The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

A 2016 Newsweek cover story by Ralph Cipriano exposed how a Catholic sex abuse fraud made Fr Charles Engelhardt a martyr, and con man Daniel Gallagher a millionaire.

November 14, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: It is very rare that we have two posts in a week. I first wrote this story in 2016. Fr. Charles Engelhardt died chained to a Pennsylvania prison medical unit gurney on November 15, 2014. I wanted to honor him with the truth, but in the years since this post was first written, so much more of this truth has come to light. In the time since his death, his Philadelphia prosecutor, Seth Williams, was the subject of a 23-count federal indictment for fraud, bribery and other charges. He took a plea deal and went to federal prison. Fr. Charles Engelhardt refused a plea deal and died in prison.

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This post has a most urgent preface, one that arrived in the mail just as I sat down to type. It was a single page sent to me by BTSW reader Helen, a frequent commenter from Pennsylvania who wrote across the top of the page, “Father Gordon, your face could be on this print.” No, Helen, it could not! The face on that printed page is someone I once met at a pivotal time in my life as a priest, but the sender could not have known that. Helen simply stumbled upon a quote she thought I ought to see, and she was right. The face and the quote on that page belong to the late Father John Hardon, SJ (1914–2000), an American Jesuit priest whose cause for beatification has begun with a recognition in Rome that he is held to be a Servant of God.

Father Hardon and I met in 1989 by “coincidence,” if you still believe in such things. I don’t, but how and why we met is another post for another day. Suffice it for now to say that it was an encounter I could not forget, and when I saw his face on that printed page, and read the words attributed to him, it seemed as though he once again stood next to me with a firm grip upon my shoulder. The quote expresses perfectly why I must write this post, why you must read it, and why together we must share it boldly, and as far and wide as we can make it travel. I took Father Hardon’s words to be a directive, and so should you. Here is the quote:

“Our duty as Catholics is to know the truth; to live the truth; to defend the truth; to share the truth with others; and to suffer for the truth.”

— Father John Hardon

I have long hoped, during the years of media coverage of Catholic scandal, that someone else in the news media might join the ranks of Dorothy Rabinowitz among journalists with a spinal column. It seems I had overlooked Ralph Cipriano. For some time now, he has been covering events in Philadelphia for BigTrial.net, his outstanding Philadelphia Trial Blog. Some time ago, Mr. Cipriano published a major media event in a Newsweek cover story entitled “Catholic Guilt? The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case” (Jan. 20, 2016).

This is a dark story, and a painful one, and for any number of reasons you might be tempted to click it away at this point, please don’t, for it became a matter not only of justice, but of life and death. Ralph Cipriano’s Newsweek article arrived in my mail on the same day as the above quote from Servant of God, Father John Hardon, and I knew instantly that I had to write about this.

Reading through the Newsweek piece was a vivid experience of déjà vu because I have written of some aspects of this story in a post entitled, “The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone.” It was an account of how a good, kind and much loved Pennsylvania priest, Father Charles Engelhardt, was martyred in prison as a result of greed, false witness and prosecutor misconduct. It is this same story that Ralph Cipriano covered in Newsweek, and both are to be commended for some courageous against-the-tide reporting. The Church and priesthood are indebted to Newsweek for presenting this story so boldly in a leading secular media venue while so much of the Catholic press crossed to the other side on the road to Jericho.

Father Charles Engelhardt died in a prison medical unit on November 15, 2014, and the full telling of this story is all that will bring meaning and purpose to his death.

So be brave, please, and read this post to the end, then share it every way you can. Do this, please, to honor the Servant of God who just told us that our duty as Catholics is to know, defend, and share the truth. Do this, please, to honor Father Charles Engelhardt who suffered for the truth and for his priesthood, a suffering that cost him his life.

Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Facts, Just Dirt

I’d like to think that I have approached this story as Ralph Cipriano did, with cool journalistic detachment, but I now admit that’s very hard to do when the story has a Kafkaesque ring that is all too familiar to me. I was admittedly angry and not at all detached when I wrote the heading for this section, “A Rolling Stone Gathers No Facts, Just Dirt,” a fact conveyed in my Search Engine summary for the post linked in the section above:

“A federal jury found Rolling Stone liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice, but their earlier malice cost the life of an innocent priest.”

