Acclaimed podcast Stolen spurs lawsuit against estate of dead Catholic priest

The British Columbia woman claims she was told the late Father Georges Chevrier had no history of the kind of sexual abuse complaints she was bringing forward.

Then she listened to an acclaimed podcast titled Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's.

Now she's suing.

The woman — known as LV — filed a B.C. Supreme Court claim this week against Chevrier's estate and the corporation of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Vancouver, which she accuses of failing to tell her the dead priest had a "known history of allegations of sexual abuse" when she first asked for compensation.

LV claims she only learned about Chevrier's past through Stolen, a podcast hosted by investigative journalist Connie Walker, which unearthed numerous allegations of sexual and physical abuse against staff at St. Michael's residential school in Saskatchewan, where Chevrier served as principal from 1950 to 1953.

According to the podcast, 10 people claimed he sexually abused them during that time.

"It is absolutely telling people that they are not alone. And people have been alone with their stories for feeling that they were the only one for a long time," said Leona Huggins, who supports clients for Kazlaw, the legal firm handling LV's case.

Huggins says LV had already been thinking of suing when she heard the podcast.

"That was the impetus that kind of said, 'Wow — okay.'"

LV claims Chevrier groomed and sexually abused her between 1973 and 1977 when she was a child and he was a priest at Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Coquitlam, B.C., about 32 kilometres east of Vancouver.

According to the claim, Chevrier exploited her "pre-existing vulnerabilities arising from trouble at home" to earn her trust and abuse her on church premises.

The claim is one of two B.C. Supreme Court lawsuits filed in recent weeks against the estates of dead priests. The other claim accuses the late Father Harold Daniel McIntee of sexual abuse at Sacred Heart Catholic Church during the years McIntee was based out of Terrace, a city in northwest B.C.

McIntee later served time for 17 counts of sexual assault against males, including victims he abused while he was at St. Joseph's residential school in Williams Lake, in the province's central Interior. 

Both the claims against Chevrier and McIntee were filed by Kazlaw's Sandra Kovacs, who has brought forward a series of lawsuits in recent years from clients seeking justice in relation to historic abuse involving the Catholic Church.