The criminal investigation into child sexual abuse in New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese has entered a major new phase, after a judge ordered the church to turn over records to Louisiana state police showing how it responded to abuse allegations over the last several decades.
The order signed on Monday seeks files that would identify every priest and deacon accused of abusing children while working in the US’s second-oldest archdiocese; when those complaints were first made; and whether the church turned those cases over to police, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
Significantly, police are also demanding copies of all communications among New Orleans’ current archbishop, Gregory Aymond, his aides and their superiors at the Vatican, those sources said.
Asked for comment on Wednesday, an archdiocese spokesperson said: “As always, the archdiocese will continue to cooperate in all law enforcement investigations.”
It appears to be the first time that authorities investigating the New Orleans archdiocese’s role in the decades-old, worldwide Catholic clerical child abuse scandal have sought the full set of abuse-related documents in the local church’s possession.
In the rare cases where New Orleans-area clergymen have been convicted of – or even prosecuted for – child rape or molestation, investigators have generally focused on documents related to the individual defendants and their direct superiors.
Now, by essentially seeking the entire paper trail generated by the scandal, investigators could also learn what top church officials in Rome knew of the breadth of abuse at the local level in New Orleans.
It also introduces the possibility that authorities could one day produce a watershed report about the extent of Catholic clergy abuse in New Orleans as detailed as those published by prosecutors in states such as Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Louisiana state police investigators sought Monday’s order from Judge Juana Lombard of New Orleans criminal court after reviewing documents, witness statements and other materials uncovered as part of a pending rape case they are helping local prosecutors pursue against retired priest Lawrence Hecker, the sources added.
Hecker was first confronted about rape allegations by the late archbishop Philip Hannan in 1988. He later admitted to past abuse to the Guardian and CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana while saying that Hannan had accepted his assurances that he wouldn’t do it again and allowed him to remain in ministry.
Hecker was later clinically diagnosed as a pedophile, according to secret church records obtained by the Guardian and WWL – and he admitted to church leaders in a 1999 written statement that he had molested or sexually harassed at least seven children. However, once again, the church allowed Hecker to remain in ministry, and he retired with full benefits in 2002.
Records obtained by the news outlets indicate the archdiocese reported a single allegation of sexual abuse against Hecker to the New Orleans police department in 2002, even though the alleged crime unfolded in another state, outside the agency’s jurisdiction.
The archdiocese did not notify the public that Hecker was a suspected abuser until it released a list of more than 50 credibly accused clergy in 2018.
That disclosure – which has since grown to include more than 70 names – didn’t mention the fact that Hecker had already admitted several crimes. And clerical abuse survivors as well as their advocates have long argued that the list omits dozens of clergymen who should be included.
Furthermore, the church didn’t cancel Hecker’s benefits until after it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020.
In a sworn statement provided on Monday to Lombard, state troopers said their investigation into Hecker and the archdiocese’s management of him had led them to suspect the church knew of widespread abuse but failed to properly report it.
Some of that abuse appears to have involved clergymen who had committed acts of child abuse that remain prosecutable.
The warrant signed Monday, though, stops short of naming any archdiocesan bureaucrats who may be under criminal investigation for covering up child rape and other abuse by rank-and-file clergymen under the command of Aymond, New Orleans’ archbishop since 2009.
Hecker’s case is unresolved. The 92-year-old priest has been incarcerated for eight months on charges including rape and kidnapping.
A panel of psychiatrists recently issued a report that described Hecker to be mentally incompetent to stand trial at the moment, though a judge has not immediately accepted or rejected that finding.
Nonetheless, state troopers obtained Monday’s warrant after Jason Williams, the New Orleans district attorney, said his office was committed to exploring the possibility of criminal charges against anyone who had a hand in delaying the prosecution against Hecker or any other clergy suspected of abuse.
Hecker’s alleged rape victim reported his allegations to his high school immediately in 1975 and received psychiatric treatment from the school, but the allegations were never reported to police, according to his attorney. He reported the allegations directly to the FBI in June 2022.
