A Pedophile Priest Speaks Out

By Jesse Hamlin, San Francisco Chronicle. Posted October 26, 2006.

He was the closest thing to God they knew. Bob Jyono can still picture the priest he and his wife, Maria, called Ollie, a family friend who often spent the night in their Lodi home, saying his morning prayers with a Bible in his hands.

"And all during the night, he's molesting my daughter -- not molesting, raping her! -- at 5 years old,'' wails Jyono in "Deliver Us From Evil.'' It's a devastating documentary about Oliver O'Grady, the notorious pedophile priest who sexually abused children, including a 9-month-old baby, in a string of Central California towns for 20 years -- and the Catholic bishops who moved him from parish to unsuspecting parish, allegedly covering up his crimes.

"For God's sake! How did this happen?'' Jyono cries.

That's one of the questions posed by this wrenching film, which opens at Bay Area theaters Friday. "Deliver Us From Evil" has rekindled long-standing accusations that Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, a powerful church leader who was bishop of the Stockton Diocese from 1980-85, knew O'Grady was a pedophile but failed to keep him away from children.

Directed by former TV news producer Amy Berg, the film is built around chilling interviews with the defrocked priest, who was deported to his native Ireland in 2000 after serving seven years of a 14-year prison sentence prison for committing four "lewd and lascivious'' act with two young brothers. He speaks in a lilting Celtic voice that sounds like Mrs. Doubtfire, making him even creepier. He dispassionately recounts his heinous acts as if describing someone else. He wears a sly smile as he says what arouses him: "How about children in swimsuits? I'd say, yeah. How about children in underwear? I'd say, yeah. How about children naked? Uh-huh, yeah.''

Berg spent eight days interviewing O'Grady in Dublin, where he moved freely about the city, walking through parks where children played, pondering his obsession as he sits in an empty church.

"Basically what I want to say is, it should not have happened,'' says the fallen priest in the film. He told Mahony of his "situation,'' he says, and "I should've been removed and attended to. And he should have then attended to the people I'd harmed. I wish he'd done that.''

He writes letters of apology to his victims and invites them to Ireland for a conciliatory reunion ("God speed, and hope to see you real soon,'' he says with a wink).

In the film, another victim, Adam M., reads the letter in disbelief. "I could kill his mother,'' says the man, pointing to the San Andreas rectory where O'Grady sodomized him. It was Adam M.'s mother who brought the priest into the family home. As she says in the film, "He was the wolf and I was the gatekeeper, and I let the wolf through the gate.''

O'Grady later retracted the invitations and, according to Berg, has fled Ireland in the wake of publicity about the movie. His whereabouts are unknown, a frightening development to those he abused decades ago, who are still haunted by him.

"There's not a day that I don't suffer from what he did to me,'' said Ann Jyono, a 40-year-old insurance agent, on the phone from her Southern California home.

Jyono says O'Grady began molesting her when she was 5 and kept at it until she was 12. Jyono didn't tell her folks for years, until O'Grady was arrested in 1993. She testified at his criminal trial and in a 1998 civil case that cost the Stockton diocese $7 million -- a small fraction of what the Catholic Church has paid out in scores of sexual abuse cases that have scandalized the institution. Jyono's suit was thrown out because of the statute of limitations.

Seeing and hearing O'Grady again, even on film, "was traumatic. I felt like I was 5 again,'' said Jyono, who appears in "Deliver Us From Evil.'' "I was still so afraid of that man. At the same time, I was pleased that his psychotic, narcissistic personality allowed him to tell the truth and show how psychotic he is. I was proud of him: He finally did it, he finally said the words. ... His craziness and his evil were captured onscreen.''

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Jesse Hamlin is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.