watch these films. If there was no market, those children wouldn’t be subjected to these very serious offences.”
The judge added: “You have sought help from people well able to provide it and there’s evidence before the court that that has had an effect on helping you reduce, perhaps completely, your impulsive behaviour, and that’s happened over a significant period due to the delay in these proceedings.”
Edis also sentenced Joyce to a sexual harm prevention order, lasting until further order of the court. The ex-MP was also given an 18-day rehabilitation activity requirement and ordered to pay prosecution costs of £1,800.
At an earlier court hearing in July, Judge Emma Peters warned Joyce that the offence crossed the custody threshold. She said the film, found on a device, “depicts a number of children”.
“Some are quite young, one is said to be 12 months old,” she said. “Clearly a category-A movie.”
She explained that Joyce, who appeared at court in person, “says he accesses it via an email which he says was a spam email”. The judge added: “At the time he was drinking heavily and he has now undergone work with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation and a psychotherapist.”
Joyce served as shadow minister for Northern Ireland from June until November 2010 before resigning from the post after being banned from driving for a year when he admitted failing to provide a breath test.
Joyce left Labour to serve as independent MP in 2012, before stepping down before the 2015 general election. He spent 21 years in the army, rising to the rank of major.
After the sentencing, an NSPCC spokesman said: “By accessing this appalling material, Joyce was helping to fuel a foul industry that thrives on inflicting pain and suffering on children. This problem cannot be solved by law enforcement alone – it is imperative that tech companies commit extra resources to prevent this material being shared, and to ensure it is removed as soon it appears online.”
It comes after the former Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke was last month found guilty of sexually assaulting two women. The father of two, who represented the Kent constituency of Dover from 2010 until last year, had denied the three charges, two in relation to a parliamentary worker in 2016 and one in relation to a woman at his family’s central London home in 2007. He is due to be sentenced in September.
Separately, a Tory MP is under investigation by the police after being accused of rape by a former parliamentary aide.
Worlingworth, Sussex, UK
McDonald’s sues ex-CEO over consensual flings: A virtue-signalling distraction for firm plagued with sex harassment probes?
Easterbrook at a press conference © Reuters / Shannon Stapleton
McDonald’s is suing ex-CEO Stephen Easterbrook for allegedly concealing relationships with employees. Axed for a consensual fling last year, he’s an ideal distraction from the fast food giant's larger sexual harassment problem.
The megachain has claimed that while Easterbrook admitted to one (consensual, non-physical) relationship with an employee when he was fired in November, he concealed three others — and destroyed evidence to cover his tracks, according to the lawsuit, revealed Monday in an SEC filing. He is accused of deleting sexually explicit photos and videos sent from corporate email accounts from his cell phone in order to keep them from investigators.
McDonald’s is using the latest accusations to attempt to claw back $670,000 the former exec received as part of his “without cause” separation agreement — the equivalent of 26 weeks salary — as well as compensatory damages. The company also wants to block him from exercising some $42 million in stock options, complaining he wouldn’t have been allowed to keep them had McDonald’s known about the other relationships prior to his firing and charging he “breached his fiduciary duties” as an officer of the corporation.
When he was terminated for the text- and video-based hookup last year, Easterbrook attested that there were no similar “instances.” Relationships between employees of different ranks are forbidden under McDonald’s company policy, though they are reportedly common.
However, the lawsuit alleges that after being tipped off that Easterbrook had had a sexual relationship with another employee, McDonald’s discovered he’d had not one but three such relationships in the year preceding his firing, even rewarding one of the employees he’d trysted with by giving her a restricted stock grant worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Current CEO Chris Kempczinski condemned his predecessor’s alleged attempt to conceal his dalliances. “McDonald's does not tolerate behavior from employees that does not reflect our values,” he said in a message to employees on Monday.
But this moral posturing over the ex-CEO’s indiscretions offers McDonald’s a welcome chance to grandstand, distracting from what is reportedly a widespread issue within the company. Just last week, the Nation ran an exhaustive cover story detailing sexual harassment allegations at McDonald’s restaurants in the US, and in May, the International Union of Food Workers (IUF) charged that sexual harassment was “systematic” and “rampant” throughout the company’s global fast food empire in a complaint filed with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Additionally, the Time’s Up legal defense fund filed 24 separate harassment complaints against McDonald’s last year, on the same day Brazilian authorities began probing the restaurant’s locations in that country over allegations of sexual assaults, racism, and promotions offered in exchange for sexual favors. Time’s Up also assisted in a $500 million class action lawsuit against McDonald’s in April for “systemic sexual harassment.”
Because McDonald’s is a franchise, it has argued the company is not responsible for what happens at individual locations.
But attacking the former CEO for consensual relationships while washing its hands of what the IUF called a “sexual harassment crisis” that is very much non-consensual comes off as tone-deaf and — given the hefty value of the stock options that could potentially end up back in McDonald’s hands — money-grubbing.
