On May 24, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges against five priests who are serving, or previously served, in Michigan as part of her office’s ongoing investigation of sexual crimes committed by Catholic clergy. The charges resulted from more than 450 calls to the attorney general’s new tip line for victims of clergy sex abuse, coupled with ongoing review of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents originally seized last October by former Attorney General Bill Schuette.
Those charges against the five priests were also just the beginning. On June 6, Nessel told the Michigan Advance news site that more charges are coming. But while the May charges understandably captured the headlines and leads of most news articles about Nessel’s efforts, one allegation remains under-reported: Nessel’s assertion that she has personally read non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) signed by victims, despite reforms dating back to 2002 that were designed to put an end to that practice.
On the heels ofmore than 10,000 allegations of childhood sexual abuse by U.S. priests between 1950 and 2002, in 2002 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops drafted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which the Conference calls “a comprehensive set of procedures ... for addressing allegations of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy.”
According to Article 3 of the Charter, “Dioceses/eparchies are not to enter into settlements which bind the parties to confidentiality, unless the victim/survivor requests confidentiality and this request is noted in the text of the agreement.” The Charter doesn’t seem to address the question of why a sexual abuse survivor would want to sign an agreement requiring the survivor to be silent about their abuse. Regardless of the reasoning behind the Charter’s wording, during the May 24 press conference about the original charges, Attorney General Nessel made it clear that at least some Michigan dioceses are still using NDAs.
"We’ve also seen it since 2002, by the way, when the church had made certain that conduct wasn’t happening anymore. That has not been our experience. I read the non-disclosure agreements myself, personally. To say they don’t exist—we confiscated those," Nessel told reporters in a quote cited by the Lansing State Journal.