Pop Stars and Priests: Michael Jackson and the Credible Standard
The late Michael Jackson settled one abuse claim for $20 million but supporters maintain his innocence. A Catholic priest is ruined for life just for being accused.
April 24, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae
Daniel Kahneman died last month on March 27, 2024. Just as Beyond These Stone Walls was beginning, I was asked by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, to write an article for the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst. Published in July 2009, my article was “Due Process for Accused Priests.” It began with a revelation about the work of Daniel Kahneman, a noted psychologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in a phenomenon known as “availability bias.”
As a result of availability bias, humans tend to replace their beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs simply because a proposition has been repeated in the media and presented as widely believed. We are subjected to subtle cues of social pressure every day in marketing that convince many people to purchase things they don’t really need. We also face subtle cues and social pressure in the daily bombardment of news stories that cause many people to believe something based solely on its prevalence in the media. It is indeed possible that Michael Jackson and many Catholic priests became the subjects of classic, media-fueled availability bias.
In his 2011 bookThinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman laid out the foundations of what a stream of availability bias might look like:
“An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by ‘availability entrepreneurs,’ individuals or organizations who seek to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a ‘heinous cover-up’”
— Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p.142
Does this not sound like exactly what has taken place in the early days of the priesthood crisis? In that arena, the “availability entrepreneurs” were composed largely of contingency lawyers and groups like SNAP, which I once exposed in “David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”
One of the conclusions of “availability bias” widely touted in the media is that statutes of limitation for lawsuits should be extended or discarded because it takes victims of sexual abuse many years or decades to come forward. The prison system in which I have spent the last 30 years houses nearly 3,000 prisoners. Estimates of those convicted of sexual offenses account for about 40 percent of them. This translates into a population of approximately 1,200 offenders in this one prison who stand convicted of sexual crimes, most true but some not. In addition to these 1,200 men, thousands more are currently on parole in New Hampshire as “registered” sexual offenders.
Only one among these thousands is a convicted Catholic priest, and if you have been paying attention at all, then you know that his conviction has been widely called into serious doubt. The thousands of other men convicted of sexual abuse are accused parents, grandparents, step-parents, foster parents, uncles, teachers, ministers, scout leaders, and so on, and for them the typical time lapse between abuse and the victim reporting it has been measured in weeks or months, not years — and certainly not decades.
My own diocese, the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, in just the last month has provided a six-figure settlement to the accuser of a long deceased priest accused in a claim from 52 years ago. Even the lawyer involved admitted in a press report that “No lawsuit was filed because the alleged abuse happened outside the statute of limitations, but … it is important for survivors to come forward as part of the healing process,” which in this case involves a whole lot of money, forty percent of which goes to that attorney. In their own statement, Church officials said, “The Diocese of Manchester provides financial assistance to those who have been harmed, regardless of when the abuse occurred.” I live in a place with men some of whom have taken lives for far less money than that provided by my diocese to those who falsely took my reputation and freedom.
A simultaneous press release came under the title “Diocese of Manchester Adds to List of Clergy Accused of Sexual Abuse of a Minor.” Accuracy in language is important here. The press release continued, “The Diocese of Manchester added three priests to its list of clergy accused of sexual abuse.” Note that the usual term “credibly accused” is missing from these reports. Even that weakest of standards seems to have been discarded in favor of discarding priests who are merely “accused.” Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of the risks that such published lists pose to priests. His eye-opening article was, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.”
Pop Stars and Priests
I kicked a hornets’ nest some years ago when I wrote an article in response to a quote from actress Marlo Thomas who suggested in some published forum that the best American role model for middle school age boys might be singer Michael Jackson. I scoffed in my own response why the suggestion was ridiculous for many reasons, not least being the taint of sexual abuse claims against him.
Despite being acquitted in a criminal trial, Michael Jackson settled a single claim of sexual abuse for a reported $20 million, and untold millions settled other claims against him. When Michael Jackson died, he was celebrated as a cultural icon of the entertainment industry. In contrast, an American bishop, under pressure from a victims’ group, reportedly ordered the remains of a posthumously accused priest exhumed from a diocesan cemetery and reinterred elsewhere.
My point was not that I thought Michael Jackson was guilty. It was that for many fans the claims and sett1ements did not destroy his name. He was acquitted at trial, so if there was any evidence at all a jury did not find it persuasive. Some people conclude that, despite acquittal in a criminal trial, Michael Jackson’s multi-million dollar settlement of civil lawsuits was itself evidence of guilt. I’ll get back to that point.
