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By Root 1489 0

liquefied fruit with eighteen powdered vitamins—“the mush,” his three young sons called it. The life force that sent him hurtling into each day sometimes ran fourteen hours at a stretch. The years of meeting clients, their lives still raw long after the early trauma, taught him how predators buried the evidence in their victims’ psyches.1 The adult survivor yearned to reach back in time and protect the child victim. Jeff Anderson spent heavily on investigations to find perpetrators; most were never prosecuted, too much time had passed. He alerted cops anyway. Hammering out settlements on the civil cases that took, on average, three years to resolve, he routinely blasted bishops in announcing new cases via Web-streamed video from his office (originally a bank built by a timber baron) in downtown St. Paul. Talking strategy with his co-counsels in other states, he carried a mental map of the many cases, working the cell phone on the forty-minute drive back to Stillwater, where he lived in a Victorian mansion above the St. Croix River. Street jogs after dinner softened the manic edge as he crawled into bed for five hours’ sleep.

A wiry five foot four inches, Jeff Anderson had receding silver-blond hair and a perpetual tan to soften his rutted brow. The Cheshire cat grin hinted at a natural ebullience that made an easy slide to flamboyance. “All roads lead to Rome,” he told the Washington Post on April 19, 2010. “We’re chasing them. We’re taking bites out of their ass.”2 Three days later he filed a motion in federal court to put Benedict XVI under oath.3 A Wisconsin priest named in several cases had molested two hundred deaf students over many years; Cardinal Ratzinger had refused to defrock him after extensive correspondence with Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee. Anderson and his associate Mike Finnegan obtained the correspondence in discovery and gave copies to reporter Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times. The Times report raised hard questions about the pope’s judgment while a cardinal, and embarrassed the Vatican.4

“It all leads to the pope,” Anderson insisted to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Deposing [the pope] sounds bombastic, but it isn’t. He needs to be held responsible for the torture and mutilation of children’s souls worldwide.”5

Torture, mutilation—inflammatory rhetoric, words that made him good copy for journalists. But he had absorbed too much factual tonnage on sex criminals whose white collars had given them a free ride to maintain a calm demeanor. Anderson had been suing the church since 1984, losing almost as many cases as he had won, picking himself up each time, coiled to fight again. In Wisconsin he had been forced to hire his own attorney when church lawyers filed punitive motions in Madison. The perpetrator was defrocked, but the abuse, legally, lay too far in the past. Defending himself had cost $40,000. A 1995 Wisconsin state high court decision had barred abuse lawsuits against the church. In time, Anderson found a way around the statute: he began suing Wisconsin bishops for fraud, on the grounds that passing off pedophiles as good priests was itself a tort—an approach that got him a foot in the door.

By spring 2003 he had about 150 clients. Over the previous twenty years he had settled claims for some five hundred victim-survivors for $60 million. He had won several high-profile trials that resulted in multimillion-dollar verdicts. Anderson was ecumenical in his way; he took cases against Protestant ministers, Hare Krishnas, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons, but, by far, most of his clients were Catholic victims. His take of each successful case was 40 percent, plus expenses, proportionally shared with his law partners, until 2002, when he split off from his longtime firm. By 2003 the larger cases were settling for high six figures and up.

“It was never really about the money for Jeff,” his wife, Julie, a willowy blonde who had done heavy lifting in the department of patience, said in 2003. “He liked to play the scrappy little lawyer, a down-and-dirty sort … He was an actor on a stage.