Barbara Blaine, advocate for victims of sex abuse by Catholic clergy, dies at 61
Blaine was molested by a priest throughout her teenage years
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Harrison Smith.
In 1988, Barbara Blaine founded the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.
Her reason for starting the group — known as SNAP — was personal.
In the summer of 1969, Blaine was part of the Deaconettes, a group of junior-high girls who cleaned up after Mass at their parish in Toledo, Ohio. They had been invited to dine with Father Chet Warren as a reward.
After the meal, Blaine, who was 13 at the time, found herself alone with Warren, who told her she was special, she recalled. He said she was holier than the other girls. And then he molested her. He wanted her to go to confession right away and tell no one else because they wouldn’t understand, and would not believe her anyway, she said.
The alleged abuse continued until Blaine’s senior year in high school. Her grades suffered. She kept her family and men at a distance.
When Blaine first told another priest about Warren, she was told that Jesus loved her and would forgive her. Later, when she met with parish leaders, she was told that she had probably “misinterpreted” Warren’s actions.
The abuse remained a secret until 1985, when a newspaper story on sexual predators in the Catholic Church led Blaine to tell her parents and seek out other survivors.
“I had this basic feeling of being dirty and bad that I carried around for years,” she told The Washington Post in 2002. “I carry with me the sense that I’m a bad person — I think that’s still there.”
Warren continued preaching until 1992, shortly before Blaine appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to discuss his abuses. According to the Associated Press, he was eventually banned from the ministry.
Because of the statute of limitations in Ohio, Blaine was too late to push for criminal charges, but she reportedly received $80,000 in an out-of-court settlement. SNAP has been credited with successfully lobbying for more “survivor-friendly” laws, including ones that would extend the statute of limitations.
Blaine died on Sept. 24 at 61. According to a statement from her family, she died while on vacation in St. George, Utah, days after suffering a spontaneous coronary artery dissection — a torn blood vessel in the heart. Survivors include her husband of 15 years, Howard Rubin of Chicago; two stepsons, Brett and Joshua; seven siblings; and two grandsons.
Growing SNAP
For many years, SNAP had no budget or staff, but Blaine was determined to make a difference. She scoured news stories and met with legal advocates to develop a national network of sex-abuse victims. The group held volunteer-run meetings in cities across the country, offering a forum for individuals who had frequently never discussed what had happened to them as children.
Along with groups such as Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup, SNAP spent years trying to draw public attention to recurrent cases of abuse and lobbied church officials to change policies that protected alleged abusers. The group was a persistent, and persistently skeptical, presence at gatherings of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Throughout SNAP’s early years, Blaine worked as an attorney for abused children in Chicago’s Cook County. But that all changed in 2002 when the Boston Globe published its investigative series on clergy sex abuse and a “culture of silence” in the Catholic Church. The series revealed that one Boston priest had molested more than 130 children while the church moved him from parish to parish. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in public service, and later chronicled in the Oscar-winning movie “Spotlight.”
Blaine was inundated with phone calls from victims around the country. With SNAP’s national director, David Clohessy, she opened the organization’s first national office in Chicago in 2003 and began taking a salary to work for SNAP full time.
SNAP now organizes advocacy efforts and survivors’ meetings in 60 cities around the world, working with more than 20,000 members. The organization recently expanded its focus to include advocacy on behalf of sexual abuse victims at schools and in the Boy Scouts.
“Few people have done more to protect kids and help victims than Barbara Blaine,” Barbara Dorris, managing director of SNAP, said in a statement. “Her relentless advocacy enabled millions to eventually accept a long unbelievable reality: that tens of thousands of priests raped and fondled hundreds of thousands of kids while bishops hid these heinous crimes.”
Blaine resigned from SNAP on Feb. 3 to start the Accountability Project, an effort to stop clergy sex crimes around the world.
Her departure occurred shortly after the resignation of Clohessy and the filing of a Jan. 17 lawsuit against the organization, in which a former development director accused SNAP of taking kickbacks from victims’ attorneys and profiting from settlements. The bulk of the organization’s donations, the suit claimed, came from donations from lawyers whose clients were referred by SNAP.
The organization denied that it was engaged in a kickback scheme and said Blaine and Clohessy’s departures were planned well before the suit was filed.
