In 2013, Rebecca Randles, an attorney who works with supreme Catholic-suing lawyer Jeffrey Anderson, sued Bill Donohue and the Catholic League for allegedly libeling a man who had made accusations against a priest in 2011. There was nothing libelous about anything Donohue said, and in January 2015 the suit was dismissed on all counts.
When a Missouri man made allegations against a priest who allegedly molested him and three other altar boys in the early 1980s, Donohue investigated the accuser and found that he had been implicated in a murder. While another man was convicted, it was public record that the priest accuser had “motive to commit the murder and the opportunity to do so.”
Donohue took the information from court records—he did not make it up. Moreover, two of the three altar boys were dead, and the one living man said that none of the abuse ever occurred.
The man who sued Donohue and the Catholic League was riding high when he hired Randles: he had just won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese. But Randles proved no match for Erin Mersino, who represented the Catholic League; she works at the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The judge dismissed the case mostly on technicalities—the defamation suit was time barred by New York’s statute of limitations (almost two years had elapsed before the suit was filed)—and on other matters.
Thus, attempts to intimidate us failed.
