Amy Berg on "Deliver Us From Evil"

Amy Berg's documentary Deliver Us From Evil features interviews both with a former priest, Oliver O'Grady, who abused children in several California parishes for years, and with O'Grady's victims and their families. The film is remarkable for the way it peers into a pedophile's soul - a confused, dark place, to judge from O'Grady - and for the way in which Berg shows that O'Grady devastated entire families.

Berg's documentary also takes a hard, close look at the Catholic church: its doctrine of celibacy for priests, its inadequate means of preparing clergy for life as sexual adults without a means for sexual outlet, and the ways in which the Church's means of training young men for the priesthood allegedly arrests human psychosexual development, in effect theoretically making the Church apparatus for generating new clergy a pedophile factory.

Amy Berg approaches the scandal from the Los Angeles side of the story, where 556 priests have been accused of molesting children. This is a hugely greater number than what Boston, where the scandal broke into public view, has seen, but the politics and the raw demonstrations of power that the Church has used are similar in both cases. Amy Berg talked with EDGE about the scandal and her new film, and about the dark puzzle that is Oliver O'Grady.

EDGE: What drew you to this very difficult, but important, material about the crisis in the Catholic church?

Amy Berg: I was versed in this story ever sine 2002. I was working a CBS at the time, and when all of the great coverage that came out of Boston funneled its way to Los Angeles, I was on the story for local angles on it. [The story] became more national over [my tenure of] four of five years of doing investigative producing.

But this guy [Oliver O'Grady] ... this was the first time I had heard of a priest who would come out and talk, and it took me five months to get him to talk, so I didn't know that straight away. I didn't really think, "God, how can I do this? He's a pedophile, it seems so crazy..." I was really interested in the fact that, when else have we seen a glimpse inside the mind of a pedophile? All we've ever heard to this point was, these people saying it happened to them, and the Church saying either it didn't happened, or there wasn't a paper trail, or they were doing their best. So, here was the conduit to bring those two stories together - someone that said, "I did it, and [Church officials] knew, but they didn't do anything about it." It just seemed important - for the victims, for the audience to understand [because] pedophilia is such a huge problem today.

I know that it's rough material, and I'm sure I did have [my doubts], but I kind of became immersed in what I was doing really quickly, The firs thing I did was fly to Ireland, when he agreed, and spend eight days with him. That was the whole interview - that was the only time I spent with him.

EDGE: Not only does your documentary give us a glimpse into the mind of a pedophile, it gives us a glimpse into the wider institutional problems of the Church - its history, its hierarchical structure. Is that something you expected to happen?

Amy Berg: Yes. [In news reports,] we always kind of mentioned [that Bishop] Mahoney didn't do anything, or there was a police report and then [the perpetrator] got moved [to a new parish] - little glimpses, but you never take the whole thing in; you have to actually go through the whole journey to have an impact, I think, and a five minute story is never going to do that. I knew that stuff, but I never had an opportunity to explore it. When I went deeper [in this documentary], it was obvious [that] it all needed to be in the film. There needs to be some kind of an outlet for all the emotions that you feel going through this journey that we go through in the film. Just watching the audience reaction in Toronto, and Los Angeles, and Australia, people were so angered by that part of it that it kind of offset some of the pain that the families [of the victims aroused in viewers with their stories].

EDGE: When you initially approached Oliver O'Grady, how did you get him to agree to speak on film, and to open up about the abuses he committed?

Amy Berg: Well, he opened up, it's just a matter of what I could do with the material. There was no coaxing him in what he said; that was the same from the first conversation to what you see on the screen. But he was protecting his family, and somewhat protecting his stake in the future of this severance pay that he's going to get at a certain point, so he wasn't ready to just exploit himself. But ultimately, after talking to me for five months, watching the hypocrisy of Cardinal Mahoney flying first class to Rome when the Pope died, Cardinal Mahoney walking out in protest when Cardinal Law was presiding over the funeral of the Pope, even though Mahoney has as much... much more, actually, [in the way of] dirty secrets. I think there were 85 priests accused in Boston [as opposed to] 556 in Los Angeles. These were the things that made him want to come out and speak, because Mahoney was his boss, and he was watching him climb in power. [O'Grady] lost a lot when the Church was taken away from him, in his mind. That was his only [point of] sanity in his life.

EDGE: Would you characterize his response to seeing Mahoney rise in power as stemming from his own displacement from his role in the Church, or is there also an element of true moral indignation in O'Grady's response? Is O'Grady capable of moral outrage?