Earlier that year, the FBI in New Orleans launched a broad investigation into possible violations of federal law by the local archdiocese’s clergy who took children across state lines to have sex.
Federal prosecutors have so far not filed any charges in connection with that investigation. But state police troopers assisting the FBI in that investigation ultimately decided to pursue a state-level case against Hecker individually.
An attorney for the victim in the prosecution pending against Hecker on Wednesday said his client “was proud and humbled by the fact that his individual case led to the issuance of this wide-ranging search warrant”.
“It’s about time that those at the archdiocese who enabled Hecker and others like him are held accountable,” the victim’s lawyer, Richard Trahant, said.
FILE – A woman prays at the San Ramon Nonato church after an Easter Holy Week procession was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak in Madrid, Spain, Thursday, April 9, 2020. Spain has approved a plan aimed at making reparation and economic compensation for victims of sex abuses committed by people connected to the Catholic Church.
Spain on Tuesday approved a plan aimed at making reparation and economic compensation for victims of sex abuse committed by people connected to the Catholic Church.
It also announced the future celebration of a public act of recognition for those affected and their families.
The Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, said the plan was based on recommendations in a report by Spain’s Ombudsman last year. From that report, he said it was concluded that some 440,000 adults may have suffered sex abuse in Spain by people linked to the church and that roughly half of those cases were committed by clergy.
Bolaños said the compensation would be financed by the church.
But in a statement Tuesday, Spain’s Bishops Conference rejected the plan, saying it discriminated against victims outside of church circles.
No details of how much or when financial compensation would be paid were released. Neither was a date set for any public act of recognition.
Bolaños said the plan aimed to “settle a debt with those victims who for decades were forgotten by everyone and now our democracy aims to repair” that, and make it a central part of government policy.
After years of virtually ignoring the issue, Spain’s bishops apologized for the abuses committed by church members following the Ombudsman’s report but disputed the number of victims involving the church as exaggerated. That report accused the church of widespread negligence.
Bolaños said the government hoped to carry out the plan over the next four years in collaboration with the church.
The project will include free legal assistance for all victims of sexual abuse and it will reinforce the prevention supervision in schools.
— Months later, former Knoxville Bishop Richard Stika is threatening priests
Bishop Richard F. Stika waves to the congregation during his during his episcopal ordination March 19 at the Knoxville, Tenn., convention center. Bishop Stika, a St. Louis native, is the third bishop to lead the Diocese of Knoxville, which was founded in 1988 and is home to almost 60,000 Catholics.. At left is principal consecrator Cardinal Justin F. Rigali of Philadelphia.
Though he hasn’t been employed by the Catholic Diocese of Knoxville for nearly a year, former Bishop Richard Stika continues to make his presence felt, contacting whistleblowers directly with threats of a lawsuit, including one who is a key witness in the sexual assault lawsuit against the church.
That lawsuit was filed by a former diocesan employee who alleges a former diocesan seminarian raped him and details how the diocese, led by Stika, interfered with the investigation and worked to discredit him. Knox News independently verified the interference, which led to the firing of an independent investigator.
As complaints about Stika’s leadership and handling of allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct piled up in the diocese, the bishop offered his resignation and it was accepted by Pope Francis in June 2023.
But Stika has continued to try to assert control over some of the priests in the Knoxville diocese. He sent a text message recently, for instance, to three priests, including the Rev. Brent Shelton, who left Knoxville in April 2023 after he was told he was being reassigned, a move church watchdogs viewed as retaliation.
Shelton recently filed a formal complaint against the diocese’s attorney with the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility, which polices attorney conduct.
Know News is not naming the other recipients of Stika’s message because they are constrained by church authorities from talking to the media and were unwilling to discuss the message.
“Happy Spy Wednesday,” reads the opening of the text.
“And it all started with (name of priest Knox News is not identifying)! I will never understand how anyone could be so hateful to destroy the ministry of any cleric and in (name of priest Knox News is not identifying)’s case to bring a former seminarian to the point of suicide. It is all documented, my attorneys are ready and the information will be shared with my successor.”
