This Accused Serial Sexual Abuser Is Also a Famous Victim. Why Isn’t That News?
This seems newsworthy, and I can’t figure out why it’s not in the news.
Maybe Ordinary Times readers will have some ideas about that, and about why in hell this former hero of Catholic clergy abuse survivors would go and do the same thing he said happened to him.
Police arrested an alleged serial child predator, and that part was big news in California. Christopher Eduard, 54, is accused of sexually abusing preteen girls in public places in Orange County since 2021.
https://ktla.com/news/man-charged-with-sexually-assaulting-3-girls-in-irvine-public-places/
But no reports have mentioned Eduard was already well-known for suing the Catholic church for childhood sexual abuse. He was part of a record settlement in 2004.
The alleged perp/victim changed his name from Christopher Eduardo Huicochea in 2014. He told the court he wanted to avoid the “stigma” of the abuse.
In 2004, the Diocese of Orange paid a $100 million settlement to Huicochea and dozens of other accusers, a record at the time. It averaged $1.1 million per plaintiff. It was among several lawsuits consolidated as “The Clergy Cases” in the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-04-me-priest4-story.html
It was a huge, international story. Huicochea gave interviews to major media, including CNN and the Orange County Register.
He told the Register, “I don’t want anybody to experience what I went through.”
https://www.snapnetwork.org/news/calif/oc_diocese_took_priest.htm
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/se/date/2003-05-28/segment/01
And now, this famed survivor of clergy abuse is charged with forcibly groping and exposing himself to 9 and 11-year-old girls. In the library case, he was accused of videoing it. (That got him a child pornography charge.)
This seems like an important part of the story. I can’t stop wondering about it. So, why is it unmentioned by any of the TV stations or newspapers that have been reporting his arrests for the past week?
Maybe no one else has figured it out yet? After all, the settlement was nearly 20 years ago, and Huicochea did change his name to Eduard. But it’s been more than a week since the first story, and he’s been arrested for two more incidents.
It was easy to find online. And, helpful meddler that I am, I’ve been posting this information in the news organizations’ Facebook comments. I know news agencies monitor those.
So, that’s one weird thing. But more importantly, why would a guy who went through something like that, and was so public about wanting to stop it, and unlike most victims was well-compensated for it, go and do it to other kids?
It’s incredibly depressing.
Huicochea/Eduard claimed a priest named Siegfried Widera abused him over a period of months, starting when he was 10, in 1979, shortly after his father died. He made a police report in 2002, at 32, and joined the lawsuit against the diocese.
Widera fled the country after the the police reports. He killed himself in Mazatlan, Mexico, in 2003, after police took him in for questioning.
So, Widera was never convicted of any crimes in Orange County. But he had been convicted in Michigan in 1973 of sexual perversion with a boy. The Catholic Church used to shuffle problem priests off to other parishes, and that’s what happened with Widera.
https://www.archmil.org/clergy-abuse-response/restricted-priests/Widera.htm
When someone’s accused of doing things as bad as what Huicochea/Eduard is charged with, I’m less likely to believe them about anything else. So, I’m willing to consider he made the abuse up because he saw other people getting money, and saw an opportunity.
However, there were a lot of other Widera accusers, and not just in that diocese. And the way he went on the run, and then killed himself when he got caught … he looked pretty guilty.
There are some studies, supposedly (but don’t ask me for links), that found people who are victims of childhood sexual abuse are more likely to commit sexual abuse as adults. But if anyone would have the resources and insight to break that cycle, I’d think it would have been Huicochea/Eduard.
I take the abuse-causes-abuse theory with a grain of salt, because I’ve known so many lying wrongdoers who claim it in mitigation. If claiming something gets a person sympathy — and sexual abuse gets the claimant sympathy, I’m not open to argument about that — then dishonest, manipulative people will falsely claim it. It makes sense.
So, I suspect the liars who’ve been caught perping on children inflate the statistics about sex abuse victims who go on to become perpetrators.
Eduard hasn’t even had his prelim yet, so I suppose it’s possible this is all a colossal mistake. But there are three separate accusers, and the Irvine police say they suspect there are more out there.
Aside from these arrests, Eduard shows no signs of being a dirtbag, from what I see in public records. I couldn’t find any substantial criminal history. He owns property. He has an art degree from Cal State Long Beach, and even worked on a few Simpsons episodes.