Amy Berg: I don't think he's capable of that. If you look at the way that the victims and their families worshipped Oliver in their own kind of distorted way, and you think about the structure of the Church, he really thought he and Mahoney were close. You saw the letter [in the film] that Mahoney wrote to him: "If there's anything I can do personally for you..." He felt something strong in their relationship. And in deposition footage, Mahoney says, "It's not like we golfed together." He [maintained] a real distance from Oliver when all of this went down, and I think that [distancing behavior], more than anything, just hurt him. It's a kind of indignation, but it's hard to say that because he's so disconnected.

EDGE: O'Grady is very disconnected. At one point he's being questioned as to whether he suffers from a dissociative disorder, and he's not able to say definitively, but he does say that there's a way in which he feels as though he's not part of the things that he describes doing, which are so horrifying.

Amy Berg: I think that was an important thing to put in the film. Maybe more important than that, though, [was] what the psychologist says about these young boys being arrested in their development. I think that Oliver is like a seven-year-old in so many ways. When he starts telling a story, it's not like he knows where he's going. It's kinf of like it comes as he's telling the story, and he's just like a little kid in that way. He feels those real kid [level] feelings, and that's how sick he really is.

EDGE: When O'Grady talks about acknowledging the harm he's done, or the devastation he's left in his wake, is he simply repeating things he's heard others say about him? Because you don't necessarily feel that he's connecting to the true fact or true scale of the abuses he's talking about.

Amy Berg: The way I saw it, and I do believe this, is he still hasn't admitted that what happened to him was painful.

EDGE: What happened to him? As a child?

Amy Berg: As a child. If he can't admit that, then how can he admit that he hurt others? That's what it seemed to stem from. I'm not a psychologist; it just seemed like he says, "I can't make a link between what happened to me and what happened to these other children," so how does he have any feeling associated [with the damage he's done]?

EDGE: One of the most surreal parts of the movie was when O'Grady decided he was going to write letters to reach out to his victims. In one way it seems like a laudable thing, and it might be rooted in the Christian idea of reconciliation. On the other hand, though, seeing him wink at the camera and say, "Hope to see you all real soon..." It's revolting. You can see how the recipients responded with indignation. One of them said something like, "That's what we need, a barbecue with O'Grady."

Amy Berg: That was only one of them who responded that way, though, The girls really went a different way. Nancy would have gone, for sure. They still - this is that thing of, "You took my faith away, but I still want to have faith, and I'll do anything I can to have faith." Talking to me was a way for them to regain some of their faith and trust, and it seemed to have worked. I don't think that meeting with him would have done something like that, but they toyed with the idea.

EDGE: As you spoke with O'Grady for those months leading up to your interview, and then as you talked with him in front of the camera, and then when you were putting the film together, did you find your perspective on O'Grady changing at all?

Amy Berg: I feel like... I mean, it's hard to say we have pity for a monster that was capable of doing things that were so reprehensible. [But] I saw that he was a victim when he was a child; I don't know of any pedophile that wasn't abused themself. That's usually where it comes from. But I did feel that through the words of the parents and the words of his victims, I had to show how they were manipulated. He's very manipulative. He is charming - charming to a fault. I guess all of that worked into it. It's hard to have a clear perspective on him, because you could go any direction with it. I felt like we needed to show that in the film, because it's definitely not cut and dried. He could be a psychopath. It's very obvious that, mentally, we don't know who he is. Does that answer your question?

EDGE: Can you answer these questions? I don't know. You can explore them, and maybe that's all you can do.

Amy Berg: Yeah, that's the truth. There isn't one answer for that one. It is interesting that you can sit in the room with him and listen to this stuff and not take a knife out with him. It's interesting, the way he describes things, you can [bear to] listen.

EDGE: A while ago you mentioned some statistics that are unbelievable. Something like 80 cases of pedophile priests in Boston and over 500 in Los Angeles. What does this tell us about the underlying culture of sexual abuse, even outside of the Catholic church? Even, as it turns out, on a global level?

