It Ends With a Whimper: A Decade After a ‘Historic’ Trial, the Case of Wrongfully Convicted Msgr. Lynn Is Officially Over

What may be the greatest courtroom fraud ever perpetrated against the Catholic Church has finally come to an end.

But unlike a decade ago when the media fell over themselves inside a packed courtroom to report the single guilty conviction (out of four charges total) against Philadelphia's Msgr. William J. Lynn, there was no such fanfare recently when Lynn's case officially ended in near-empty chambers.

A long fraud

If you thought that the Msgr. Lynn case had concluded a long time ago, you would not be alone. Indeed, Lynn's conviction was overturned twice over the years. But despite the mountains of evidence exonerating Msgr. Lynn and showing that the entire case was a complete scam, Philly's far-left, George Soros-funded D.A. – a loon named Larry Krasner – was determined to retry Lynn in a show trial and publicly bludgeon the Catholic Church just as one of his predecessors, the corrupt Seth Williams, did years earlier. [For case background basics, see this.]

However, in a very rare rebuke of Krasner, Judge Gwendolyn Bright opposed Krasner's wish to continue the decade-long circus and forced his office to arrange a plea deal with Lynn. In the end, Lynn agreed to plea no contest to one paltry count of something called "obstructing the administration of law," a measly second-degree misdemeanor.

Judge Bright did not lay down any further punishment of Lynn. Over the last decade Msgr. Lynn served nearly three years in prison and fifteen months of house arrest for crimes that never even happened. It was a true travesty of justice that should never occur again – to anyone.

A beacon of light in the darkness

In truth, Msgr. Lynn never would have seen the inside of a prison cell if our country had an honest media that actually did its job. Had so-called "journalists" – and we're talking to you, John P. Martin (Philadelphia Inquirer), Joe Slobodzian (Philadelphia Inquirer), and Maryclaire Dale (AP) – actually put aside their animus against the Catholic Church and looked at the actual evidence of the Lynn case, they would have seen that the two primary accusers behind the Lynn case, Dan Gallagher and Mark Bukowski, were both frauds and that innocent men – including Lynn, Rev. Charles Engelhardt, and teacher Bernard Shero – were being tried for crimes they didn't commit.

Indeed, this site was the first outlet to question the wild and sensationalistic claims of the 2011 "grand jury report" that targeted the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and set the Lynn case in motion. We also exclusively published the lengthy criminal record of the accuser (Bukowski) of Fr. James Brennan.

However, since then, nearly everything we learned about the injustice against the Church in Philadelphia came from independent journalist Ralph Cipriano, who remarkably began his reporting on the case as "pro-prosecution" but soon saw the deceit playing out in front of him in the courtroom. Most of what we've reported in the past decade on Philadelphia has been based on Cipriano's dogged reporting.

Cipriano represents brand of journalism which is almost nonexistent today, a brand that follows facts, not a political agenda. His must-see, insider reporting on the goings-on in Philadelphia are over at Substack: Big Trial. Check it out.

Happy 2023.