David Lujan stood up for us, when no one else would

Nearly 300 survivors of the Archdiocese of Agana’s decades-old cover up of rape by clergy and Catholic school teachers soon will be seeing a semblance of justice for the cover up. As you read this, a team of people are preparing to close out the first installment of settlement damages to the claimants. The survivors first made these claims last decade.

The case took this long because of a series of legal maneuvers by the Archdiocese’s lawyers. The leaders of Guam’s church, for all their rhetoric about healing, dragged us (I am one of the survivors) through this unnecessarily-prolonged process. Alas, here we are.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to thank perhaps the most important figure in this whole quest for some kind of justice. Attorney David Lujan was, for many of the survivors, the first person who heard our stories and believed us.

When you think about the vast majority of the claimants and their wish to conceal their identities, it takes no leap in logic to figure Mr. Lujan was the very first person they ever told about the abuse they endured, and the cover up that followed in the church.

And he wasn’t just the first confessor for many of us, he also was the man who stood up for us, when it wasn’t popular to stand up against Anthony Apuron and his Archdiocese of Agana. Before it was popular and trendy to break the silence against the church, and before any of the other lawyers showed up, it was just David Lujan against the best lawyers the church could bring to shut us up and tear us down.

And tear us down and wait us out, they tried. I will never forget that morning in August 2016, when reporters began calling me because of a ruse orchestrated by Apuron’s Neocatechumenal Way leaders to defame me and others as a way to discredit Mr. Lujan. I’m not the only victim of that cult of conspirators. Ask Tim Rohr. Ask Fr. Matthew Blockley. Ask Monsignor James Benavente, and Fr. Paul Gofigan. But those stories are for a different article.

It was David Lujan and his daughters, Lila and Gloria (both attorneys, like their dad), who stood in front of us survivors, shielded us from the monsters who wanted to destroy us even further than their client already had, and became our voice after decades of being ostracized and spat upon by so-called Christian leaders and lay people.

Lila sat by my side, when Associated Press journalist David Goldman asked me about the first time my St. Anthony School vice principal and music teacher raped me on December 8, 1993.

Gloria sat by my side, when a lawyer from the archdiocese deposed me, having me relive the rapes in detail. She was in tears. She told me she was sorry for what happened to me. Not the church’s lawyer. My lawyer.

In fact, in the nearly 30 years since the abuse started for me not one priest or bishop has ever apologized to me. And of the Sisters of Mercy (they run St. Anthony School), who were around, only one ever expressed sorrow: Sr. Cecilia Camacho.

I’m not looking for anyone’s sympathy, but I do want to make the point that as all these Christian leaders profess to desire reconciliation, hardly any of them have attempted to make things right with those of us they harmed through the cover up. It has been David Lujan – a lawyer – who has had the courage and the determination to see justice for us, to console us, to be on our side, and to fight for us.

Critics may point out that Mr. Lujan and his law firm didn’t do this for free; that they stand to make money from the settlement. Sure. He’s a lawyer. He gets paid to represent people. But, Mr. Lujan has financed this case since it started; and as far as I know, not a single client has paid Mr. Lujan a cent for representing us against the archdiocese. He will have earned every penny of his fee, when the settlement is paid. More importantly, none of this would have happened without him. No one else stood up, when it counted. No one else wanted to be the first to say, ‘I’ll fight for them.’ Until he did.

David Lujan was more of a Christian to me and to the survivors than every church leader involved in the cover up.

Mr. Lujan and his daughters are the angels God sent to us to bring light to our dark hours, and I couldn’t be more grateful.