MADISON, Wis.—Theodore McCarrick, the defrocked cardinal archbishop emeritus of Washington, is charged in Wisconsin with the fourth-degree sexual assault of an 18-year-old man in 1977.
McCarrick, 92, of Hyattsville, Md., was charged in a criminal complaint filed on April 14 in Walworth County, about 60 miles southeast of Madison.
He is due to make an initial appearance in Walworth County Circuit Court in Elkhorn on June 26.
Stephen Brady, founder of Illinois-based Roman Catholic Faithful who has worked with Wisconsin authorities, told The Epoch Times the alleged assault victim is James Grein, 64, whose public testimony in 2018 helped lead to McCarrick’s downfall and eventual laicization by the Vatican.
In Wisconsin, fourth-degree sexual assault is a Class A misdemeanor that carries up to nine months in prison and a $10,000 fine. Because McCarrick has not been a Wisconsin resident, the statute of limitations on the charge never expired.
Grein has spoken publicly about more than 18 years of alleged sexual, mental, and spiritual abuse he said he suffered at the hands of McCarrick, once one of the Catholic Church’s most powerful prelates.
Grein told The Epoch Times that the Wisconsin charge against McCarrick brings a “feeling of euphoria that I’m no longer all by myself. I can live more happily today than ever before.
“I had been inside a prison wall by my own doing since I was 11 years old. I’m 64.”
At the time, McCarrick was the auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of New York. He later became the cardinal archbishop of Washington.
Grein was 18 at the time, stationed at Naval Center Great Lakes north of Chicago.
The abuse allegedly took place at a house on Geneva Lake in Walworth County. Grein said after he went waterskiing, he jumped off a pier into neck-deep water. McCarrick came up and “pulled my shorts down,” Grein said, and Bernardin grabbed his genitals.
“I’m struggling to get out of their grasp, to get onto the shore, to get onto the pier,” Grein said, “and try to get away from them as quickly as possible.
‘Not Consensual’
“It is not consensual. It is not fun. It is horrifying for me.“Being groped and raped by another human being is not consensual, no matter how old I am,” Grein said.
“He [McCarrick] always coerced me, and he used power against me all the time,” he alleged.
On the visit to Geneva Lake, Grein said, McCarrick paraded him around like a prized possession.
“I was McCarrick’s trophy, and he was showing me off that day, and Bernardin was just so excited to have a chance to be with his trophy.”
Bernardin went on to become the powerful cardinal archbishop of Chicago, a position he held until his death in 1996.
Bernardin has also been accused of sexual crimes, including forced sexual contact with a seminarian and the 1957 rape of an 11-year-old girl.
‘Uncle Teddy’
Grein said McCarrick first sexually abused him at Thanksgiving and Christmas 1969 when he was 11 years old. McCarrick took him upstairs in the Grein family home in Teaneck, New Jersey, to hear his confession.Grein said McCarrick sexually abused him as a minor and “many more [times] as an adult.”
The final occasion of abuse occurred at the 2012 funeral of Grein’s mother in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, Grein said he told “Uncle Teddy” he was going to expose him as a predator.
“And that’s when he said to me, ‘Go ahead and try. Don’t you know who I am? I’m the most powerful man in the United States if not the world. No one’s ever going to believe you.’
“I will crush you in the media, and if that isn’t enough, I have friends who can help me.”
Grein said in response, he turned away and cried. “He ruined my life and I can’t do anything about it.”
Grein found the courage to go public with his story in the summer of 2018 when the Archdiocese of New York deemed as credible allegations against McCarrick from a former altar boy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The then-16-year-old said McCarrick sexually abused him during preparations for Christmas Mass in 1971 and 1972.
“McCarrick has been laicized. He is no longer a priest,” Grein testified before the New Jersey State Senate in 2019. “But he and thereafter his ghost will forever haunt the American Church and those he abused.”
As of April 18, McCarrick did not have a defense attorney listed in the Wisconsin circuit court records system.
McCarrick’s attorneys in an ongoing Massachusetts sexual assault case have said the former cardinal suffers from dementia and may no longer be competent to stand trial.
