Poor bastard (huge fair-used slabs of the story here, since the details of the abuse of power are so vivid. Now we know who really wired up the bomb, eh?
The suspect arrested for allegedly holding hostages at Sen. Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire presidential campaign headquarters claimed a history of abuse at the hands of a priest, who has since been defrocked amid allegations of sexually abusing young men.
Leeland E. Eisenberg, formerly known as Ralph Woodward, sued the Archdiocese of Boston and Cardinal Bernard Law in 2002 for negligence and infliction of emotional distress, alleging that at a young and vulnerable point in his life he was molested by the Rev. Richard Buntel.
Eisenberg claimed in his lawsuit that in or around 1982 or 1983, when he was about 21 years old, he was “homeless and living in abandoned cars in a local junk yard” in Ayer, Mass., at least in part as a result of the death of his mother and a traumatic childhood at the hands of his “violent, alcoholic father.”
Eisenberg went to St. Catherine’s Parish in Westford, Mass., where he asked for help. The Rev. Daniel Cronin, who was the senior priest, hired Eisenberg to paint the church in exchange for room and board. Eisenberg was given a cot in the boiler room.
On Cronin’s days off, Buntel, also a priest at St. Catherine’s, would take Eisenberg out for lunch and drinks. Back at the rectory, Cronin allegedly continued to offer Eisenberg “numerous drinks.”
After that, Buntel — who was later forced to resign as a priest — “would bring out a box of pornographic material, sit beside the plaintiff” — Eisenberg — “on a couch, pull out pornographic pictures and magazines and insist the plaintiff look at the pornographic materials,” the suit alleged. “Father Buntel would then sexually molest the plaintiff.”
Eisenberg claimed that the incidents made him suicidal. The suit, filed by the law firm Greenburg Traurig, claimed that Eisenberg “felt that he needed to stay in the good graces of Father Buntel,” since he relied upon him for food and shelter, and feared if he offended the priest his “only means of survival would be ripped away from him.”
Concerns about Buntel’s inappropriate behavior with alcohol and young men had been voiced as early as 1983, according to documents provided on the Web site BishopAccountability.org. A fellow priest, the Rev. John D’Arcy, wrote to the Archdiocese in 1983 (LINK) that “I think that these allegations are true.”
Thanks, Bernie. Nice work. And to think you were running for Pope, back in the day.
Of course, Pope Benedict has since apologized, in the name of his particular institutionalized versin of Christianity, for…. Oh, that didn’t happen?
Say, wouldn’t it be great if there were a very, very few very powerful people, who had the power to deny the rest of us food and shelter, and “the means of survival” … Oh, that’s happening?
Front page
Not once do we hear the magic word
Terrorism.
Why?
It’s not like he had a dynamite belt right?
White American Males pointing weapons at non-Republicans isn’t terrorism.
So what's your point, Maalox?
“White American Males pointing weapons at non-Republicans isn’t terrorism.”
Yeah, and?
NOTE Actually, the belt was “only” flares, but I don’t think anybody knew that until it was all over.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
Trademark infringement I guess
Terrorism used to be a generalized, not to mention brutal, means to get attention. Harvey Oswald and Timmy McVeigh were perhaps the most notorious white male American terrorists ever but I get the feeling that the language would be different today as it is with Lee Eisenberg.
Terrorism is a reserved characterization for dark skinned foreigners and liberal dissenters who challenge American Exceptionalism. It is also convenient to scare the timid sheeple who get rambunctious at the airport.
The message discipline to avoid the terror meme in this case is sovereign so far as I can tell from the teevee news accounts and the written accounts I have been able to read. Terrorism isn’t mentioned once.
Don’t call domestic white males with fake bombs terrorists. It might open the door to Americans waking up to the fact that we, via Bush foreign policy, are terrorizing the rest of the world with military force. Terror is no longer an emotion so much as it is an antagonist. Besides it wasn’t a GOP campaign office which might have given the ruling party a chance to extoll their mad terra-fightin skillz.
Am I being overly sensitive? Consider the possibilities if the perpetrator was an elderly former Black Panther or if the office under seige was Rudy’s.
Interesting that this terrorist had the same lawyer as
Jack Abramoff..
suit, filed by the law firm Greenburg Traurig
Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a huge firm and nobody outside the billing department probably has any idea of which partners are working for/suing anybody on any given day.
But did you hear Mr. “Leeland E. Eisenberg, formerly known as Ralph Woodward” ’s rap sheet? Listened to part of it live on CNN and they were rattling off everything from rape to aggravated mopery. Then the voiceover guy (didn’t catch the name) who had apparently been looking into his past independently said that he had been given a 10 year sentence in Massachusetts, I think on the rape rap, from which he apparently escaped. Or at least there’s some question of why he wasn’t still in the gray-bar hotel for the matter.
I’m with Maalox at least to a certain degree, there’s a lot of weirdness about this case. Most essential point is that if this guy had been just about six shades darker he would most certainly not have been walking the streets of New Hampshire living with a wife and stepson and getting shitfaced and having contact with the police on a fairly regular basis. Not with the kind of record he had.