Shelton said Stika’s messages are both threatening and intimidating.
“If bishops keep getting away with threatening and retaliating against whistleblowers, I’m afraid children and vulnerable adults will never be safe in the Church,” he told Knox News in an email. “The diocese needs to move forward, but we cannot do that if priests must live under the shadow of threats like these from the man we looked up to as our spiritual father for over a decade.”
Stika responded to questions from Knox News by text message and denied his messages to priests were threatening.
“Did not threaten at all. Just informed them about a possible lawsuit but I have decided not to include them in a lawsuit,” he said. “I have developed some additional heart issues over the last months and decided it is not worth it. I have moved on. I am retired. Plus, I have not found you to present anything that is balanced.”
The most recent messages were sent March 27, and Knox News viewed them. Shelton sent a list of questions to the diocese about the messages April 1 and 10 days later he received a “good faith” response acknowledging the questions from Louisville Archbishop Shelton Fabre, who is acting as the apostolic administrator until a new bishop is named.
The perception of some priests that Stika is threatening them is similar behavior they and others flagged during his years in Knoxville.
In a 2023 court filing, for example, Stika admitted he told a room full of priests that the man who says he was raped by the former seminarian was actually the predator, not the other way around. He also admitted to telling a separate group of priests that the man groomed the seminarian accused of rape.
“I’m sad but not surprised,” David Clohessy, former national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, wrote in an email. “This sometimes happens when church officials let a bad bishop quietly slink away without disciplining or defrocking him.”
Is it Witness intimidation?
Mitchell Garabedian, a world-renowned clergy sex abuse attorney whose work helped break open the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in Boston in the early 2000s, told Knox News Stika is potentially tampering with witnesses in the lawsuit that names him among the defendants.
“The question is (was) he intimidating the witness,” Garabedian said. “If he is intimidating the witness, then the judge in the case will look at what was said and whether the witness was intimated and decide what sanctions should be brought against Stika.
“Witness intimidation can turn into a criminal matter if it is found the witness is being intimidated and being influenced by a person.”
He went on to say Stika’s messages are unusual but not unprecedented. Typically, those types of messages are kept within secret church files.
“It sounds like bishop Stika is still a powerful person within the church who might be trying to influence the outcome of the case,” he said.
Attorney Patrick Thronson, who represents the man who filed the lawsuit that names Stika, declined to comment about whether he thought the former bishop is tampering with witnesses, but he did say he plans to take up Stika’s messages with the court.
The Rev. Athanasius Abanulo celebrates Mass at Holy Family Catholic Church in Lanett, Ala., on Sunday, Dec. 12, 2021. Originally from Nigeria, Abanulo is one of numerous international clergy helping ease a U.S. priest shortage by serving in Catholic dioceses across the country.
While the number of U.S. Catholics is increasing, the total number of Catholic parishes nationwide declined 9% between 1970 and 2020, according to a new report by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
In 10 of the 11 dioceses studied, those closures are disproportionately happening in Black and Latino neighborhoods and neighborhoods with higher poverty and unemployment.
The total number of American Catholics increased by 46% in the half-century before 2020, though the study’s researchers provided the context that the overall population increased 65% in those same years, meaning Catholics are a smaller proportion of the population.
The total number of priests, meanwhile, declined by 40%. The shortage of priests has played a significant role in the decisions to close parishes. Bishops announcing parish closures or consolidation repeatedly cite fewer and aging priests and low Mass attendance in decisions that typically receive pushback from their flocks.
Religious orders, like the Jesuits, have also announced plans to pull out of parish ministry because of few priests, ending longtime relationships with local parishes.
FutureChurch, a Catholic nonprofit that advocates for access to the Eucharist and reforms to the church, including married priests, commissioned the 759-page CARA report.
Parish size has grown by 60% since 1970, according to the report.
