TTSOML #67: My Lawyer Works For The Archdiocese

After I was defamed by The Willamette Week, I wasn't treated the same anymore, by anyone. My professors and classmates had read the article, and I was sitting there in class, and began to get treated differently. I was also treated differently by police, because there had been an investigation made on my bahalf, and after the article came out, the chief investigator basically dropped the investigation. He also got the impression something was wrong with me after he read the Willamette Week article, and he recommended that I "lose the coat" which I had been wearing in the photos. I had people treating me with contempt after the publication of the article, and I suddenly had some men coming onto me all the time. The change was overnight. It was as if some men assumed, by the article, that I was accustomed to writing lascivious emails and letters and was some kind of wild woman who tried to seduce monks. I was approached by a ton of married men.

And, while I may NOW write sexually graphic material, or related things, and swear, etc., at that time in my life and my entire past before I never did, and I was extremely conservative so this caused an incredible amount of anxiety. I didn't sleep around, I never wore "sexy" clothing, and I didn't drink, party, do drugs, or try to seduce committed men. I actually began to drink more after the article was published and started going out dancing around this time, because of the stress. My reputation was completely damaged.

Not only did total strangers begin to doubt and question me and my character, good friends I'd had from high school did as well. They could not understand how it was even legal for a newspaper to print such untruths. They kept saying, "Why don't think print retractions?" I had thought the same thing--that it wasn't even possible, because what paper would risk getting caught? They just knew, from gathering information about me, that I wouldn't be able to fight it, and then they wrote this article about me which they knew would make it even more difficult for me to get a lawyer. I tried to get retractions, and wrote to the editors of the paper and outlined all the corrections which needed to be made. Basically though, it was so screwed up, the whole article needed to be pulled and retracted. To do that would have probably put them in a position of having admitted they wrote an entire article of fabrication about me. How many times do papers have to retract and pull an entire article? Maybe they thought such an admission could then lead to a lawsuit or make it easier for me to get a lawyer who would sue in the first place. They knew they had defamed me, but didn't want to admit it.

I tried to find a lawyer still. I ended up meeting this guy who was listed as a "civil rights" lawyer in the yellow pages. I went to his office, which was very small. I took a copy of The Willamette Week article and my emails from the monks. I wanted to file two different lawsuits: one for the monk's improper use of police for civil gain, and another for defamation.

This lawyer had a large desk with stacks of papers on it, a bookcase in the room, and a small miniature dog. He looked through the emails and his eyebrows raised once or twice. He said to me, "You know I have nothing to do with the Catholic church." I said yes, okay, I knew. But then as he said this, and was reading my papers, I began to notice what books he had in his bookcase. I noted a fat book on Canon Law, for the Roman Catholic Church. I said nothing. Then, as he was still reading, I noticed Archdiocese letterhead in his stacks of paper on his desk. It was the archdiocese cross and it peeked out from under some of the other papers. Why did he have a book of canon law in his bookcase, and correspondence from the Portland Archdiocese in his legal stacks?

I said nothing. I kept my questions to myself.