263 San Francisco Bay Area priests branded sexual abusers: Report
The leaders of three San Francisco Bay Area dioceses have been accused of engaging in sex abuses along with 263 local priests who were branded sexual predators.
The priests, who are from the Archdiocese of San Francisco and the dioceses of Oakland and San Jose, were named in a 66-page report, compiled by the law firm of Jeff Anderson & Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota.
Anderson has filed suit against all 11 dioceses in California on behalf of Tom Emens, 50, who said, a priest that died in 2002, repeatedly molested him when he was 10 years old.
Anderson also released a separate 120-page report on clerical sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles earlier this month that named over 300 alleged clerical offenders.
At a news conference on Tuesday, he said the new names were collated from publicly available documents, adding he believed the bishops had the names of other sexually abusive priests whom "they have not told the public about, that they have not told the public about."
"There is a culture of secrecy, and every single bishop in California has made a conscious choice to keep the names that they know to be criminals, who are sexual predators," he said.
According to the report, "Perhaps most shocking among the discoveries is that some perpetrators were intentionally transferred and retained in trusted positions with direct access to children even when they were known to be abusers."
Between 5,700 and 10,000 Catholic priests have been accused of sexual abuse in the United States, but only a few hundred have been tried, convicted, and sentenced for their crimes, according to the watchdog Bishop Accountability.
Since the abuse crisis became public in the 2000s, the US church has spent more than $3 billion in settlements, according to Bishop Accountability.
One estimate suggests up there were 100,000 US victims.
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