[Guest post by Aaron Worthing. Follow me by Twitter @AaronWorthing.] So there has been a lot of events in Sandusky-land, particularly the interview between Sandusky and Bob Costas, which attorneys agree has been sort-of a disaster. Consider this answer to the question of whether he fit the profile of a pedophile: “I didn’t go around seeking out every young person for sexual needs that I’ve helped.” Which, gosh seems like an implicit confession that he has done that with at least some of the children he helped through his charity. And for this some people have criticized his lawyer, Joe Amendola, for allowing this to go on. But bluntly, there are some clients too stupid to listen to their lawyers, so I am not going to knock Mr. Amendola for that. I will give him the benefit of the doubt by assuming he told his client ahead of time that this was a mistake. But there is a funny consequence that comes with representing a client in a high-profile case; it throws the spotlight on you, too. What I am about to say doesn’t bear in the slightest bit on the guilt or innocence of Sandusky, but I find it independently interesting/horrifying, if true: Defense attorney Joe Amendola, 63, representing Sandusky in the sexual molestation case roiling Penn State and Joe Paterno’s legendary football program, impregnated a teenager and later married her, The Daily has learned. According to documents filed with Centre County Courthouse, Amendola served as the attorney for Mary Iavasile’s emancipation petition on Sept. 3, 1996, just weeks before her 17th birthday. The emancipation request said Mary graduated from high school in two years with a 3.69 grade point average and maintained a full-time job — but makes no mention of any special relationship between her and her lawyer. Roughly around the same time, however, Iavasile became pregnant with Amendola’s child, and gave birth before she turned 18, her mother, Janet Iavasile, alleged in an interview with The Daily. He was born in 1948 and was around 49 at the time. “At the time, I didn’t know the extent of the relationship,” said Janet of when her daughter first began spending time with the attorney. Amendola seemed more like Mary’s “mentor,” she added. “She met him through the school district; she was interested in the law,” Janet said. Court records show the two were married on Feb. 8, 2003, around the time her mother says their second child was born. They are now separated, but she has kept his surname. Read the whole thing. Now as of today, here are the relevant rules. First, the age of consent in Pennsylvania appears to be 16, so it isn’t statutory rape. At the same time, the rule on sexual relations between an attorney and his/her client is more or less this: you cannot have sex with our client, unless you were in a consensual sexual relationship before you entered into an attorney client relationship. So none of this was a slam dunk (assuming both of those rules were the same back then—which may not have been the case). I could see a scenario (with extra creepiness added) where he started this relationship and then said to his teenage girlfriend, “hey, let’s get you emancipated so that we can have even more sex together without mom interfering!” But even in that scenario, while he steps around the technical rules regarding sexual relations with his client, it raises the concern that he was giving her legal advice driven more by his needs, than what is best for her. I am not saying he has definitely violated any of the Rules of Professional Conduct for certain. I can imagine scenarios where he avoids doing so. I am just saying that the situation is questionable enough that the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court or Pennsylvania needs to look into it now that the public has been informed of this conduct. [Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]
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Paging the Attorney Disciplinary Board in Pennsylvania…
Well. So the woman who accused Herman Cain at the National Restaurant Association is outed. And lo and behold — her complaints against employers about matters of sex in the work place include more than Herman Cain. That’s right. Ms. Kraushaar, according to this AP story , hired the same attorney she sent after Herman Cain to go after — wait for it — the federal government. Why? Here are some excerpts from the AP exclusive by reporters Brett J. Blackledge and Suzanne Gamboa:
[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.] Update: The PJ Media article now has significant corrections that undermine the believability of the original account and the certainty that sex occurred. Not their finest moment. Thanks to narciso in the comments for pointing that out. So PJ Media (a.k.a. the website formerly known as Pajamas Media) has the scoop on the details of one of the allegations against Herman Cain, and if true, it’s pretty bad: Adding to the ongoing Herman Cain sexual harassment controversy, two sources have now confirmed to PJ Media that a female employee of the National Restaurant Association told associates she had been brought by Mr. Cain to his Crystal City, Virginia residence where she alleged “he had taken advantage of me.” Now let me point out a few issues that the lawyer in me can’t help but notice. First, I assume “take advantage of” means sex (and my definition of sex includes a “Lewinsky”) and PJ Media is either being coy, or letting sources get away with coyness. Please don’t. If they had sex, say that, so there is no needless ambiguity. Second, assuming I am right on the first point, then the timeline goes like this. Cain pressures the woman to have sex with him, she capitulates… and then she goes to HR, hires a lawyer and sues? That sounds odd to me, although the answer might be that something might be missing. Like maybe something happened to buck up her courage or something like that. But unless there is something missing, that timeline seems weird. If she is going to challenge Cain about it, wouldn’t the time be before she slept with him? But again, more facts might illuminate the matter. Third, and this is something I have been meaning to say all along: settling doesn’t mean very much. That goes double when insurance companies are involved. For instance, years ago my mother was the victim of an auto insurance fraud. Two con artists intentionally struck my mother in her car, and then claimed she was at fault when the police arrived. Despite this, the insurance company settled the claim, and paid the men and about ten years later when the fraud ring was busted, the insurance company humbly apologized and paid her back about a decade’s worth of higher premiums. On the corporate