The CARA report notes that sacraments, including baptisms, Catholic marriages and Catholic funerals, have all declined. A deacon can also perform these sacraments, but there are fewer deacons than priests in the U.S.
Between 1970 and 2020, baptisms declined 57%, Catholic marriages declined 78%, and Catholic funerals declined 14%.
The report studied 11 dioceses: the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Archdiocese of Chicago, Archdiocese of Detroit, Archdiocese of Miami, Archdiocese of New Orleans, Archdiocese of New York, Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Archdiocese of St. Louis, Diocese of Bridgeport, Diocese of Cleveland and Diocese of Memphis.
The dioceses were selected to fit FutureChurch’s research needs and are not a representative sample. Several large dioceses, including the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Archdiocese of Atlanta, Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston and Archdiocese of Seattle are not among the dioceses studied.
But in the dioceses studied, the report showed a tendency to close or merge parishes in neighborhoods that were poorer or had higher percentages of Black people or Latinos.
While the average proportion of white residents was lower in neighborhoods where parishes closed and higher in neighborhoods where parishes were opened, “in all 11 dioceses, the average proportion of people below the poverty line, people unemployed, Blacks/African Americans, and Hispanics/Latinos was higher in those neighborhoods where parishes closed/were absorbed than in those neighborhoods were parishes opened/expanded,” the report concluded. (The sole exception was for Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods in the Archdiocese of Miami.)
In part, it was his position — as a priest and doctoral student — that convinced so many children and parents at Seattle’s St. Paul School and Catholic parish to trust Patrick O’Donnell.
He told them he was working on his graduate research when he recruited 60 seventh- and eighth-graders for a 1978 dissertation experiment “on the subject of trust.” And he told them he was working on “research” when he asked parents and teachers to pull students out of class.
In fact, the reason he was in Seattle in the first place was because the Spokane Diocese had sent him to get treatment for what one priest euphemistically called his “pediatrician complex.”
In the 1970s and early ’80s, as he was moved from parish to parish — in Spokane, Seattle, and the small eastern Washington town of Rosalia — he allegedly molested more than 65 children, court records show. He admitted abusing at least 30. Six victims were from St. Paul.
By 2002, O’Donnell had become known as one of the most infamous predator priests in the region. His actions helped drive the Spokane Diocese into bankruptcy. He was sued — settling for $5 million he didn’t have. He lost his psychology license, his role as a priest and his reputation.
But O’Donnell still has one honor left.
“He can put the letters Ph.D after his name, and that’s still a problem,” said Pomona College chemistry professor Dan O’Leary. “He’s in my world, higher education. I don’t think he deserves to be in this world.”
Back when O’Leary was an altar boy in Seattle, he had his own run-in with O’Donnell. Since 2018, O’Leary has been doggedly urging the University of Washington to take a radical step: revoking O’Donnell’s 1978 degree entirely.
Emails provided to InvestigateWest show that UW has seriously considered taking that step over the past six years. Numerous administrators, university investigators, the Title IX office and even the state attorney general’s office have weighed in. The university declined to make any staffers available for an interview with InvestigateWest, and InvestigateWest was unable to reach O’Donnell, now 81, for comment.
In a statement, however, the university said that while the actions were “heinous and reprehensible” and the efforts to seek justice “certainly understandable,” they were “unable to obtain evidence that in the course of his graduate work, Mr. O’Donnell met the standard for degree revocation.”
InvestigateWest, however, has uncovered additional evidence tying O’Donnell’s sexual abuse to his graduate work and calling the honesty of the work itself into question.
In a 2009 lawsuit against the Seattle Archdiocese, an attorney demonstrates how the Spokane Diocese transferred child molester Patrick O’Donnell to the Seattle region, where O’Donnell attended graduate school.
Degrees have been revoked before, but mostly for issues like plagiarism and data falsification. Revoking a degree for sexual assault would mean diving into a thorny issue that has divided academics for decades: Can you separate the research from the researcher?
