To hear Steven J. Cook tell it, suing Cardinal Joseph Bernardin for alleged sexual abuse is not a matter of attacking the church, but trying to help it.
“My faith is telling me to do this,” Cook, 34, said in an interview Saturday afternoon. “I feel that maybe I’ve been chosen to do this.”
Cook’s statements came a day after he filed a lawsuit claiming that Bernardin and another priest abused him in the 1970s while Bernardin was the archbishop of Cincinnati and Cook was a high school student participating in a seminary program.
Bernardin has adamantly denied the allegations, painting his life as “an open book.”
Details of his accuser’s life, however, are more elusive.
Cook’s classmates-those who remember him-recall a reticent student who grew up in a quiet, middle-class Cincinnati suburb and slipped through school virtually unnoticed.
But friends in his adopted home of Philadelphia describe a different Cook: an outgoing social worker who spent his free time volunteering for the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force and square-dancing to country western music in the city’s gay bars.
Six months ago, friends said, complications from AIDS forced Cook to retire from his job and file for disability compensation. The death of a friend from AIDS, they said, has devastated him.
The latest turn of events has only added to his anguish, friends said.
“You’re not looking at a person who has AIDS and wants to take people down with him,” said Fran Stoffa, a close friend of Cook’s and the executive director of the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force. “He’s trying to resolve a painful part of his life.”
On Saturday, a fatigued and frustrated Cook spoke briefly about the pressures he now feels.
“I’ve done what I thought was the right thing,” Cook said in a telephone interview. “But the media is scaring me and abusing me. They’re persecuting me for telling the truth.”
Ever since the lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, reporters have descended on the three-story house where Cook lives with his companion, Kevin Neeley, in Philadelphia’s working-class Mt. Airy neighborhood.
On Saturday, while a barrage of reporters camped outside Cook’s home, Stoffa ran interference, answering the door and refusing media requests for interviews.
Earlier, Cook told CNN he was suing so that the church could “rid itself of this kind of vermin, this kind of evil.”
“I want others who are afraid to come out who may have been used and perpetrated and raped by him to come forward and tell their story because it’s a very healing process,” Cook told CNN.
Of the $10 million lawsuit, Cook told CNN that the money “is about an apology.”
Cook claims he was abused while he was a junior and senior at Elder High School, a Cincinnati Catholic boys school, and studying at the now-defunct St. Gregory Seminary in a program designed to interest students in the priesthood.
The abuse allegedly occurred after a priest, Rev. Ellis Harsham, delivered Cook to Bernardin’s private quarters. The suit also charges Harsham, who was a seminary instructor at the time, with “repeatedly and continually” abusing Cook from 1975 to 1977 and with plying him with alcohol, marijuana and pornography during that time.
In an interview Saturday with WHIO-TV in Dayton, where Harsham is now assigned, the priest denied the allegations.
“I really don’t understand why this is happening,” Harsham said.
The lawsuit is based on vague memories that Cook said he resolved only recently. In the suit, Cook claims he suppressed the memory of the alleged abuse by Harsham until 1992. Further, he claims he did not recall the alleged abuse by Bernardin until last month.
More Top Picks Best Xl Gaming Mousepads For The Money
Joseph Deters, the Hamilton County, Ohio, prosecutor, said no criminal charges will be filed in the case, in part because the statute of limitations for sexual abuse has expired.
Cook’s civil suit may be barred by the statute of limitations in Ohio for civil cases as well.
The statute of limitations does not bar Cook from suing. But it does mean that Bernardin might be able to request that the case be dismissed on the grounds that the limitations have run out.
Bernardin’s lawyers have a little less than a month to make that request under Ohio law.
Stoffa defended Cook’s motives.
“I don’t think he has any illusions about seeing a penny of money,” Stoffa said.
“He’s genuinely a person who is troubled by this,” Stoffa said. “This is something that has profoundly affected his life for the past 17 years. He needs to put closure on this aspect of his life, which he has never done.”