Catherine Coy, a fan and advocate of Michael Jackson, sent a shot across my bow back then for suggesting any connection between settlements and credible accusations. I knew I was in for it when Ms. Coy began her message with “You, of all people …!” Actually, when Catherine Coy and I listened to each other, we came to a sort of detente if not agreement. In a 2005 article, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” (Catalyst, Nov. 2005), I detailed the relationship between mediated settlements and claims against Catholic priests. Did Michael Jackson become vulnerable to the same media-generated shroud under which claims against priests were seen as “credible?”
Catherine Coy insisted that in spite of monetary settlements, Jackson had never had a “credible” claim of sexual abuse lodged against him. That statement might evoke a dismissive “Yeah, right!” in some corners, but not in mine.
Why did so many people presume the worst of Mr. Jackson? It certainly wasn’t evidence. It is more of a spontaneous response, and one that is very similar to what happens when priests are accused and maintain their innocence. This is the point predicted by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. The mere news media repetition of sordid stories about Michael Jackson and Catholic priests took on such prevalence in the news media that they became an unconscious bias against both. When the Catholic bishops of the United States refer to a 20-, or 30- or 40-year-old claim against a priest as “credible” they mean only that they have determined that both the priest and the accuser lived in the same community in the time period alleged.
Michael and I in The Wall Street Journal
Catherine Coy was right. I, of all people, should have seen the analogy instantly. Ms. Coy wrote “There isn’t a person alive who could have withstood the onslaught of lies, innuendo and slander that was heaped on Jackson for well over 20 years.” On that score, I beg to differ, but I see her point.
The very association of Michael Jackson’s name with the bizarre proclivity attributed to him may in fact be the result of media-fueled availability bias and not evidence. There is no doubt in my mind that I and many other priests have faced this same phenomenon. With no personal experience of the behaviors attributed to some accused priests, many Catholics simply adopted the point of view given them by the news media.
This does not mean that all the claims of sexual abuse by priests are false. The U.S. Bishops commissioned a formal study of the matter conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. There were really two waves in the scandal. The first was the revelations that priests were accused at the time alleged abuse happened in the 1960’s to the 1980’s, and then were quietly moved around to other parishes to avoid a public scandal. This was scandalous enough, and tragic.
The John Jay Report also revealed that a full seventy percent of the claims faced by bishops and dioceses in 2002 and following also alleged claims from the 1960’s to 1980’s, but those claims were not brought forward until 2002 when it became clear that Church institutions would settle because of the bludgeoning they took in the media. Those claims were propelled by the widely held belief that it takes victims decades to realize they were abused and report it. Lots of people now believe that, and entire states have passed legislation to accommodate that belief. However, as demonstrated in “Due Process for Accused Priests,” the “delayed reporting” principle is classic availability bias.
In June, 2005, just three months after Dorothy Rabinowitz published an explosive two-part analysis of the case against me in The Wall Street Journal, Deputy Editorial Page Editor, Daniel Henninger wrote a most interesting commentary as Michael Jackson’s criminal trial got underway (“Pushing the Envelope – Michael Jackson: A Freaky Culture’s Peter Pan,” June 3, 2005).
It was Daniel Henninger who first put into print what I hoped someone out there might grasp:
“[Prosecutor] Tom Sneddon may lose this case. If so, it will be because Mr. Jackson, like Kobe Bryant [and O.J. Simpson], was able to mount a defense equal to the accusatory powers of the state. Not everyone can do that. If Michael walks, I’ll wonder if any of the many convicted Catholic priests similarly charged were in fact innocent but found guilty because they couldn’t push back against the state’s relentless steamroller.”
I do not at all begrudge Michael Jackson’s having had the means to mount a defense equal to the state’s prosecution of him. Whatever he spent defending himself, it was less than the state spent trying to put him in prison. At the same time, I thought Daniel Henninger’s comment about convicted priests was just and fair, but he missed an important point. I no longer have the letter, but I wrote to Mr. Henninger shortly after his 2005 editorial. This is the gist of what I wrote:
“As a priest without the means to push back in equal measure to Michael Jackson, I must point out some factors you overlooked:
“Imagine how steeply uphill Michael Jackson’s battle would have been if twenty years passed between the alleged crime and the state’s prosecutorial steamroller rumbling into action for a trial. Imagine the state having to prove nothing while Michael Jackson’s defense tried in vain to prove that something alleged to have happened two decades earlier never happened at all.