Former American Psychiatric Association President Paul Appelbaum, an expert on ethics in medicine and psychiatry, said even the question of whether to use data from the experiments conducted in Nazi death camps doesn’t have a clear consensus among researchers. He’s uneasy about the idea of revoking O’Donnell’s degree, instead of just condemning his actions.
“Going back to erase the record of his Ph.D seems to raise more problems than it could conceivably address,” Appelbaum said.
Yet Mary Dispenza, part of the Seattle Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said that even decades later, it “matters to a survivor” when an “institution finally stands up to crimes of any nature.”
“If the university has the right to do that, I say do it,” Dispenza said. “If it is a wrong act, you make it right. It doesn’t matter if it’s 50 years later.”
FOR THE SAKE OF SCIENCE
O’Leary wasn’t one of O’Donnell’s victims. But he thinks he almost was. O’Leary said he remembers lying on his back, in the winter of his eighth-grade year, at a university pool after O’Donnell offered to teach him how to swim. He will never forget the look on O’Donnell’s face as he floated in his arms.
“It was really clear to me that he was fantasizing,” O’Leary said.
The priest wanted to shower afterward, O’Leary recalls, but the altar boy declined to join him. These memories are nearly a half-century old, but he still finds them “chilling to the bone.”
“It’s like being in a car with Ted Bundy,” O’Leary said.
But he also knows that lawsuits are filled with depositions of boys who said they’d experienced far worse. There were boys who knew O’Donnell as a basketball coach, or track coach, or Boy Scout chaplain, or a family friend. There were boys he’d strip naked after basketball practice, boys he’d take out on his boat, boys he’d wrestle, grope, tell to keep quiet.
There was the boy O’Donnell would let drive if he’d sit on his lap. The boy who rolled the lowest number in a dice game in O’Donnell’s hot tub and had to run naked to the dock to do push-ups. And the boy who knew something was wrong one night at Spokane’s Bishop White Seminary, who tried to call his mom again and again but kept getting a busy signal until O’Donnell was on top of him, mauling him, kissing him, grinding against him, until the boy pleaded with him enough times to stop.
There were boys who grew up and confronted O’Donnell. In the courtroom. In the press. At the front door of the parish with a Bible in their shaking hands. In a suicide note.
The fact that O’Leary got away unharmed, while so many of O’Donnell’s victims didn’t, has stuck with him.
“I think there’s probably some survivor’s guilt,” O’Leary said. “You lived and other people perished.”
It’s part of what’s fueling his tenacity, driving him to keep hammering away on this issue for so many years. Whenever one UW administrator stopped responding to his emails, he’d simply reach out to another.
When he managed to get his hands on O’Donnell’s 1978 doctoral dissertation — sent to him in California by interlibrary loan — the thing that angered him the most was on the very last page: The University of Washington consent form, a permission slip to participate in the experiment that students and parents were asked to sign.
“That told me that O’Donnell understood that researching with human subjects has responsibility,” O’Leary said. “It’s clear that he was well-aware there are ethical obligations.”
The May 1978 experiment had focused on studying how trust develops between kids and adults. The recruits were asked about the prisoner’s dilemma, a famous two-person negotiation game: If both players are trustworthy and choose to cooperate, they both benefit — gaining a small amount of money. But if one decides to betray the other, the betrayer gets more money and the victim gets nothing.
Attorney Michael Pfau, who represented many of O’Donnell’s victims, said he’s never come across any victims who remember being a part of the experiment. But he cited O’Donnell’s doctoral dissertation, “Evoking Trustworthy Behavior of Children and Adults in A Prisoner’s Dilemma Game,” in multiple lawsuits as an example “of a pedophile using a number of means to gain access to children.”
To O’Leary, the topic was “tragically ironic.” In March 2018, as the #MeToo movement sparked hundreds of whistleblowers across the country to go public with allegations against rapists, O’Leary made his pitch in an email to the UW: If O’Donnell had “engaged in sexually abusive behavior under the pretext of conducting doctoral research” then surely, UW would “disavow itself from that research and question the validity of any degrees given in association” with it.
