James Porter (priest)
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James Porter (January 2, 1935 - February 11, 2005) was a Roman Catholic priest who molested at least 125 children of both sexes over a period of 30 years, starting in the 1960s. His imprisonment in 1993 was a precursor to the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal a decade later.
Born in Revere, Massachusetts in 1935, Porter started both training for the priesthood and molesting children at a young age; he abused his earliest known victim in 1953, the summer before he entered seminary. He was ordained in 1959.
Porter was assigned to St. Mary's parochial grammar school in North Attleboro in April 1960 and put in charge of the altar boys. Complaints of sexual abuse, ranging from fondling to rape, quickly surfaced against him, but Porter's superiors ignored them, going so far as to bully his accusers into recanting. At least one of Porter's supervisors had first-hand knowledge of the abuse.
In 1964, Porter was arrested for molesting a 13-year-old boy and sent to a mental institution for 13 months. Once released, he was quickly reassigned to another parish, the first of many such reassignments over the years. He was shuffled into two more parishes before more accusations piled up and he was hospitalized again in 1967, this time to a hospital run by fellow priests who practiced holistic psychotherapy upon its patients, many of whom were clergy members suffering from psychological problems. Porter's "problem" was not unique among the hospital's patients; two of them were later imprisoned for abusing, between them, hundreds of children.
Porter was released after a few months, once again declared cured, and given probationary assignments in parishes in Texas, New Mexico and Minnesota, all of which included access to children. Complaints surfaced by the dozen against Porter, but none of them resulted in disciplinary action beyond his being quietly moved from post to post.
Porter left the priesthood in 1974 and eventually settled in Minnesota with a wife and four children, all of whom were unaware of his past.
In 1990, a man named Frank Fitzpatrick went public with accusations that Porter had abused him as a child in the '60s. Over the next two years, Fitzpatrick contacted the state police, the FBI, and the media, resulting in over two hundred people coming forward and leveling charges of abuse against Porter. A 1992 segment on Porter's crimes on the NBC TV news magazine Primetime Live, hosted by Diane Sawyer, sparked national attention, and Porter was arrested, tried and convicted of sexually abusing his children's babysitter in 1984. He served four months of a six-month prison sentence before his conviction was overturned by the Minnesota Supreme Court.
In a foreshadowing of future disgrace, Cardinal Bernard Law of the Boston Archdiocese criticized the media attention Porter's case received, saying that the media "liked to focus on the faults of the few" in the Catholic Church. A decade later, Law resigned after widespread criticism of his handling of cases like Porter's.
By 1993, dozens of lawsuits had cropped up against Porter in Minnesota, Texas and New Mexico; in Minnesota alone, he was charged with over two hundred counts of sexual abuse. Porter's lawyer struck a plea bargain with the state, and Porter was sentenced to 18-20 years in prison, with possibility of parole, with counseling, after six years. Parole was consistently denied.
Porter died of cancer in prison on February 11, 2005, aged 70.
