Public Law 33-187

The sad thing in our society is that scammers and opportunists do exist. Public law 33-187 is being challenged by the Archdiocese of Agana.  This law may be unconstitutional, but it also opens the door for scammers to target the Catholic Church.  According to The Media Report:  

In 2010, Vincent Carroll at the Denver Post fearlessly noted, "[F]raudulent or highly dubious accusations are more common than is acknowledged in coverage of the church scandals — although they should not be surprising, given the monumental settlements various dioceses have paid out over the years."

In 2005, Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, writing about abuse lawsuits against the Church, asserted, "People have to come to understand that there is a large scam going on with personal injury attorneys, and what began as a serious effort [to help genuine victims] has now expanded to become a huge money-making proposition."

In addition, in 2001 (!), an East Coast attorney wrote, "I have some contacts in the prison system, having been an attorney for some time, and it has been made known to me that [accusing a Catholic priest of abuse] is a current and popular scam."

Who knows how many more such scams are being perpetrated today while the mainstream media sleeps? 

Public law 33-187, which was passed by the Governor and Guam Legislature, is an open door for scammers to walk in and target the Catholic Church.  In the United States, the U.S. bishops' have also expressed their opposition to these kind of bills and laws, which is a good sign that they have finally caught on to the relationship between accusations against priests and the enticement of guaranteed financial settlements.


This law targets mainly the Catholic Church.  In prison, the ones who face claims of sexual abuse that are decades old are only Catholic priests.  Among the thousands of men who have passed through prison for sexual abuse charges, there is no other case of a man facing charges that were many years or decades old, going back to 20 to 50 years ago. This happens solely to Catholic priests, and it is because of the enticement of money.  The law made it easy for scammers to scam the Catholic Church out of millions of dollars.  According to one news report:

The Catholic Church told police it was duped into paying $188,000 to a woman who claimed she was injured when raped by a priest. 

The police only became aware of the woman's claims that she was raped by a Palmerston North Catholic priest - who abused her with a knife and a broken bottle - when the church learned it had been duped out of the payments. 

The woman, who has name suppression, appeared at the Morrinsville District Court on Wednesday, June 8, to be sentenced on one charge of obtaining by deception $188,190.17 from the Catholic Church, which paid for various medical operations and psychological tests in relation to the abuse claim. 

The woman supplied fake medical reports to the church to support the claim. 

The fraud was discovered only when the church queried one of the reports with a health provider.