He knew it was going to be an uphill battle. While plenty of honorary degrees of serial predators such as Bill Cosby have been retracted, pulling a real degree for nonacademic reasons is very rare.
Dan O’Leary, chemistry professor at Pomona College in California, says that the University of Washington awarding a doctoral degree to Patrick O’Donnell, who preyed upon children while a grad student at the university, “is a history that needs to be corrected.”
There have been exceptions. In 1999, MIT revoked the diploma of a former fraternity pledge trainer for providing a freshman with the alcohol that killed him. In 2000, a federal court found that University of Virginia did have the right to revoke a graduate’s degree for embezzling funds from a student club, but allowed the student to sue on due process grounds. And while Columbia University officials revoked the degree of a journalism student accused of sexual assault in 2017, they restored it three years later as part of a lawsuit settlement. But almost all of these cases involved recent graduates.
But Applebaum, the ethics expert, said he’s uneasy about the notion of stripping away someone’s degree for anything but academic reasons.
“Whenever someone is convicted of a felony, does that mean we go back and take away their graduate degrees or their undergraduate degrees or their high school diplomas?” he asked. “Where does this end?”
But when O’Leary reached out to UW in 2018, they were coming off of multiple years of headlines about a star university researcher accused repeatedly of sexual harassment.
In emails provided to InvestigateWest, university officials initially seemed supportive of revoking O’Donnell’s degree. Martin Howell, the assistant dean for academic and student affairs in the College of Education at UW, told O’Leary that the “mission and values” of the university were driving him and other administrators to push O’Leary’s proposal forward.
Since the 1950s, UW faculty had the power to recommend that the Board of Regents revoke a degree retroactively — if they could prove it was granted based on “fraud and deceit.”
The fundamental question, Howell wrote in a 2019 email, was whether, if the school knew about O’Donnell’s conduct at the time, they would have refused to grant him the doctorate. At first, Howell said, they anticipated being able to rely on “non-academic misconduct that would have violated the UW Student Conduct Code in place at that time.”
But after a conversation with the state attorney general’s office, the university concluded it would be more difficult than they had suspected: To take away his degree they needed proof of fraud and deceit connected to his actual academic work.
The best evidence for that had come from Jim Biteman, one of O’Donnell’s victims at St. Paul. Biteman was never a part of O’Donnell’s 1978 “Prisoner’s Dilemma” experiment. But the year before, he recounted in a deposition, O’Donnell repeatedly pulled him out of class, claiming “he was going to ask me questions regarding research for his university studies.”
The priest would ask the boy to stand in front of the cafeteria window — his back to O’Donnell — and imagine himself naked and describe what he saw. And then O’Donnell would ask Biteman to imagine another boy naked with him, touching him, and ask how the thought made the eighth-grader feel.
“He would always say, ‘Don’t tell anybody about this conversation. This is part of my research. I don’t want you to spoil it, because I have to talk to some other boys,’” Biteman said in the deposition. “I know for a fact that he pulled other boys down there and did the same routine, same questions because I have spoken with others that have gone through it.”
Later, O’Donnell invited Biteman on trips on his boat up at a lake — as he did with so many other kids — and molested him.
While Biteman did not respond to an interview request from InvestigateWest, in a 2019 email he stressed to O’Leary that the evidence clearly showed O’Donnell had used his role as a graduate student to abuse underage boys.
“If the UW chooses to ignore the facts and requires ‘proof’ that directly ties his research to the abuse,” Biteman wrote, “then it appears they are not interested in pursuing what is right and are taking the easy way out.”
He hoped O’Leary could get traction on his efforts to convince UW to revoke O’Donnell’s degree.
“Anything that can be done to discredit this guy, who is currently living out his life … with little if any payment or accountability for his crimes, is welcome,” Biteman wrote.
AN ACADEMIC QUESTION
Finally, last June — more than five years after O’Leary first raised the issue with the university — he was told the investigation had come to a halt.