Already under fire for underpaying workers and continuing to serve up highly-processed, unhealthy food in a nation facing an unprecedented obesity crisis, McDonald’s certainly didn’t need another scandal. But attempting to reframe itself as a paragon of #MeToo virtue by suing its former CEO will not silence those demanding accountability for the fast food giant.
On the other hand, if you are trying to clean up a monster like McDonalds, there is no better place to start than at the top.
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Calgary-raised Lindsay Ell confronts her trauma on
vulnerable new album
The Associated Press
Calgary-born Lindsay Ell poses in Nashville on Aug. 3, 2020, in Nashville, Tenn.
(Mark Humphrey/Associated Press)
Country singer Lindsay Ell lived alone with guilt and shame for years, but it took seeing herself in the story of another young girl to realize that she didn't have to be defined by her trauma.
While listening to teenagers talk about their experiences with sexual abuse at a youth centre where Ell helped launch a music program, the Calgary-born singer and guitarist heard a 12-year-old girl explain how her parents had sold her into sex trafficking.
"All I want to do is reach out and tell her it's going to be OK because when I was 13 years old, I would have done anything for someone to hold my hand and tell me that it was going to be OK," said Ell, now 31.
Ell realized she also had a story to share about her journey through grief and trauma, and she eventually wrote enough to fill a full album. It's called "heart theory" and it will be released Friday.
Lindsey Ells 'Criminal'
Shame and grief are such heavy feelings and we cannot deal with them by ignoring them.
- Lindsay Ell
The musician said in an interview with People magazine earlier last month that she was raped at age 13 by a man from her church and then again in a separate incident when she was 21. The Associated Press generally does not identify victims of sexual assault unless the victim agrees to be publicly identified.
It was a secret gnawing at her for years before she revealed to her parents what happened to her as a child. And as a songwriter and masterful guitarist who has toured the globe playing in front of thousands, she struggled for years to put the words to paper and let the secret out to the public.
"Shame and grief are such heavy feelings and we cannot deal with them by ignoring them," said Ell. "And I got really good at ignoring those feelings, so much so that it felt like my new normal."
But the meeting at the youth centre years ago made her realize she had an opportunity to reach more people like herself, who had felt broken and alone.
So she called one of Nashville's most talented tunesmiths — Brandy Clark — the six-time Grammy nominee who has written hits for Kacey Musgraves ("Follow Your Arrow") and Miranda Lambert ("Mama's Broken Heart"), and toured alongside Ell. They had never written together until the day Ell asked if Clark would help her write the song "make you," which directly addressed her sexual assault.
'It was OK to say her truth'
"I felt like my biggest job was to just let her know that it was OK to say her truth," said Clark. "I was really just trying to help her tell her story in her words, not put too many of my own words in it. And I was really honoured that she would be that vulnerable with me and also that she would be that vulnerable with the world."
Onstage, Ell comes across as confident and exuberant. She is one of the best lead guitarists in contemporary country music after being schooled in blues and rock guitar from an early age and easily holds her own onstage alongside Keith Urban and Brad Paisley.
Ell's career was jumpstarted as a teenager when Randy Bachman discovered her and produced her debut album.
She's nominated in two categories at the Canadian Country Music Association Awards on Sept. 27.
And she's up for two Academy of Country Music Awards at its rescheduled awards show to be held on Sept. 16, including new female artist of the year and musical event of the year for her duet with Brantley Gilbert, "What Happens in a Small Town," which became a No. 1 hit at country radio and Ell's first song to crack the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Ell's "heart theory" concept album is broken down into the seven stages of grief, starting with shock, denial, anger and depression. She wrote with a wide swath of hit Nashville songwriters, including Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line, Kane Brown, Jessie Jo Dillon and Nicolle Galyon. The 12-track album ends with an uplifting message of acceptance.
"I'm able to take the hand of my 13-year-old self and take the hand of my 21-year-old self and be like, `I got you guys. We're in this together,"' said Ell. "And I'm validating those little girls within me."
Ell started a foundation called the Make You Movement that will provide funds to organizations that focus on disenfranchised youth and survivors of sexual trauma and domestic abuse. And her message has resonated among her fans.
"If I were to open up my DMs right now, I could read you so many incredible stories and so many heartbreaking stories," said Ell. "The fact that fans feel connected enough to me that they want to bare their souls and share these things that some people have not even ever told to anybody before, I feel just such a gratitude to their humility and wanting to share that with me."
Just as she wanted the song "make you" to end on a point of healing and recovery, Ell said she's learning every day how to turn her pain into strength.
"When you fully accept these things, it's going to make you have a deeper appreciation than you ever have," said Ell. "I truly believe that it's the things that bend and stain and break us is what make us who we are."
And who you are sounds like a pretty awesome young lady, Lindsey. God bless you for your courage and honesty and creating a safe place for others to speak out and start dealing with their own pain. There is so much of it out there.
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