As Kamala Harris celebrates her victory as Vice President-elect and the first woman to hold the second-highest office in America, she might have to face a ghost from the past.
Years ago, a man named Joey Piscitelli wrote to Kamala Harris, who was then San Francisco’s District Attorney, about the plight of the catholic clergy sex abuse survivors. However, it fell on deaf ears.
According to Piscitelli, Kamala Harris never responded to him when he wrote to her about the abuse he had suffered at the hands of a local Catholic priest. Five years later, he wrote to her again urging her to release records on clergymen accused of sexual abuse to not only get justice for himself but also to help other survivors who were filing lawsuits, but Harris never responded.
“She did nothing”, said Piscitelli, who is now the Northern California spokesperson for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
Now there is a possibility that Harris’s record on fighting sex abuse crimes within the Catholic Church might become an issue as she campaigned as a tough-on-crime ex-prosecutor when she was trying to get the democratic nomination for the office of the President. Survivors of clergy abuse and their attorneys say that Harris was consistently silent on the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal both as San Francisco’s District Attorney and later as California’s Attorney General.
In 2019, in a statement to The Associated Press, the Harris campaign in a statement said, “Kamala Harris has been a staunch advocate on behalf of sexual assault victims, especially child sexual assault victims,” and noted that she “used her position as District Attorney to create the first unit focused on child sexual assault cases in the office’s history.”
However, it maintained stoic silence regarding survivors abused by Catholic clerics. The statement said that withheld documents regarding clergy sexual abuse from attorneys and news reporters to protect the identities of survivors which has been faulted by survivors and their lawyers.
It is to be noted that President-elect Joe Biden is a practicing Catholic and California is home to large Catholic voting blocs, accounting for roughly a quarter of the population in the entire state of California.
“There’s a potential political risk if you move aggressively against the church,” said Michael Meadows, a Bay Area attorney who has represented clergy abuse victims. “I just don’t think she was willing to take it.”, he was quoted saying in a report.
In 2003, a U.S. Supreme Court decision made it impossible to pursue criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse cases after statutes of limitation had expired which left lawsuits in civil court as the only path for seeking justice for many clergy sexual abuse survivors.
After Kamala Harris assumed the office of the District Attorney (DA) in 2004, when attorneys of survivors urged her to release church records on abusive priests that had been gathered by her predecessor, Terence Hallinan, she refused to release saying that it was intended to protect the identities of clergy abuse survivors.
However, survivors and their attorneys were not happy and one of the lawyers of the survivor said that Harris could have redacted any identifying information.
It was also reported that Harris’ office resisted informal requests to help them with their cases, while other district attorneys or their staff members were making themselves available.
“Of all the DAs in the Bay Area, she’s the only one who wouldn’t cooperate with us”, Rick Simons, the attorney for Piscitelli was quoted saying in the report by CBS local.
It was when Kamala Harris was running for the state Attorney General in 2010 when she had again highlighted her work for sexual abuse survivors that Piscitelli wrote Harris his second letter, asking her to release the clergy personnel files. It was around the same time the SF Weekly renewed a previous public records request for the church documents on sexual abuse. However, to advance her politcal carrier, Kamala Harris continued to avoid taking a stand on the Catholic Church’s abuse problem.