The trouble with Biteman’s account, the university explained in a letter to O’Leary, was that they didn’t have any evidence O’Donnell was actually conducting doctoral research when he was victimizing the eighth-grade boy.
If O’Donnell was lying to Biteman, if his “research” didn’t have anything to do with his studies and he was just molesting them, then his degree was safe.
On its face, that may seem perverse. But Appelbaum, the ethics expert, argues that it makes sense. A university degree shouldn’t be read as a moral badge of character, he said; it’s proof of the completion of academic standards.
“If a man, however evil he was a person and however many people he may have harmed, fulfilled the requirements for a Ph.D, then he’s got a Ph.D,” Appelbaum said.
In UW’s emails to O’Leary, officials stressed they’d tried to find a clear connection to his dissertation.
While O’Donnell had written that 60 seventh- and eighth-graders had participated in the experiment at St. Paul, there was no record of who they were. The university tried to reach out to Biteman, but never heard back. The university even sent a letter to O’Donnell himself, to his home in Mount Vernon, but through an attorney, O’Donnell declined to talk.
But UW would not tell InvestigateWest whether they considered another major trove of information: court records.
During a 2004 deposition, O’Donnell testified that he did pull kids like Biteman out of class for purposes tied to UW academics — but didn’t indicate it had anything to do directly with his dissertation. Instead, he said, he was performing a “psychological test” on them.
His academic transcripts, indeed, show he was taking a class called “individual testing,” which focused on intelligence tests for children. But O’Donnell said the tests he was conducting involved a word-association game where the kids would have to react to words like “man,” “masturbation” and “intercourse,” though he claimed he didn’t particularly emphasize the sexually charged words over other words.
O’Leary sees it as evidence of “extensive human subjects violation during the courses” that O’Donnell had taken. Combined with Biteman’s testimony, it suggested that O’Donnell had been using these kinds of games to groom young boys and that this behavior was clearly intertwined with his academic work.
“When someone is a rule breaker, it’s worth going back and taking a close look at their doctoral research, and see whether there’s any rule-breaking there, too,” Appelbaum said.
Indeed, O’Donnell insisted that the only reason that he had landed on the “prisoner’s dilemma” dissertation topic was because “the ethics committee at the university wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do” and he’d done similar research for his master’s program at Gonzaga University.
Vast sections of O’Donnell’s doctoral dissertation had lifted entire pages from his master’s thesis word for word, right down to using the same lengthy quotes from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” about how the “difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”
Today, the UW warns doctoral students that plagiarism, even using “your own, previously published work” without citing it, could prevent them from getting a degree.
The prohibition against self-plagiarism can be hazy, Appelbaum said, but it becomes a problem “when it crosses the line from merely recapitulating the same idea or using the same phrase to extracting and reusing a larger body of words.”
Self-plagiarism, of course, is almost a comically minor sin compared to those committed against the more than 30 victims O’Donnell has confessed to molesting. But, crucially, it’s an academic one.
The revelation has re-invigorated O’Leary. Earlier this month, he was armed with a highlighter and a green pen, going line by line through a copy of O’Donnell’s dissertation, marking up just how many lines appeared verbatim in each of them. He even identified two small instances of plagiarizing other people’s work — nearly word-for-word quotes that were sourced in the Gonzaga thesis but unsourced in his dissertation.
“I’m confident it would raise eyebrows,” O’Leary said. “Anyone on a dissertation committee, if they knew that was happening, they would consider it fraud or deceit.”
Presented with this evidence by InvestigateWest, the UW said it remains open to new information but was “focused on the concerns regarding abuse of minors within the conduct of his university research, not plagiarism.” It declined to comment further.
But O’Leary sees an opportunity: O’Donnell had used the pretext of UW doctoral research to molest children as a grad student. Now, O’Leary argued, the university could use the shoddiness of his actual research as a pretext for removing the degree of a child molester.
“It does directly meet the usual standard for degree revocation,” O’Leary said. “Maybe the university is actually secretly hoping for a valid reason to do the right thing.”
