US journalist champions case of wrongly convicted priest Fr Gordon MacRae

Fr Gordon J Macrae

In a hard-hitting article that bravely veers from the media's predictable coverage of the Catholic Church abuse story, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz has taken up the case of Fr Gordon J MacRae, who has been serving a 33 and half-to-67 year sentence in a New Hampshire state prison since 1994 on abuse charges.

Rabinowitz's article in the Wall Street Journal reports that MacRae was wrongfully convicted in a grave miscarriage of justice.

TheMediaReport.com has thoroughly examined Fr MacRae's case before, and this is the second time that Rabinowitz has profiled MacRae. She first reported about the priest for the Journal back in 2005.

In a nutshell, Fr MacRae was convicted by a jury and imprisoned based on the claims of a single accuser named Thomas Grover, whom Rabinowitz aptly notes had "a considerable history of forgery, assault, theft and drug use."

In 1994, the then-27-years-old Grover claimed that Fr MacRae sexually assaulted him over five consecutive weekly counseling sessions years earlier in 1983 when he was 15 years old. Asked why he would repeatedly return to a place where he had been brutally attacked the week before, Grover amazingly testified that he "had experienced 'out of body' episodes that had blocked his recollection" of previous abuse.

But these are not the only troubling aspects of MacRae's case. Among the others: there are multiple, independent attestations that Grover has said privately that he was never assaulted by MacRae, and he accused the priest in order to sue the Church for money; there are multiple, independent sources who say that they were coerced by law enforcement into falsely implicating MacRae of abuse; a signed statement from a courtroom witness claimed that a therapist hired by Grover's contingency lawyer used hand signals from the back of the courtroom during the trial in order to coach Grover on the witness stand; and a veteran FBI agent conducted a three-year investigation and concluded, "I discovered no evidence of MacRae having committed the crimes charged, or any other crimes."

To read the article see: www.themediareport.com/