Today, I find myself no less angry revisiting it. It told the tale of how Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s infamous November 19, 2014 Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus” came unraveled as her account of serial rape at the University of Virginia was debunked and widely exposed as grossly inaccurate and misinformed. Ms. Erdely fell for the story of “Jackie,” took it at face value, and ran with it — doing much damage not only to UVA and its students, but to the field of journalism itself.

Since I first wrote of this, the University of Virginia and its Phi Kappa Psi fraternity have filed multi-million dollar libel and slander lawsuits naming Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine as defendants. Both have since suffered serious losses in journalistic credibility. Rolling Stone magazine has since retracted Ms. Erdely’s account of a lurid frat house serial rape case at UVA. Her Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus,” is today widely seen as grossly irresponsible and agenda-driven slander masked as journalism.

However, Mr. Cipriano’s bold Newsweek cover story is the first hint of media clamor to revisit Ms. Erdely’s other Rolling Stone fraud, “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files” in which she introduced “Billy Doe,” a purported victim of violent and horrific sexual abuse by several Pennsylvania Catholic priests. Billy Doe, granted anonymity by Rolling Stone and everyone else in the news media, was described by Ms. Erdely as “a sweet, gentle kid with boyish good looks” who had been callously “passed around” from predator to predator in the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The story eventually resulted in $5 million in settlements for Billy Doe while landing three innocent Catholic priests in prison.

One of those priests was Father Charles Engelhardt whose decision to stand by the truth against Billy Doe’s $5 million fraud cost this good priest his life. As journalist Ralph Cipriano reveals in Newsweek, Father Engelhardt refused pre-trial plea deals including one deal on the eve of trial that would have resulted in no time in prison and a sentence of simple “community service.” Father Engelhardt chose the truth, and he chose to suffer for the truth. He instead was sentenced to a term of six to twelve years in prison “because he would not perjure himself by pleading guilty ‘to make a deal,’ to admit to a crime he did not commit.” In “Handcuffs and a Hospital Bed,” a November 17, 2014 posting at his “Big Trial” blog, Cipriano wrote:

“For Father Charles Engelhardt, the ordeal is finally over. The 67-year-old priest died at 8:30 PM Saturday night [November 15, 2014] an inmate at the State Correctional Institution in Coal Township [PA] where he served nearly two years of a 6-to-12 year sentence.”

Daniel Gallagher after his $5 million fraud took the life of Father Charles Engelhardt.

Daniel in the Liars’ Den

The man dubbed “Billy Doe” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine — while shielding his true identity and character from view in all this — is Daniel Gallagher. Today he is a free man living in Florida where he settled into a lifestyle bankrolled by $5 million in settlements from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and, in part, its insurers. Gallagher lives free from scrutiny and the long arm of the law because the DA, judge, and news media in Philadelphia all got behind this case, but remain unable to surrender enough of their hubris to stop covering for him, to admit to their pursuit of “trophy justice,” and to allow the facts to invade their field of vision. Sometimes the meting out of justice comes down, not to facts, but to mere ego.

In his riveting Newsweek article, and in “Newsweek’s Cover Boy Makes a Media Splash” on his BigTrial.net blog (Jan. 28, 2016) Ralph Cipriano pursued the truth about who and what Daniel Gallagher is. From his claims of serial victimhood to his ever changing accounts of abuse, to his vague and amorphous facts and stories, to his most recent (and most troubling) psychiatric profile, Daniel Gallagher is exposed as

“chronically maladjusted, immature, self-indulgent, manipulating others to his own ends, refusing to accept responsibility for his own problems, exaggerating, grandiose, hedonistic, impulsive, manipulative and self-serving, paranoid, delusional…”

And the list doesn’t stop there. Gallagher pulled off a con man’s dream when he got a DA and judge to agree that his 23 failed stints in drug treatment were all someone else’s fault. In a Linkedin article, “A Weapon of Mass Destruction,” I quoted a prison inmate who reacted to the flood of decades-old claims against priests with a dose of brutal self-honesty about his own proclivities and enablers:

“So let me get this straight. If I say that some priest touched me funny all those years ago, I’ll be seen as a victim, I’ll be paid for it, and my life will be his fault instead of mine? Do you have any idea how tempting this is?”

