An Alameda County jury on Wednesday delivered a $16 million verdict against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland, in a key lawsuit that could have far-reaching consequences for hundreds of people claiming decades of abuse by the church’s priests.
The jury ordered the payout to a former Union City altar boy — now a 61-year-old father of four — who claimed he had twice been molested in 1975 by a notorious priest, Stephen Kiesle, during church sleepovers.
The lawsuit was one of six so-called “bellwether” cases against the diocese, which were allowed to proceed toward trial after years of delays brought on the diocese’s decision to file for bankruptcy protection in 2023.
On Wednesday, an attorney for that former altar boy hailed the verdict as a message to the Diocese to significantly increase their settlement offers, amid glacial progress toward reaching an accord in some 350 other lawsuits claiming similar abuse.
The verdict “shows that our community recognizes how harmful – not just for a week or a month but for a lifetime – sexual abuse of a child is,” said the attorney, Rick Simons.
“People, parents and adults are tired of the bullshit coming from these institutions,” Simons said. “They’re tired of kids being abused, and they want it to stop.”
Attempts by this news outlet to reach representatives for the diocese were not immediately successful.
The jury found that the diocese was liable for $12 million in past non-economic damages, as well as $4 million in future non-economic damages.
That former altar boy, who is named as John Doe in the lawsuit, described during testimony this week being made to undress in Kiesle’s rectory bedroom during a sleepover as a fifth-grader, before being molested alongside another child as part of a role-playing bedtime story.
The repeated sexual assaults left the long-ago altar boy with decades of post-traumatic stress that he often buried “with two feet of concrete,” and led to thousands of dollars in therapy treatments, according to court testimony.
Until now, the case had ranked among the hundreds of lawsuits that had been placed on hold when the diocese declared bankruptcy in May 2023.
But last year, a bankruptcy judge allowed six of those lawsuits to proceed to trial, so that each side could gauge how juries would react to their claims and potentially hasten an all-encompassing settlement. The next such case could begin in the coming months.
Both sides remain far apart on any potential deal.
A committee representing the abuse victims most recently demanded $314.1 million over the course of three-and-a-half years from the diocese and a related corporation overseeing its schools.
That compared with an offer of $180 million from the diocese and that corporation, including an additional $44.3 million from its insurers; the victims’ committee wants to negotiate its own settlement with those insurance companies, on the premise that they could secure significantly more money from them.
Kiesle is alleged to have abused victims in more than five dozen of the 350 or so pending lawsuits against the Oakland diocese.
The former priest pleaded no contest in 1978 to a misdemeanor charge of lewd conduct for tying up and sexually abusing two other boys at Our Lady of the Rosary in Union City.
Yet despite his conviction — and the three-year sentence of probation that followed — he remained a part of the church during the 1970s and ’80s.
Kiesle continued working with the church after being defrocked in 1987; a subsequent wave of molestation charges led to a six-year prison sentence in 2004, after which he was forced to register as a sex offender.
He has not appeared in court this month due to the fact he is currently serving another prison sentence in a 2022 vehicular manslaughter case.
During the trial, attorneys for the diocese do not dispute that Kiesle abused the boy.
Rather, they questioned during opening statements whether the man’s decades-long mental struggles were caused by the abuse or by a series of other traumas he experienced in his life, including the death of his best friend from a brain tumor in fifth grade, bullying in middle school and his mother’s alcoholism.
Taking the stand, the former altar boy described being initially offered compensation by the diocese for therapy from 2002 through 2010.
Yet he testified that the the church ended that aid in 2010, after the man’s clinician objected to demands by the diocese to share information about his diagnosis and prognosis.
The diocese’s demands for that information “hurt me,” the man testified, “because in a way, I felt like this was them not believing that something did happen to me.”