Jeff Anderson (attorney): Difference between revisions

This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. (December 2020)

Jeff Anderson (born August 27, 1947) is an American personal injury attorney and leads Jeff Anderson & Associates PA with headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota. ^[1] He is best known for uncovering the widespread concealment of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Clergy in the 1980s and using media events to encourage child sexual abuse victims to speak out.^[2] In 2010, Anderson made international headlines^[3] when he challenged the Holy See's protected status under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act,^[4] in several lawsuits. Matt Carroll of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team described Anderson “One of the foremost attorneys in this area.”^[5]

Jeff Anderson was born on August 27, 1947, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Raised in Edina, Minnesota, Anderson's mother stayed at home while his father worked as a furniture salesman for Dayton's department store. Anderson's first marriage ended in divorce in 1979. He met Julie Aronson in 1981, and the two married in 1987.^[5] His children were raised in the Roman Catholic faith, though he became an atheist in the 1980s, while working with legal cases involving sexual abuse. Anderson returned to organized religion in the 1990s, while attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.^[2]

After graduating magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota, Anderson obtained his Juris Doctor from William Mitchell College of Law (now Mitchell Hamline School of Law) in 1975.  He is licensed to practice law in Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, before the U.S. Supreme Court, and in several U.S. District Courts and U.S. Courts of Appeals.^[6]

In 1983, Anderson was brought on as a defense attorney by the family of Greg Riedle. Riedle, who was a minor convicted of molesting a younger child, told his parents he had learned his behavior from the family priest. Riedle claimed he had been sexually abused by Rev. Thomas Adamson while serving as an altar boy at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church of St. Paul Park. The Riedles informed their bishop of their son's allegations. Finding the bishop's response inadequate, the Riedles approached Anderson. Anderson launched a lawsuit against the Catholic Church after conducting an investigation that convinced him there had been a cover-up "all the way to the archbishop." In 1984, after church officials denied in depositions that they knew about the priest's history of sexual abuse, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis reportedly offered over $1 million to settle the case out of public view. Anderson, who was troubled by the church's insistence on confidentiality, talked Riedle out of the offer, instead filing suit and calling the press.^[7]

Anderson's firm represented 14 more alleged victims of sexual abuse soon after Riedle's case went public. Most of those cases were eventually settled out of court. Anderson made national headlines, however, when the jury in a trial against the Diocese of Winona found for the plaintiff and set punitive damages at $2.7 million and compensatory damages at $883,000.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Anderson filed over 200 suits against religious organizations, a majority of them sex-abuse complaints against the Catholic Church. The most notorious of these cases involved James Porter, an alleged repeat offender across multiple states.^[5]

Anderson’s settlements tend toward the creative, routinely exposing abusers to the media. In a settlement with Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, Anderson stipulated the names of 17 monks with “credible allegations of sexual abuse,” be released in addition to an undisclosed dollar amount on behalf of nine plaintiffs.^[7] A decade after he started representing victims of childhood sexual abuse, it was widely reported in the media that an increasing number of victims were bringing suit based on "recovered memories" dredged up during therapy, under hypnosis or with the encouragement of a sympathetic listener. Anderson says only a "very small percentage" of cases were actually brought based on recovered memories.^[5] Throughout his career, Anderson has taken on cases in Australia, Brussels, Belgium and Mexico (Mexican immigration officials expelled Anderson in 2006). His law firm, Jeff Anderson & Associates PA, opened an office in London and hired a barrister in Ireland.^[7]

The agnostic attorney is quoted as finding his work fulfilling—"it nourishes my spirit.”^[7] In a 2010 interview with the New York Times,^[8] Anderson said he considers what he does as part of "the child civil rights movement." He has also taken aim against the Catholic Church's framework on gender and sexuality, stating: "Within that culture, they say that men are superior and priests are celibate. They suppress sexuality. Sexuality can't be suppressed. It creeps out. And those most accessible when it does are boys, nuns, and housekeepers--in that order. It's a matter of opportunity and access."^[5]

Critics have called Anderson a headline chaser and a self-promoter. He has been accused of baiting the media with the heartbreaking stories of his clients. Some in the legal community refer to his role as co-counsel in so many abuse cases around the country as "the Jeff Anderson franchise system."^[8] "Rather than settle out of court and seal the record, Jeff has learned the church is impervious to all but the most intense pressure," writes Anson D. Shupe, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University, who wrote the book Rogue Clerics: The Social Problem of Clergy Deviance. In 2002, the Washington Post wrote that Anderson himself estimated that total recoveries amounted to $60 million.^[7]