— A prison inmate

Daniel Gallagher’s claim of having passed polygraph tests also now appears to be no more truthful than his claim of being passed from priest to priest. No one but his contingency lawyer claims to have seen polygraph results, and efforts to obtain them have been met with silence. Meanwhile, Father Charles Engelhardt DID take polygraph tests, and passed them conclusively, as did other priests in Daniel Gallagher/Billy Doe’s sights. (And for what it is worth, so did I).

Readers of Beyond These Stone Walls should find a loud and clear ring of the familiar in all this. Everything now said of Daniel Gallagher in these reports has been said of Thomas Grover, my accuser trial. And it has all been said of Shamont Lyle Sapp, a con man who landed settlements from accusing four priests in four different states until he was exposed by a U.S. attorney and a journalist with integrity. I take no credit, but he was also exposed by me in my Linkedin article cited above.

This particular rolling stone about Daniel Gallagher and Father Charles Engelhardt, was sent downhill by Sabrina Rubin Erdely who has since been found liable for “actual malice” and “disregard for truth” by a judge in the University of Virginia story. The rolling stone about Father Engelhardt had a long path. It rolled all the way Down Under to Australia where elements of the story were duplicated and reused by prosecutors and the media in Australia to condemn an even greater trophy, Cardinal George Pell. I wrote of the glaring similarities in the two cases in “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” It turned out that indeed he was, and Australia’s highest court exonerated him after 400 days in prison.

Thanks to Ralph Cipriano and Newsweek magazine, some honest media has taken notice of the Daniel Gallagher scam, but not in time to save the life of Father Charles Engelhardt. Still, these revelations of truth bring immense comfort to those still charged with clearing this good priest’s good name. But there’s more than that at stake here. You have been duped. Our Church has been duped, and cast aside in the public square in the process. The truth is a value in its own right, and we owe it to ourselves to learn it and share it.

I can only thank Ralph Cipriano and Newsweek for taking this on, and for telling a truth most in the news media have shunned. Take a little time, please, and read the Newsweek article and Mr. Cipriano’s BigTrial.net blog, and share a link to this post with others. I know one Servant of God who will smile upon you for it.

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

Seven judges of the Australia Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Cardinal George Pell was wrongly convicted and imprisoned. He and we deserve to know how and why.

Strange things had been happening in the weeks leading up to Holy Week 2020. For the first time in our lifetimes, Catholic churches were inaccessible to most Catholics observing Holy Week and Easter as a community of believers.

Then, in the midst of all the church closures due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, Cyrus Habib, the Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Washington State, announced that he is leaving politics to study for the Catholic priesthood. This was not the sort of hopeful news the news media likes to hype in Holy Week so it was barely noticed. Then the Supreme Court of Australia announced that, on Tuesday of Holy Week, it would release its decision on the final hope for appeal in the case of Cardinal George Pell.

I did not greet this news with a sense of hope. Far back in April of 2010, I wrote a post with the controversial title, “Breaking News: I Got Stoned with the Pope.” It was about how some consistently anti-Catholic news outlets have a tradition of exploiting Catholic scandal during or just prior to Holy Week.

The pope in question back then was Benedict XVI. For full disclosure, neither he nor I inhaled anything illicit. That was not what I meant by getting stoned with the pope. It was meant in the Biblical sense, the same sense found in one of the most popular posts on These Stone Walls, “Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote in the Sand.”

The type of stoning that brutally took a person’s life in Biblical times is carried out today in another way. Instead of taking a life, a person’s reputation is destroyed. False witness and sensational headlines are now the stones of choice. We have all seen the “gotcha” media at work. You cannot sit through a White House press conference without witnessing firsthand how some in the news media insinuate, inflame, and then exploit the interpretations that too often today pass for real journalism.

A vivid example came during the 2016 Presidential election cycle. A group of 200 noisy white supremacists demonstrated in Virginia using slogans such as “Make America Great Again.” For much of the far left mainstream news media, this was evidence enough to link them with Donald Trump implying falsely that he must support racism because some racists support him.

The real scandal is the news media itself. By giving these marginal racists a spotlight, the news media took their tiny microphone and turned it into a national megaphone. The news media does not even try to justify its viral coverage of 200 white supremacists while turning a blind eye to 200,000 prolife advocates at the annual March for Life in Washington DC.

