Victims planning legal cases
Civil rights lawyer Crump representing diverse group of survivors
Born and raised in East Baltimore in a devout Catholic family, Tanya Allen, who is Black, remembers her mother beaming with pride decades ago when she carried the cross down the aisle as an acolyte at their church.
Timothy Ferguson, a white man who used to represent Carroll and Frederick counties as a Republican senator in the Maryland General Assembly, was an altar boy at his family’s church.
Allen and Ferguson come from different backgrounds, but both worshipped in parishes of the Archdiocese of Baltimore as children, and both said they were sexually abused. They spoke Tuesday at a news conference hosted by prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump outside the Baltimore Basilica, the first Catholic cathedral in the U.S.
Crump and fellow attorney Adam P. Slater say Allen and Ferguson are part of a diverse coalition of survivors of child sex abuse by priests and others affiliated with the church in Maryland who they are representing as the state’s landmark law lifting the statute of limitations nears its Oct. 1 effective date. The team of lawyers working under Crump and Slater, whose firm specializes in child sex abuse cases, expects to contribute to the forthcoming flood of lawsuits this fall.
“Nobody was beyond this abuse,” Crump proclaimed. “You have Black victims, white victims, Hispanic victims. You have men, women. It was little boys. It was little girls. They preyed on them all.”
A 456-page report released by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown last month laid out in stark detail decades of abuse and torture of children by members of the archdiocese. That report said clergy and lay staff abused approximately 600 children over 80 years, but said there were likely more victims.
The report’s authors said the abusers they identified singled out vulnerable children — those who were isolated from their peers, had problems at home, or whose families were of limited means — and presented themselves as the children’s protectors and their families’ allies. The report says the abusers then
preyed on these children, knowing they would be the least likely to come forward — and perhaps not believed.
According to the attorney general’s report, abusers often groomed victims by giving them alcohol or buying them gifts or meals.
“Can you imagine a hungry kid — a poor, hungry Black kid — and how they are finally getting nourished. And they’re saying, ‘Well, if you go tell somebody, all of this stops, and you’re back on the street,’ ” Crump said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun following the news conference.
A spokesman for the archdiocese did not immediately return a voicemail Tuesday evening seeking comment.
Crump is hopeful that the potential for healing and for holding institutions, primarily the church, accountable will inspire more victims to exercise their rights under the recently enacted Child Victims Act.
However, Crump said, it will be difficult to convince Black and other minority survivors to trust systems, like the courts, and institutions, like the church, that have “betrayed them so many times.”
Slater said he and Crump would advocate for their clients to receive fair compensation regardless of their race or background, and that there is benefit to coming forward for survivors beyond the potential payout.
“That’s why it’s so important to get the message out,” Slater added, “because you saw how empowering it was.”
No matter their background, survivors who spoke Tuesday were unified in their message. They said they were taking back their voices, and encouraged more survivors to come forward. After each person spoke, some fighting through the emotion of telling the stories of their abuse publicly for the first time, they were embraced by
survivors.
“I’m here basically to help anybody who’s out there who has not come forward, who has not reached out for help,” Ferguson said. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. And you need people to get better: It’s people that mess us up, and people that help us get better. You can’t do this with you and God alone.”
Ferguson said he kept the abuse he suffered to himself for a long time, in part, because he worried about his father’s reaction. He said it happened when he was a young teenager, and that his abuser invited him on a fishing trip and “plastered me with some beer.” He said he stopped being an altar boy immediately afterward.
Other survivors told of how the abuse fractured their families. Some said not even their parents believed them.
That’s what happened initially to Allen, who said she was abused from age 8 to 12. Over the same time, she ascended through the ranks of youth positions at her church. She talked about being abused the same day she first carried the cross in a procession.
“I’ll never forget the look on my mother’s face when I carried that cross down that aisle for the first time,” Allen said. “I lived to please my mother and I knew how much it meant to her to see me carry that cross.”
Allen said she tried to tell her mom afterward about what happened to her, but her mother didn’t want her to talk about it.
Eventually, Allen said, her mother apologized and told her she believed her. Allen told her mom she forgave her.
She said her mom died a few months later, and “I felt like I killed my mother by forcing her to accept my truth about what happened to me.”
But the reason Allen spoke out, she said, is because she now realizes she has no reason to be ashamed or to feel guilty.
“We’re not being silent anymore,’ Allen said. “Our voices will be heard.”