A 1996 LA Times article about Eric Stefani, former member of No Doubt and brother of Gwen Stefani, quotes a “Chris Huicochea” and describes him as having known Stefani for a decade. Eric Stefani also worked on the Simpsons.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-10-30-ca-59399-story.html
And I found this on Flickr.
But that’s another one of the tropes about pedophiles: They seem so nice. They get people to trust them. That’s how it works. That’s how Fr. Siegfried Widera supposedly was.
It’s possible, I suppose, that Widera sexually abused a bunch of other victims, but not Huicochea/Eduard, and Eduard just me-tooed because he’s a rotten and manipulative human being.
Or, as I say when people I dislike claim victimhood: Sometimes bad things happen to bad people.
Maybe when someone abused as many children as Widera did, the odds were good he’d eventually find one who was a born pedophile himself.
But I don’t like any of those explanations.
1- Childhood sexual abuse, or any other kind of serious childhood abuse, interferes with healthy development. It confuses a child’s understanding of relationships, and not simply in an intellectual way. I’ve heard it described this way: some people say that children are resilient, but the truth is that they’re adaptable.
2- Does $1 million cure psychological issues? Watch TMZ and you’ll know it doesn’t.
3- Do paedos “seem so nice”? This is a trick question. It’s similar to the myth that sociopaths are smart and have great interpersonal skills. The successful ones do, but the rest don’t get labelled sociopaths; they’re just creepy guys in the alley.Report
I work with a lot of abusive people and their victims. I’ve heard roughly a billion times that “I should watch out for my ex, he/she is a great liar. They con everyone.” Very few of those people i should watch out for are good or even passable liars. But my position and experience is different.
Pedo’s or sociopaths usually feel off to “normal” adults. There is a reason they tend to prey on kids or people with problems. However there is a solid chunk of people ( maybe 25%, very rough guess) who tend to be more easily conned. My guess and experience is that those people came from abusive homes so they don’t see what are fairly obvious signs or have a gut that tells them “danger.”Report
I think many things interfere with healthy development. But there are also many gradients between “healthy development” and “sexually accosting random girls in public.” Same for that behavior, versus the typical dysfunction we see highlighted on TMZ.
It’s not that the money cures the issues. But one can afford therapy, and avoid severe economic stressors. The guy was such a big voice against clergy abuse, and then he goes and (allegedly) does these awful things in the same vein. It’s discouraging.
And what about all the dozens of other plaintiffs who settled along with him? I’d bet most if not all have managed to avoid sexually assaulting minors. At least, I hope so. So why this guy?Report
I think you just gave the key phrase for why this hasn’t become a story: it’s discouraging. No one wants to think about the cycle of violence and abuse because it’s miserable. It also ruins the narrative. We want to think that we can isolate a problem and it’ll go away, but everyone who suffers some kind of abuse is carrying around a scar at best.
A dear friend has gotten her life on a decent track, but she became unreasonably protective of her daughter around the time she turned 12. Knowing her background, I could understand why that happened, but she couldn’t. She had no perspective on it. I believe in free will, but we also have to recognize that people can get their wires crossed and it becomes a full-time job to function correctly.Report
I think there are two at least two potential narratives that this story disrupts, and none that it fits.
If one wanted to argue Catholic priest accusers are opportunistic liars, this doesn’t help much, because there’s still all the other evidence. If it had just been this one guy, it might help exonerate Widera in the public eye, but alas.
If one wished to make a point about how badly clergy abuse damages its victims … this guy is a hard subject with whom to sympathize now, given his charges. Well-compensated, publicly validated, a scenester with famous friends … Attacking little girls while they look for books and toys. Yet he’s someone I probably would have thought was hot 30 years ago.
If he’s allowed mitigation due to his past, do we have to then consider what happened to Fr. Widera to cause his behavior? Heck, what trauma was suffered by Harvey Weinstein? Jeff Epstein?Report
i knew Chris, and I know his story with Widera. Widera had his hands on me, but Chris’s experience with him was much worse than mine. i was not part of the lawsuit. This is the first I’ve heard of Chris’s current situation, of which this article is my only information. I feel, given the accusatory bent in this story, that Chis’s past deserves validation.Report