insurance level, I have been involved with companies where there was strong evidence that the claim was entirely fraudulent and where a single subpoena of the right person would have revealed the fraud, if it existed. But the insurance company didn’t bother to do even that much, and paid off the plaintiff. But I also wanted to make another point. Now even these allegations are kind of fuzzy right now on the “how” of the seduction. Did they just have sex that night? Did she feel that because of his position it was an inherently coercive situation? Did he seem overbearing, but it was ambiguous about whether he was trying to use his position to obtain sex? Or did he do the full quid pro quo (“something for something”) and say, “sleep with me or you are fired/won’t get that promotion, etc.?” Now I want to be careful to say that we are not nearly there, yet, but if that is what it was, then it’s not just “sexual harassment.” Seriously what do you call it when you give something of value in exchange for sex? In most states, that’s prostitution. It certainly is under the Virginia Code (where the conduct occurred) as of today. Indeed, I have read of cases where Virginia attorneys offered for their clients to pay them in sex instead of fees, which then led them to be arrested for soliciting prostitution. Which feeds back to my original observation; it is strange that she let it go that far and then reported Cain’s conduct. But like I said, maybe that account is incomplete. Finally, the PJ Media article explains why the woman’s name is kept out of their piece. I can accept that, but why keep out their sources? I think we deserve a word or two on that subject. [Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]
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On the Latest Cain Allegations; Some Thoughts
James Oliphant of the L.A. Times reports : One of Herman Cain’s accusers wants to be heard. Her lawyer told the Washington Post on Tuesday that she is ready to tell her side of the ongoing saga involving allegations of sexual harassment while Cain was head of the National Restaurant Assn. in the late 1990s. But , the lawyer, Joel Bennett, said the woman remains bound by the confidentiality agreement she signed as part of a settlement of her claim with the association. But, the sentence, has, one, too many, commas. Cain was asked on Fox whether he had breached the agreement by discussing the allegations publicly, thus freeing the woman to talk. He said he hadn’t because he had never identified the name of the one woman who’s complaint Cain says he recalls. Who’s idea was it to say “who’s” instead of “whose”? The whole thing is just horribly written, with misplaced modifiers galore, “specters” “hovering” about, and nouns separated from verbs by monstrously awkward phrases. Yeeesh. But at least the editors remember some of their old tricks, if not their grammar. Look at the bottom picture on the left in this screenshot of tonight’s wretched article: See? You can tell this whole thing is making Cain nervous because he is wiping his forehead ! A carefully selected picture beats a thousand awkwardly punctuated and poorly selected words. Don’t stop dying on account of me, L.A. Times .
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Editor Shortage Showing at L.A. Times
I got an email from someone the other day asking me why I have not written about the Fr. Frank Pavone story since the day it broke . The short answer is, because we really don’t know anything more today than we did on September 13 — things are still pretty murky, but this week, the water got stirred a little…which means it’s even murkier. Pavone is still in Amarillo; contrary to hyper-dramatized internet reports that he is being held prisoner in a remote and horrible convent where he is unable to watch tv or contact anyone, he is in fact living in a perfectly nice convent I’m sure the sisters would not like having impugned as a prison; he has his own kitchen and his own car; he comes and goes as he pleases, and — as evidenced by his near-constant presence on social media — he is not being “shut up.” He was asked by Bishop Patrick Zurek, who has expressed some concerns about financial matters pertaining to Priests for Life , to take some time for prayer and recollection. That, we I have no way of knowing if he’s doing. (I know if my bishop asked me to do the same and set me up in a nice quiet location, I’d take advantage of the chance to move deeply into prayer, but that’s just me! ) It does seem clear, however, that this is a tussle between two strong-willed men. The bishop made a public invitation to Pavone to meet with him this week — a kind of “thrillah in Amarillah” as Deacon Greg might say — and Pavone was a no-show Canon Lawyer, Ed Peters writes : Maybe Pavone saw in Zurek’s letter only an “invitation” to meet and did not know, or want to know, that, in diocesanese, an “invitation” from a lawful superior to a recalcitrant subject to meet privately is tantamount to saying “here is our chance to talk behind closed doors before this gets any nastier”. Perhaps Pavone narrowly read the “invitation” from Zurek as something he was free to accept or decline. But if so, good manners should have led Pavone to let the bishop know that he was declining the invitation. And a lot of folks could have then saved their prayers for a meeting that Pavone apparently had no intention of attending. But even if word-splitting accounts for Pavone’s refusal to meet with Zurek, a strict ‘parsing-of-words’ defense is not one I would suggest for Pavone: whatever the character of Zurek’s overture to Pavone, the topic of their meeting was to be Pavone’s “spiritual progress during this time of prayer and reflection”. What, therefore, Pavone rejected was a meeting with his own bishop to discuss matters squarely and unquestionably within the authority and responsibility of his bishop. It’s just not where a priest who, as I have said several times, has suffered some injustice in the course of this dispute, wants to draw a line against his bishop. He’s bound to lose that one. Meanwhile, Pavone’s own canon lawyer , defends the no-show I think probably both priest and bishop have legitimate issues, but things are so murky — and people are so busy taking sides in the murk — I believe I’m going to go back to not writing about this story until there is something to write about. Pissing contests, as a rule, are not that interesting to me — even when they’re between churchmen. A very big fan of Pavone’s expresses disappointment with how he’s handling this matter. Originally posted here: Pavone Story Still Murky
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Pavone Story Still Murky
