Catholic Church Paid $2.1 Million to Stop Reform Bill Helping Sex-Abuse Survivors

The New York Catholic Conference paid more than $2.1 million dollars to lobbyists hoping to prevent a reform bill that would help survivors of sex abuse within the church file claim against their attackers, according to the New York Daily News.

The bill in question, The Child Victims Act, would allow survivors over the age of 23 to file charges against their abusers for a window of up to a year--the statute of limitations currently doesn't allow any claims to be made at all.

Melanie Blow, chief operations officer of the Stop Abuse Campaign, told the Daily News, "They are willing to spend limitless money in order to basically keep bad guys from being accountable for their actions. I think they're doing it because they don't want to have to pay out settlements."

In 2009, Dennis Poust, spokesperson for the Catholic Conference, told The New York Times, "We believe this bill is designed to bankrupt the Catholic Church."

The Conference employed both internal and external lobbyists to fight the CVA from 2007 through the end of 2015, calling upon Patricia Lynch, who notably engaged in an affair with former Speaker Sheldon Silver. According to Gawker, Silver, who was arrested at the end of last year on corruption charges, was accused of blocking the CVA as a result of his relationship with Lynch.