“Then imagine Michael Jackson struggling to proclaim his innocence while the institution he served denounced him and his attempts to defend himself, seeking only the path of least resistance to settle with his accusers and rid themselves of liability at the expense of due process.
“Imagine all of this, and you will have captured the scene faced by most similarly accused Catholic priests.”
The Wall Street Journal
The aftermath of those articles in April, 2005 was most interesting. The accusers in the case against me — anxious to talk to the news media before receiving settlements — suddenly had nothing to say. one of my prosecutors had nothing to say. The other took his own life. The judge was quoted in a local news article saying, vaguely, “Review is a positive thing.” Then he took early retirement from the bench. The police detective who choreographed the case, reportedly offering bribes to potential accusers, had nothing to say and has since been exposed on a previously secret list of ethically challenged police.
After those WSJ articles about me, I expected an onslaught of defensive rhetoric from victims’ groups, prosecutors, and contingency lawyers, but it never came. The sole protest came from the most unexpected source. Father Edward Arsenault, my Bishop’s delegate and the man most involved in settlement negotiations in these cases, declared that I was found guilty in a court of law by a jury of my peers, and nothing else needed to be said. Father Arsenault denounced The Wall Street Journal and its writer as biased. Incredible!
A few years later, Msgr. Edward Arsenault was convicted of multiple counts of embezzlement, including charges of forgery and fraud, and sentenced to prison. He was subsequently dismissed from the clerical state by Pope Francis but now inexplicably has a new life and a new name: Edward J. Bolognini.
In 2005 just as the Catholic scandal was building up steam to rumble full speed ahead for a national contingency lawyer windfall, I did not expect that the world’s largest secular newspaper would publish so openly against the tide — or tidal wave — of typical media coverage of claims against priests while most in the Catholic media remained silent. With the exception of Father Richard John Neuhaus in First Things and The Catholic League in Catalyst, and the Catholic World Report, the Catholic media — on both the left and the right — continued to remain silent about false claims against priests brought for money, or, worse, they have used the clergy scandal for some agenda of their own.
And of Michael Jackson, writing in The Nation, (“The Love We Lost”), JoAnn Wypijewski wrote that
“Ordinary rules of judgment have been suspended” in this sound-bite culture of news that shapes most peoples’ views on sex and the accused:
“[I]t cannot matter that Michael Jackson was acquitted of child molestation, since he was frequently remembered in death as a pedophile… just as it cannot matter whether others who plead guilty to a sex charge really did it, or whether evidence to convict was nonsense, or whether the guilty served their time. They can never ‘pay their debt to society.’ Guilt is the presumption, forever.”
JoAnn Wypijewski went on to describe the case of the priest convicted in a trial in which the sole “credible” evidence presented to the jury was the mere fact that he is a priest — that, and a claim of repressed and recovered memory, the legitimacy of which is always questioned when the accused is not a priest. In an all-too familiar twist, that priest’s bishop added his own sound bite by administratively dismissing the priest from the priesthood just before the sham of a trial.
JoAnn Wypijewski also bravely wrote about me just as the fiasco film, “Spotlight” was receiving its Academy Award for Public Service. Her ground-shaking article was “Oscar Hangover Special: Why "Spotlight" Is a Terrible Film.”
After what has now exceeded $4 billion in total mediated settlements nationwide, the matter of false claims is the elephant in the sacristy that no one wants to talk about. At the same time, our beleaguered Catholic bishops present case after case as “credible” despite knowing exactly what that term means and does not mean.
The “credible” standard Catherine Coy applied to Michael Jackson is admirable and hopeful. Ms. Coy’s fair-minded attitude about Michael Jackson is the polar opposite of what is now applied to Catholic priests.
There is no mechanism whatsoever beyond preserved DNA or an admission of guilt that would serve as evidence that a priest accused from decades ago is guilty. There is no investigation technique that could determine the credibility of such claims. What makes most claims against priests “credible” is the fact that someone — not them — has paid money to an accuser. Nothing else. Catholics should take note of the efforts by Michael Jackson fans to revisit credibility despite financial settlements which, in the secular world, are merely designed to make the claim go away with no statement of culpability.
For my part, I can only remember the famous scene early in Michael’s trial during which he danced on the hood of an SUV outside the court to the wild cheers of fans. Michael sure was a strange guy, but the dance gave me pause. Having been through such a trial, I know its oppression. That dance was surely the act of a delusional man …
… or perhaps an innocent one.
Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Your comments are most welcome, but they are moderated, so they may not appear instantly. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.
Due Process for Accused Priests, Catalyst, July 2009
In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”