Movie pageant to premiere clergy intercourse abuse documentary partly based mostly on Guardian reporting | New Orleans clergy abuse

A brand new documentary inspecting the Catholic clergy molestation scandal in New Orleans – based mostly partially on journalism by the Guardian and its native reporting associate WWL Louisiana – is making its world premiere at London’s Raindance movie pageant in June.

God As My Witness can also be nominated for greatest feature-length documentary on the main movie pageant’s thirty third version, in keeping with the film’s director, Lindsay Quinn Pitre.

The producer of the 82-minute movie is Michael Brandner Sr, who in 2018 found a pile of what had been primarily love letters to his youthful brother, Scot, from a Roman Catholic priest named Brian Highfill. Scot – who was a young person when he acquired the letters – by no means informed anybody about them and died by suicide at age 29 within the early Nineties.

Michael introduced the letters to New Orleans’ Catholic archbishop, Gregory Aymond. In a recorded cellphone name between the lads, Aymond informed Brandner that the letters had been probably grooming materials however “weren’t specific sufficient” to warrant Highfill’s inclusion on an inventory launched by the archdiocese that recognized clergymen confronted with substantial allegations of kid molestation.

Aymond finally added Highfill to that record in October 2020 after WWL Louisiana and a reporter now on the Guardian questioned the archdiocese about no less than three different victims who had reported their very own allegations of sexual abuse by the hands of Highfill over the earlier 18 years.

God As My Witness partially recounts the experiences of Brandner’s household with Highfill, who died in 2021, and quite a lot of individuals who endured being sexually molested as kids by clergymen whereas rising up within the Catholic church in New Orleans. It additionally tells the tales of the attorneys who’ve advocated for clergy abuse survivors after the New Orleans church confronted so many clerical molestation claims that it filed for federal chapter safety in Could 2020.

The case has value the archdiocese greater than $40m in charges however remained unresolved because the 26 June premiere of God As My Witness was introduced.

Pitre just lately informed WWL Louisiana that the movie is deliberately left “open ended as a result of that is nonetheless a rising course of – it’s nonetheless being unraveled in entrance of our eyes”.

Brandner stated the clergy abuse survivors searching for to be made entire by means of the chapter don’t embrace “those who didn’t come ahead or those which can be deceased” – his youthful brother amongst them.

“I believe Scot is [speaking] proper now by means of me,” Brandner informed WWL Louisiana. “I consider that with my whole coronary heart.”