I admit that I was cynical and suspicious when I learned that the High Court of Australia chose Tuesday of Holy Week to announce its long awaited final verdict on Cardinal Pell. As soon as the decision was announced, victim groups and some in the media went into high gear to denounce the finding and declare that it is not an exoneration or acquittal.

This is nonsense. The unanimous finding that Cardinal Pell’s charges were fatally flawed, his trial unjust, his convictions unsupported by evidence, are in fact an exoneration. He stands convicted of no crime. It exposed for all the world to see the harsh reality that — as for so many other priests facing the cruel tyranny of false witness in the current age — Cardinal Pell was considered guilty merely for being accused.

The Integrity of Justice Itself Is at Stake

Four hundred and five days! That is how long 78-year-old George Cardinal Pell spent in prison before Australian justice woke up. On the day of his exoneration, I marked 9,350 days of wrongful imprisonment. I do not write that as a comparison, but rather as an expression of deepest empathy for what Cardinal Pell endured.

Throughout his ordeal, I believed in his innocence; I supported him with my prayers, and I offered some of my own unjust imprisonment in spiritual alliance with him. I hope this was evident in my series of widely-read posts about his plight that I will link at the end of this one. When I say that those end posts were widely read, the truth is that they were widely read everywhere but in Australia.

The first of these posts was “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia.” Its focus was on the fact that the whole world was watching these charges as they proceeded to trial with no real evidence and much media exploitation. In the end, it is Australia’s justice system that now seems indicted and facing trial in the court of public opinion.

I hope this exoneration brings some much-needed soul searching to the people of Australia, the Australian courts, and the police and prosecutors who ignored much exculpatory evidence to bring these charges. However, evidence for that soul-searching was not reflected in the public statement of Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria State where Cardinal Pell was convicted.

After the unanimous Supreme Court exoneration, the public statement of the Victoria State Premier addressed none of what the Court covered or decided. He instead addressed himself to what the media calls victims and survivors but what the legal system must treat as accusers. His statement to them was: “I see you. I hear you. I believe you.”

On its face, that seems benign, but it isn’t. It is perhaps the most dangerous affront to justice in a case like this. It is grotesquely irresponsible to reduce the application of justice to a set of hashtags instead of evidence. Why have courts and trials at all if the personal beliefs of police, prosecutors and state officials are all that is needed to convict and condemn?

In the United States, the Center for Prosecutor Integrity has joined over 100 legal scholars in a petition to the department of Justice to cease its support for #BelieveSurvivors and guilt-presuming investigations. It is one of the most prolific causes of wrongful convictions and other injustices. When police and prosecutors — and the governments on whose behalf they operate — launch “Victim-Centered Investigations” they begin with a faulty assumption that crimes did occur and that the accused is guilty.

The Prosecutor Integrity website lists hundreds of scholarly articles by legal experts about how innocent defendants like Cardinal Pell are victimized by investigators wearing blinders. Police and prosecutor misconduct were central factors in 42-percent of wrongful convictions. One article at the Wrongful Convictions site is “The Intersection Between Innocence, Expert Witness and Religion: The Case of Rev. Gordon MacRae.”

Victim-Centered instead of fact-centered investigations result in a failure of the justice system to look honestly at itself. The Australian police and prosecutors — and the two judges who upheld a guilty verdict against Cardinal Pell in his first appeal — have some explaining to do.

I know only too well what the trashing of Cardinal Pell’s good name has cost him, but the other damage is to the integrity of the criminal justice system. I also know well the treachery of those — both inside and outside the Church — who disregard a lack of evidence or substantiation, mindlessly poised to believe any lurid tale regarding any priest so accused.

On social media after this exoneration, some in Australia suggested that, innocent or not, Cardinal Pell should have remained in prison in reparation for the sins of other priests. This is nothing more than evidence of the moral panic this story set in motion. It is easy to offer up someone else’s good name and freedom for a politically correct cause.

Minds should not be made up because the media celebrates the fall of Catholic priests and prelates. Minds should be made up by clear and compelling evidence, and there was none. Anything less is to surrender our own personal integrity to the news media and to reduce justice to a lynch mob.

Priestly Scandal: A Pandemic of Trophy Justice

Accusations against a high profile cardinal and member of the curia too easily result in “Trophy Justice,” a term that also has grave implications for the integrity of the justice system. Cardinal Pell spent 405 days in prison because those empowered to impart justice were too reluctant to give up their trophy.

