Lawsuit Over Haitian School Sexual Abuse Case With Connecticut Ties Settled - Knights Of Malta Involved (pizzagate)

submitted ago by think-

Over 130 people who say they were molested at a school in Haiti connected to Fairfield University, have settled a lawsuit for $60 million, pending approval by a federal judge in Hartford.

The Jesuit university agreed to the settlement with several other defendants, including the Haiti Fund, the Society of Jesus of New England, the Order of Malta, and others that had supported the now-defunct charity, Project Pierre Toussaint.

The lawsuit claimed that the Haitian school's founder, Douglas Perlitz, molested over 100 boys while operating the facility, which housed and taught children as young as six. Perlitz is currently serving a 19-year prison sentence for the abuse after being convicted in 2011.

Perlitz graduated from Fairfield in 1992 and was the university’s commencement speaker in 2002, years after the Haitian school opened. The university also honored Perlitz with its humanitarian award and an honorary degree.

Of course... /s

The lawsuit also named the university’s then-director of campus ministry, Father Paul Carrier, who was alleged to have been responsible for supervising Perlitz.

School officials denied they did anything wrong, according to court records, but lawyers for the victims said there were many warning signs that should have alerted Fairfield University and the other defendants to the abuse.

Attorneys for the victims initially sought $120 million in damages and legal fees.

The suit represents the latest development in abuse cases involving priests or clergy with ties to the Catholic Church. Earlier this week, the Hartford Archdiocese released a list of 48 priests who have been credibly accused of abusing children. The archdiocese also reported that it had paid out over $50 million to settle over 140 cases of abuse.

Also this week, the attorney general for Washington, D.C., proposed legislation that would add clergy to the list of mandatory reporters, who are required to alert authorities to suspected abuse.

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letsdothis3 ago

Think you might really be onto something with that COFA connection...

Jeff Medefind, President https://cafo.org/speaker/jedd-medefind-3/ Prior to his this role, Jedd served in the White House as a Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, leading the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Elizabeth Wiebe, Vice president for engagement https://cafo.org/speaker/elizabeth-wiebe/ Prior to this role Elizabeth served in the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush where she spearheaded outreach and organized trainings for faith-based organizations nationwide.

CAFO is discussed in this article: https://adoptionland.org/1022/christians-alliance-for-orphan-q-a/

CAFO for the last several years has been undergoing a transformation in which intercountry adoption (ICA), which had been emphasized early in the movement, receives less attention, while other kinds of interventions and ministries receive greater attention. In addition, many Christians active in the spheres in which CAFO operates have become more informed about the complexities involved in adoption and “orphan” care, and more vocal in questioning the prior simplistic narratives. Some in leadership, such as Jedd Medefind, are open to dialogue. The changes are evident looking back over the last four years. These positive trends continue to gain momentum, although they still have a long way to go.

...Many people—children, first families, adoptive families, communities, and the adoption system itself—have been harmed by the mistaken approaches to ICA advocated and implemented by the movement. Those harms are ongoing, for adoption is not just a moment-in-time invention, but alters the lives and trajectories of lives permanently.

From my perspective, the movement did not merely rhetorically over-emphasize international adoption, it actually undermined international adoption by advocating flawed practices.

One odd thing about CAFO is how little information about illicit practices in international adoption is actually available at CAFO events. So far as I can tell, there have been no planned sessions and little discussion about either the specifics of illicit practices, nor the current crises in Ethiopia, DRC Congo, Uganda, and (in the recent past) Guatemala, Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam (for example) that are related to illicit practices. CAFO claims to present the best information on international adoption and children’s rights, and yet you could attend all of CAFO with virtually no information or discussions of these issues.

More about ICA here: https://adoptionland.org/1082/the-cognitive-dissonance-between-child-rescue-and-child-protection/

The orphan industrial complex

Aside from the usual paternalism of north-south relations, charities’ child rescue narratives constantly place children of the global south in the position of needing ‘saving’ by northern benefactors. From organisations like ‘Save the Children’ to a prominent orphan movement in evangelical churches (which has been likened by critics to both colonial civilizing missions and slavery), these child rescue narratives not only create cognitive dissonance between the protection of children at home and abroad. They fuel the orphan industrial complex that makes orphans commodified objects for intervention, from tourism to mission trips to intercountry adoption (ICA). Orphans are now effectively being ‘manufactured’ to meet the demand of child rescuers.

I have been conducting research with children for two decades in Uganda. Since the orphan industrial complex set its sights on the country in 2009, the number of orphanages has increased five-fold, as have ICAs. Approximately 95 percent of the 800+ orphanages now operating in Uganda are foreign-funded, yet only about 30 of them are licensed. It is furthermore estimated that 85 percent of the children in Uganda’s burgeoning childcare institutions have living and locatable relatives.

This situation is not unique to Uganda. It is part of a broader pattern in the developing world that we see whenever orphanhood becomes commodified.

More about Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Office_of_Faith-Based_and_Neighborhood_Partnerships

OFBCI was established by President George W. Bush through an executive order[2] on January 29, 2001, representing one of the key domestic policies of Bush's campaign promise of "compassionate conservatism."

President Barack Obama renamed the office[4] and appointed Joshua DuBois as its head. He also established an advisory council for the office. The office has not officially been abolished by President Donald Trump, but a director has yet to be named and the website is no longer available.

We have a voat post about Joshua DuBois: James Alefantis is in the White House at the same time of a White House Google Hangout on human trafficking

We have surmised in the past that Bush, Obama and Alefantis are all CIA related...