Survivor who ignited US Catholic church’s reckoning with abuse killed in Louisiana
The clergy abuse survivor who effectively ignited the US Catholic church’s reckoning with clerical molestation when – at age 11 – he testified in the 1980s that his priest had raped him was recently beaten to death in south-west Louisiana.
Scott Anthony Gastal, whose later life was marked by legal struggles after enduring child sexual abuse at the hands of notorious clergy predator Gilbert Gauthe, was 50.
“Like all other sexual abuse victims, Scott surely lived a tortured, troubled and difficult life, having been robbed of his youthful innocence,” said a statement from attorney Cle Simon, whose late father, J Minos Simon, represented Gastal’s family in civil litigation involving Gauthe.
Simon said that his own involvement in other Catholic church-related sexual abuse cases has convinced him “that there is probably no end in sight to the number of innocent children that were subjected to clergy sexual abuse and horrible consequences resulting therefrom”.
When Gastal first publicly shared his abuse, the Catholic diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, had already paid more than $4m in confidential settlements to nine families whose children who were molested by Gauthe. Gastal’s family, however, declined to settle and sued the diocese, alleging that the church so badly failed to protect the boy from Gauthe that the abuse inflicted on the child sent him to the hospital with rectal bleeding at one point.
The family alleged that Gauthe tried to ingratiate himself with them by bringing their child a toy truck during his hospitalization, as Minnesota Public Radio once reported. Yet the gesture did not dissuade Gastal from taking the witness stand at a civil trial in 1986 and – not yet 12 – describing his being raped by Gauthe.
Gastal’s family ultimately won $1m from the diocese. His case added to revelations that Gauthe had abused children for years before he pleaded guilty in criminal court in 1985 to molesting several boys. Both the civil and criminal cases against Gauthe – who once reportedly told a psychologist that he had molested more than 300 children – made international headlines after being covered extensively by regular Guardian contributor Jason Berry.
Though Gauthe served only 10 years in prison and now lives in Texas, the scandal surrounding his downfall metastasized across the US. Numerous priests nationwide have been accused of child molestation in the decades since, including in cases that occurred well before Gastal’s abuse. Some have been convicted in criminal court and imprisoned.
Survivors and their families have pursued so many lawsuits seeking damages over Catholic clergy abuse that about 40 of the church’s US institutions – including dioceses – have filed for federal bankruptcy protection. Most of those bankruptcy cases had settled, but many remained pending at the time of Gastal’s death.
Gauthe’s defense attorney, Ray Mouton, later helped draft a 92-page manual aiming to detail how widespread Catholic clergy abuse was and to advise the church’s bishops on how to address the issue. Mouton then published a novelized version of the Gauthe case and its fallout: 2012’s In God’s House, dedicating it in part to Gastal, whom the author said “changed the course of history when he became the first child to face a bishop in a court of law, testifying bravely before a judge and jury”.
Meanwhile, after a Pulitzer prize-winning Boston Globe investigation in 2002 exposed its local Catholic archdiocese for having covered up the widespread sexual abuse of children by its clerics, Gastal told CBS that he struggled to hold down work because of the extreme post-traumatic stress and insomnia with which he had grappled after surviving Gauthe’s abuse.
“I don’t like to be around people,” Gastal, working at the time at a horse ranch, said to the news network. “I just try not to feel at all. For the longest time, I just tried to black all this out so it wouldn’t hurt me no more.”
Information online shows Gastal more recently had a couple of relatively minor brushes with the law. Then, on 2 March, police said he was found on the ground and badly beaten in a motel parking lot near a convention center in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
He died nine days later at a hospital in Lafayette, where he was being treated for head injuries, as the Louisiana news station KPLC reported.
Police arrested a 28-year-old man named Reese Iles Chaumont in connection with Gastal’s slaying and he faces a count of second-degree murder. Chaumont would receive mandatory life imprisonment if eventually convicted of murdering Gastal.
Gastal’s death prompted intense condolences from his state’s tightly knit community of clergy abuse survivors and advocates.
Among them was Scott “Alex” Peyton, whose brother was sexually molested by another priest of the Lafayette diocese and who helps his parents lead TentMakers of Louisiana, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting clergy abuse survivors.
“Some lives are shaped by battles they never chose, defined by resilience in the face of darkness – to endure the storm and rise, only to be struck down by senseless violence, is a tragedy beyond words,” Peyton said in a statement. Peyton’s statement also said that Gastal’s killing was “a cruel reminder that fate is often indifferent to justice”.
A statement from Peyton’s mother, TentMakers executive director Letitia Peyton, said Gastal’s murder was “a sad end to a life that was riddled with early childhood trauma”. She credited him with “preventing so many other children from suffering the horrific abuse that he suffered” and hailed him as “a truly brave little boy”.
The president of Survivors of Childhood Sex Abuse, Richard Windmann, added in his own statement that he believed both Gauthe and the Lafayette diocese “have blood on their hands” after Gastal’s death – despite the role that police attribute to Chaumont.
“If he had not been raped by Gilbert Gauthe, Scott Gastal would not have been there,” Windmann contended.
Neither Gauthe nor the Lafayette diocese immediately responded to requests for comment.
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