Stalking Ex-Employees? AP Advances Dumb Premise In Search of a Storyline

Imagine you work for an organization and that organization has a non-legal, ad hoc process whereby it decided whether you "could have" committed misconduct in your past. And if you were found "credibly accused" – whatever that means – by your employer of misconduct, your employer followed you around and "monitored" you for the rest of your life, even after you left its employ.

Sound bizarre? Illegal? Wacky? Well, that is the very premise of a headache-inducing screed by the Associated Press entitled, "100s of accused priests living under radar with no oversight"* – written by Claudia Lauer and Meghan Hoyer.

Apparently, as long as you are writing a piece bashing the Catholic Church over old sex abuse claims, the editors will approve any dumb storyline.

Chasing you, too?

Only until one reads deep into the 5900-word piece does one finally learn that Lauer and Hoyer are actually referring to "former priests" and "former employees"; in other words, regular US citizens who have the attendant legal rights including the right not to be stalked by their former employer. One wonders how Lauer and Hoyer might react if they left the AP but the AP chased them around the rest of their lives because of its judgement that they may be a danger to others.

Memo to Lauer and Hoyer: We're not in Stalinist Russia. No organization has the right, much less the duty, to spy on their former employees for the rest of their lives based upon its views of employees' potential past misconduct. We have a government and a justice system for that, thank you.

Hypocrisy alert

And if the mere premise of the AP's article were not insipid enough, Lauer and Hoyer turn to David Clohessy, the disgraced director of the lawyer-funded hate group SNAP, to attack the Catholic Church for not tracking the whereabouts of its ex-employees.

But Lauer and Hoyer completely failed to inform their readers that one of those alleged "100s" of former priests across the country who now live "unsupervised" is Clohessy's very own brother, Rev. Kevin Clohessy, who was removed from ministry nearly two decades ago after it was alleged that he sexually assaulted an innocent boy over a period of nine years!

David Clohessy has openly admitted that he had known "for years" about the allegations against his brother before they became public, but he did not go to the police.

Indeed, the current whereabouts of Kevin are a complete mystery, and David still has not publicly disclosed Kevin's current location. Yet David somehow now demands that the Catholic Church do what he himself refuses to do. How rich.

The hypocrisy and dishonesty are off the charts.

TheMediaReport.com repeatedly reached out to Lauer, Hoyer, and other members of the Associated Press for comment. All refused to respond.

* NOTE: The original headline (jpg) of the AP's article was "100s of accused priests living under radar with no oversight." The AP then mysteriously changed the headline – without comment – to "Without oversight, scores of accused priests commit crimes," even though the AP found that only 31 former priests out of nearly 2,000 surveyed – or 0.0155 (or 1.55%) – have actually been charged with crimes that were sex-related.