King of the County Pedophiles

Related story: The Damning Documents  (Editor's note: the names of sex-abuse victims are pseudonyms.)

  A gold-plated statue of the Virgin Mary tops the tower of Mary Star of the Sea in San Pedro. You can see her from 831 Ninth Street: her arms outstretched in acceptance, head surrounded by a halo of stars, face turned toward the cluttered law offices of Werner Meissner.

 Meissner talks fast but low through a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache; in another era, he might have played a Jimmy Cagney's sidekick. He no longer boxes but still maintains a lithe figure thanks to his black belt in karate. Meissner continues to exhibit the requisite bravado.

"I'm not going to let anyone abuse my clients," he says. "Physically, legally or any other way.

"I'm the guy who started the damn thing," Meissner snaps as he discusses the flood of lawsuits that have swept over the Los Angeles Archdiocese in the past two years, including three of his own. "I know more about Ramos than anyone. I'm the guru."

It's partially true. In 1986, Father Andrew Christian Andersen pled guilty to 26 counts of molesting four altar boys while at St. Bonaventure in Huntington Beach. Just months before Michael hired Meissner, the Orange diocese settled a lawsuit with Mary Grant for $25,000 after she alleged that Father John Lenihan had sexually molested her during the late 1970s while he served at St. Norbert's in Orange. But lawyers who have sued the Orange diocese consider Meissner's 1991 case against Ramos the template for the stonewalling and vicious attacks the Orange diocese would levy against sex-abuse victims in the following decade.

"He's the one who started it all," says John Manly, a lawyer who has sued church officials from Orange County to Alaska for harboring pedophile priests. "And he did it when no one else would. He and Michael had the courage to go through that fire by themselves. It's amazing."

Meissner at first only wanted the Orange diocese to apologize to Michael and pay for his therapy. When diocesan officials wouldn't return his calls, Meissner hired private investigators. They found the diocese was still paying Ramos a stipend. They also turned up witnesses who claimed they had complained to church officials about Ramos.

But Meissner wanted more evidence. So while his investigators continued to dig, Meissner grilled Michael almost daily.

"It's easy to find evidence now because the courts make the diocese turn over those personnel files," Meissner says. He's referring to the documents church officials keep on their priests that can include anything from phone bills to parishioner complaints to signed confessions of pederasty. "But back then, it was so vague. It's like a puzzle with a bunch of esoteric pieces coming into place. Michael would say, 'I think there were pictures, I think we went to a motel,' and I would ask him to try to remember more so we could get them at the depositions."

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The pretrial depositions occurred in the offices of Meissner and Peter Callahan, then and now the Orange diocese's lead attorney on sexual-abuse cases. Ramos came up from Tijuana, still a priest but now harried and fatigued. He never acknowledged Michael's presence.

Meissner says Monsignor John Urell, chancellor for the Orange diocese, approached him before the depositions began and said the diocese wanted Ramos gone just as much as Meissner and Michael, that Ramos "was a bad apple." But the diocese adopted a different stance once depositions began at Meissner's office.

First to be deposed was Michael. It lasted three days, eight hours each day, with only a lunch break, and involved every question imaginable. Meissner objected to as many questions as possible, "to protect him," but Orange diocesan lawyers would not let up. They had already contacted all his previous sex partners and asked Michael about each in detail. They asked about his encounters with Ramos and made him relive them in graphic detail. They asked him about his drug use. "They tried to say I couldn't be that messed up because I was still able to get degrees from college," he says. "Then they said I wasn't believable because I repressed those memories. Ramos even argued I was gay—therefore, it was okay."

But the toughest question Michael remembers was when Callahan asked how his family was handling it.

The truth was that Michael's family had become pariahs because of his lawsuit. His parents in particular anguished over how an institution they gave so much of their beings to could so ruthlessly attack their son.

"Here I was taking massive hacks at my family's foundation, and the cocksucker [Callahan] wants to know how it affected my family," Michael says, tearing up at the memory. "I just broke down. I wanted to jump across the table and kick his ass. You can do what you want to me, but don't fuck with my family."

Meissner next deposed Ramos. Church lawyers objected to almost every question Meissner asked the priest, citing the Fifth Amendment. Ramos admitted only to having sexual relations with Michael as an adult even after Meissner showed Ramos the letter he sent to Michael in the spring of 1990. And he denied Meissner's charge that he molested at least four other boys during his stay in the Orange diocese.