Since his exoneration there has been no shortage of biased treatment in the news. The much needed voice of Bill Donohue at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has been, as usual, on the front lines exposing this.  Annual membership in the Catholic League is the best $30 investment I have ever made.

Ironically, in the wake of this exoneration, editorials in The New York Times and The Boston Globe have criticized a lack of transparency in the Australian justice system. Bill Donohue rightly pointed out that neither newspaper ever questioned its transparency when Cardinal Pell was found guilty without evidence, or when he was sentenced to prison, or when a lower court disregarded the shoddy work of prosecutors to uphold an unjust verdict. That was all perfectly transparent.

And it was all front page news. The exoneration did not at all receive anything even close to equal treatment. I am thankful to Bill Donohue for informing us that The Boston Globe  reported Cardinal Pell’s exoneration on page 19. Why any thinking, reasonable Catholic is still reading The New York Times  or The Boston Globe  is a mystery. There are alternatives. In ten years of writing behind These Stone Walls, I have never seen anti-Catholic bias and media distortion in The Wall Street Journal.

I am ashamed to add to the above that some Catholic media have fared little better. After Cardinal Pell’s first appeal to a lower court failed in a two-to-one decision, Our Sunday Visitor  reported in its news section that his conviction was upheld by a three-judge panel. In a letter of protest to the editors, I pointed out that this was inaccurate and misleading.

Judge Weinberg the most experienced judge on that Australian three-judge panel, published a blistering dissent against the conclusions of the other two, but Our Sunday Visitor  did not publish my letter clarifying this. After Cardinal Pell spent another six months unjustly in prison, the seven judges of Australia’s Supreme Court agreed with Judge Weinberg’s dissent.

Why should we support obviously biased or agenda-driven news outlets? When we know the truth behind a mishandled story, logic requires that we ask how many other stories are misrepresented in the news without our awareness. The Catholic League has never retreated from reporting on the crisis in the Church without sacrificing the rights of priests. In the March 2020 issue of Catalyst, just weeks before the exoneration of Cardinal Pell, Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote of both our cases:

“Cardinal George Pell, who is in an Australian prison for alleged sexual abuse (awaiting a final appeal) was accused as far back as 1962. The case was dismissed because nothing could be substantiated. His accuser had been convicted 39 times for offenses ranging from assault to drug use. He was a violent drug addict…. There is another priest, Father Gordon MacRae, who is still in prison in New Hampshire for crimes he vehemently denies, and whose accuser, Thomas Grover, has a history of theft, drugs, and violence. Even his former wife and stepson call him a compulsive liar and manipulator.”

— Catalyst, Accused Priests Deserve Better

Pope John Paul II once cautioned that the Church must be a mirror of justice to the world. The mirror of justice has since cracked, however, when the American bishops adopted merely “credible” as sufficient evidence to discredit and discard a priest, and then pressed Rome to apply that standard throughout the Church. The result is the treatment that we have just witnessed in the case of Cardinal Pell.

Too many in the media — sadly including some in the Catholic media — simply presumed his guilt just as they presume the guilt of most priests so accused. But there were other, even darker agendas at work in the case of Cardinal Pell, and real transparency will require getting to the bottom of them.

Some in Rome, convinced of his innocence, remained silent while others may have been complicit with getting Cardinal Pell and his financial reforms out of the way. It has been suggested recently by Paul Kelly, an Australian political commentator for The Australian, that “State power had been recruited in an effort to destroy Pell.”

Cardinal Pell was a scapegoat who was targeted by enemies of the Church — enemies perhaps both foreign and domestic. Pope Francis had been careful to withhold any public statement until the Cardinal Pell case had exhausted all appeals. On Tuesday of Holy Week, just hours after Cardinal Pell’s release from prison, Pope Francis released this remarkable statement via Twitter:

“In these days of Lent, we have been witnessing the persecution that Jesus underwent and how He was judged ferociously, even though He was innocent. Let us pray together today for all those persons who suffer due to an unjust sentence because someone had it in for them.”

— Pope Francis

Someone had it in for Cardinal Pell. He and we deserve to know who and why. And as for Pope Francis, his summation sure sounds like an exoneration to me.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please pray for Cardinal Pell, for his restoration from this years-long ordeal, and for a just and honest reckoning about the process that brought it about. You may also wish to read this related post:

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?