Roosa compared this lawsuit to the famous Los Angeles suits of 2001, which claimed 550 victims of abuse in a Catholic population of 3.4 million. Today, Roosa said, there are 17,000 Catholics in the diocese of Fairbanks, though there was a much smaller number during the peak of the abuse. This concentration of abuses is orders of magnitude greater than Catholic sex-abuse cases in other parts of the United States. Roosa and his associate Patrick Wall (a former Benedictine monk who once worked as a sex-abuse fixer for the Catholic Church) said they knew of 345 cases of molestation in Alaska by 28 perpetrators who came from at least four different countries. "As a direct result of Father Sundborg's decision," the suit alleges, "Father Hargreaves was able to continue molesting children, including but not limited to James Doe 94, who was raped by Father Hargreaves in 1992, when James Doe was approximately 6 years old." (The Oregon Province includes Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska as Provincial, Sundborg was head of the entire province.) The suit alleges that while Sundborg was head of the Northwest Jesuits, he had access to the personnel files of several pedophile priests, including one named Father Henry Hargreaves, whom he allowed to remain in the ministry. Among the alleged conspirators is Father Stephen Sundborg, who is the current president of Seattle University and was Provincial of the Oregon Province of Jesuits from 1990 through 1996. The suit, filed in the superior court of Bethel, Alaska, the day before, accuses several priests of being offenders and conspirators.
"We are going to shine some light on a dark and dirty corner of the Jesuit order."
"It was a pedophile's paradise." He described a chain of poor Native villages where priests-many of them serial sex offenders-reigned supreme.
"They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police," Roosa said to the assembled cameras and microphones.