Amy Berg: I can talk to the Los Angeles statistics. There must be a lot of political power with [Cardinal] Roger Mahoney. He must be incredibly powerful, because who could get away with that? The evidence is - the pile is high. He has, for four years, been able to not turn his documents over to the District Attorney. He only turned them over in May. They've been trying to get these documents out of him for four years. Maybe Cardinal Law wasn't as politically connected as Mahoney. That's Los Angeles. In the world [as a whole], you can justify why it's going on in each country, based on the political infrastructure. Places like England and Ireland, there isn't a separation between the Church and the State, so if someone comes in and says this happened to them, they don't get a trial. There is no question, because the State owns the Church, so how is there justice in that situation? I guess that it all comes down to the power [the Church holds]. In the film you can see how much power they have. And then [the other factor is] the faith of their parishioners; the people don't want to hear about this. They want to know that they're going to Church and they're going to go to Heaven. That's kind of all they really care about. That's why I think this film is really important. If there are still corrupt people in positions of leadership, I think that's a call to action for the parishoners. They should be marching like the people of Boston did, so they can get the bad guys out and reform their Church in a way that would work for them. Or maybe it's not possible - I don't know.

EDGE: One of the Church's approaches to handling the pedophile crisis is to scapegoat gay clergy and gay seminarians.

Amy Berg: Oh, I know. Oh, my god. That is such a travesty. They cite a report from, like, 1973 that no one has ever heard of - it's not even a credible report - to link homosexuality to pedophilia. There's no real report that shows that. Our psychologist, who is one of the leading, foremost experts in the country, says that [children] are safer with a homosexual male than with a heterosexual male, just statistically. I don't know if that [claim on the part of the Church] is [them] trying to be part of the [right wing] Christian movement, because that's what the extreme Christians say - that the homosexuals have corrupted the Catholic Church. I don't know what their motive is, but it's a bad PR move. It's a really bad move.

EDGE: I don't know that many people understand that there is a difference between a homosexual and a pedophile - that a pedophile is attracted to sexually immature people, meaning children, regardless of gender.

Amy Berg: Right. Why are these priests picking boys and girls? [They have] access to more boys, [for example,] altar boys, but Oliver O'Grady was [sexually inappropriate] with just as many girls as he was with boys.

EDGE: There was a strange, almost anomalous situation cited in your film in which O'Grady evidently had consensual sexual relations with a married woman as a means of getting to her son.

Amy Berg: Right. So many people have not gotten that - a lot of people missed that point. You can't hit it over the head, but I felt that was important. That was probably one of five mothers that he did that with, maybe more. The Howard mother... we did not interview the Howards, but we used their documents. She had nine kids, and she was having trouble with her husband. [O'Grady] was right in there. He was basically living in the house, and I think 70% of her kids were abused. They haven't confirmed the last few, but I have talked to a lot of them. That was his M.O.

EDGE: You spoke with O'Grady, and then you spoke with his victims. How was that for you? Was it difficult to approach his victims, and to get them to open up on camera?

Amy Berg: And with somebody who'd just interviewed their perpetrator. They were very shaky in the beginning - of course. But I spent the time with them. I didn't come in and ask them to sign a release and try to just sew it up. I spent a lot of time with them, and I tried to make them comfortable.

EDGE: Did they find that the chance to speak out in your film was healing for them?

Amy Berg: I think that they did. I think that the best thing that has happened for some of them has been when people walk up and say, "This happened to me too, and you are a hero for doing this." They get emails. They go to the SNAP conventions - "Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests," that's a national organization. Voice of the Faithful has all their information on their web site. They feel good about that. I know that the relationship between Bob Jyono, the father [interviewed in the film] and Anne Jyono [his daughter, who was abused by O'Grady] was pretty bad when I first met them, and it got really good by the time we finished filming. He's called me and said things to me like, "She was a victim when she first met you, and now she's a survivor," and he's so proud of her to have been able to bring this out [into the open] and talk about it. It's helped their family heal. So, yes - I think it's positive.

EDGE: Do you have a sense as to whether the Church is going to institute meaningful reforms, or whether they are simply going to wait out the controversy and continue with business as usual?

Amy Berg: I always feel a little uncomfortable answering that question, because I'm not Catholic. I'm not slanted on that at all. I just wanted to give these people an opportunity to talk about it. I would hope that people would try to speak out about corrupt individuals running the Church; I would hope that this [film] would promote a call to action. But my goal is not to take people's faith away from them or provide an avenue to close the doors. I would just hope that they would open the doors to people like Anne Jyono [who was turned away by Vatican guards when she traveled to Rome to seek an audience with Pope Benedict]... people who requested meetings and couldn't get them, and that's why they ended up having to [resort] to lawsuits and interviews with me and other people. I think that's why they do what they do: because they haven't had an opportunity to sit with Cardinal Mahoney and ask why this happened, and let him listen to their stories. That's all they ever really wanted.