The Catholic League’s Epstein defense is even worse than you think

This is a desperate attempt by Bill Donohue to redefine abuse, shift blame, and protect institutions over children

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A quick personal note: This weekend, I’ll be speaking to the Ethical Society of St. Louis. The events will be Saturday night and Sunday morning and all are free to the public. I hope you can come if you’re in the area!

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There are bad press releases, and then there’s whatever the hell the Catholic League released late last week in response to the Jeffrey Epstein emails.

You may have seen clips of former Fox News host Megan Kelly attempting to downplay the seriousness of what the late New York financier and his associates did:

“He wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds,” said Kelly, adding “but he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.” She then added: “There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”

Her argument, then, is that it’s unfair for anyone to call Epstein a “pedophile” because he wasn’t technically into little kids. He was only into slightly older kids, which technically makes him an ephebophile. SO CALM DOWN, EVERYONE!

It was a horrible argument because the technicality doesn’t make a difference. Epstein exploited children and a lot of people apparently knew about it. It’s not so complicated that we have to parse the language to separate various classes of children.

That’s where the Catholic League comes in. They heard the word “pedophile” and their Spidey Sense immediately began to tingle.

When the non-profit group (with assets of over $60 million) found out what Kelly said, they jumped to her defense with a statement saying “Megyn Kelly is right about Epstein.”

The group’s leader Bill Donohue argued that the word “pedophile” only applies to a “person who has sex with a prepubescent male or female, meaning someone ten or younger.” (That’s not the definition, but let’s go with it.)

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League (screenshot via YouTube)

The Catholic League could have said nothing. Instead they said this. And then they kept talking.

The needed to chime in because they have a long history of defending the Catholic Church against accusations of pedophilia. Kelly’s comments gave them an opening to rehash that defense… which never made any sense to begin with.

So what statement was so important that they chose to piggyback on Kelly to make it? They want everyone to know all those priests accused of wrongdoing were not pedophiles either. And not only were their underage victims still underage (but less underage than headlines might suggest), the priests involved were also gay.

(No, seriously, that’s their argument.)

Why does this matter to the Catholic League?

For too long, the media and the chattering class have said that the Catholic Church clergy abuse scandal was due to “pedophile priests.” Wrong. The data clearly show that the vast majority of priestly victims were male (81 percent) and that 78 percent were postpubescent. Why is this important? Because it means the molesters were homosexuals. When males have sex with males who are postpubsecent, that’s called homosexuality, not pedophilia.

But the media ignored the data, thus avoiding the role that homosexual priests played. This allowed them to tag the offenders as “pedophiles.” The fact is only 3.8 percent of clergy sexual abuse victims were boys ten or younger.

You see, nearly 4 out of every 5 victims of clergy abuse were “postpubescent,” therefore those priests weren’t pedophiles at all, and by the way, these priests assaulted little boys so that makes them gay, so HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE THEM OF DOING ANYTHING WRONG?!

I had to read those paragraphs multiple times to come to terms with just how depraved it is. Their argument here is that the accused priests weren’t technically pedophiles, but they were gay, and the Catholic Church opposes sexual activity between two men, therefore none of this is really their fault.

They’re shifting the blame in order to avoid taking any responsibility for it. After redefining pedophilia, they redefined homosexuality, all in an effort to downplay sexual abuse. Because that’s how Catholic morality works.

Not that this matters, but the accused priests attacked the people they had access to, and they had access to boys. Much like you would see in prison, that doesn’t make these people gay. It just makes them predators.

Maybe the most disturbing word in that excerpt is the one in the last sentence: “Only”

“Only 3.8 percent of clergy sexual abuse victims were boys ten or younger.” As if that means everyone is exaggerating the scope of the abuse. By the way, 3.8% of victims would still mean over 12,500 children ages 10 and younger… in France alone. How that makes everything better, I have no idea.

This is the sort of defense of sexual abuse you get from a guy who made over $650,000 last year to put out press releases like this. (Imagine how broken you have to be to willingly work for this organization.)

As one Redditor put it, the “Catholic League justifying the rape of young teens isn’t the flex they think.”

This isn’t the first time the Catholic League has pulled this stunt, either. In 2018, they issued a lengthy response to the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report documenting sexual abuse in the state’s dioceses—the report that opened the floodgates in so many other states.

In that rebuttal, Donohue argued that only a small percentage of priests were implicated (so it’s not a big deal). He said the victims weren’t raped: “They were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word ‘rape’ means.” And this is what he wrote about the allegation that these priests were pedophiles:

Let me repeat what I have often said. Most gay priests are not molesters, but most of the molesters have been gay. Not to admit this—and this includes many bishops who are still living in a state of denial about it—means the problem will continue. Indeed, there are reports today about seminaries in Boston and Honduras that are disturbing.

…

How many were pedophiles? Less than five percent. That is what the John Jay study found. Studies done in subsequent years—I have read them all—report approximately the same ratio. It’s been a homosexual scandal all along.

…

[Then-Attorney General Josh] Shapiro fed the myth about this being a “pedophile” scandal when he said the victims were “little boys and girls.” This is a lie. Anyone who actually reads the report knows it is a lie. Most were postpubescent. This doesn’t make the molestation okay—the guilty should be imprisoned—but it is wrong to give the impression that we are talking about 5-year-olds when more typically they were 15-year-olds.

Relax, everyone. Many of the victims were just 15. They were tweens, not toddlers.

Anyway, since Bill Donohue doesn’t seem to understand the problem here, let me spell it out for him: Assaulting children is a crime. It doesn’t matter, under the law, if they’re 5, 15, or (as Alan Dershowitz recently put it) “a 17-year-and-10-month-old person.”

If your religious morality leads you to parse the ages of underage victims in an effort to defend alleged predators, you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere in life.

To be clear, the Catholic League doesn’t have any formal connection to the Catholic Church. It’s not a “league.” It’s not even really under the Catholic umbrella, though it was at one time housed in the building for the Archdiocese of New York and retains the support of many high-ranking conservative Catholic leaders. Really, it’s just one angry old dude who likes to cosplay as a bulldog working on behalf of the Church. But how broken is your moral compass when you’re downplaying sexual assault against minors because you think that’s part of your job description?

This isn’t just a problem with one press release. It’s a problem with conservatives whose views are so warped that they can’t recognize the basic humanity of the victims. By obsessively slicing those victims into by-the-book age categories and reframing sexual abuse as a debate about definitions, they are trying to normalize the unthinkable.

This isn’t a semantic disagreement. It is a deliberate strategy to drag public empathy away from the children who were harmed and toward the institutions that enabled their abusers. Ultimately, it’s an invitation for more harm. When a well-funded organization rushes to protect the Church’s reputation—or the head of the Republican Party’s reputation—by painting predators as misunderstood victims of terminology, it sends a chilling message to survivors everywhere that their suffering is negotiable. It distracts from any serious kind of accountability. This is how abuse flourishes: by convincing the public that nothing truly terrible happened.

All the more reason the rest of us need to call out the gaslighting and reject the euphemisms. The only moral stance here is clarity: Sexual abuse of minors is sexual abuse, full stop. If you can’t bring yourself to say that, you’re part of the problem.

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