Matos McGreevey is seeking $600,000 in a divorce filing in which she accuses her husband, the former governor of New Jersey, of defrauding her by hiding his homosexuality.
But a former driver and aide to Jim McGreevey made the bombshell claim that Dina Matos McGreevey must have always known her husband was gay - because he was the other man in bed with them.
In an explosive March 16 interview with the NY Post, Ted Pedersen, 29, gave explicit details on three-way sex romps that he claimed to have had with the McGreeveys, starting during their courtship and ending when McGreevey became governor in November 2001.
Pedersen told the Newark Star-Ledger that he had sex with Matos McGreevey while her husband watched.
Pedersen said never had sex with McGreevey, but hinted he thinks his presence was required to get McGreevey aroused. He thought the former governor only had “light interest” in him.
Pedersen said he and the McGreeveys had what they called “Friday Night Specials” that began with dinner at T.G.I. Friday’s and ended with sex at McGreevey’s condo.
Dina Matos McGreevey shot back by declaring Pedersen’s claims were “completely false” and that he is one of her husband’s “cronies.” She told ABC News that last August McGreevey paid for Pedersen to go to China with him and Mark O’Donnell, his domestic partner. The three of them, plus a few others in McGreevey’s innner circle went there for vacation.
Pedersen retorted that she was in denial and a hypocrite. He said he came forward in part because he disputed Matos McGreevey’s assertions that she was unaware of her husband’s homosexuality.
The McGreeveys go back to court on Thursday. In the meantime, I am left with two questions:
- Didn’t Dina McGreevey think it even a wee bit odd her boyfriend liked to watch another man screw her?
- Are there T.G.I. Friday’s in China now?
The principal at Cardinal Hayes High School, an all-boys school in the Bronx, was ousted last week after photos of nude men were discovered on his computer.
No criminal charges were filed against the principal, Christopher Keogan, because the photos were of adults.
Two ex-faculty members and a priest associated with sexual abuse lawsuits have accused Keogan in letters and affidavits of theft of petty cash, an affair with a male subsordinate, faking transcripts to help that man get into college, and misuse of funds. The priest alleged that Keogan took $10,000 from a charity set up to provide scholarships to purchase furniture for his new apartment.
In 2006 a staffer claimed to the Equal Opportunity Commission that she was fired after reporting that Keogan had an affair with a male subordinate. Keogan denied the affair and the unfair firing charge. He said the archiocese investigated it and the allegations were not substantiated.
His ouster stunned teachers and students at the school, where Mr. Keogan was largely seen as charismatic and fair. He joined the school in 1990, and served as dean of discipline for six years before becoming principal in 2003.
“He was a really nice guy, really down to earth, really cool,” said Kyle Brooks, 18, who graduated last year. “If you got into trouble, he would listen to both sides of the story. He was an honorable guy. Extremely fair.”
So, was Keogan set up by disgrunted and possibly homophobic staffers-or–did some instances of bad judgement do him in? The case gets more interesting with the addition of Fr. Bob Hoatson, a priest who wrote Keogan a scathing letter accusing him of a slew of misconduct at the school. He blasted the payment from the scholarship fund (which may have been legitimately authorized) to Keogan.
Fr. Hoatson comes with a little scandal of his own. Believing he had been fired from his job at Catholic Charities because of his advocacy for sex abuse survisors, in 2006 he filed a 44-page complaint in which he outed New York’s Cardinal Edward Egan.
Halfway through the 44-page complaint, the priest-turned-advocate drops a bomb on the cardinal–he alleges that Egan is “actively homosexual,” and that he has “personal knowlege of this.” His suit names two other top Catholic clerics in the region as actively gay–Albany bishop Howard Hubbard and Newark archbishop John Myers.
What Hoatson claims is that, as leaders of a church requiring celibacy and condemning homosexuality, actively gay bishops are too afraid of being exposed themselves to turn in pedophile priests. The bishops’ closeted homosexuality, as the lawsuit states, “has compromised defendants’ ability to supervise and control predators, and has served as a reason for retaliation.”
Before an incident last summer, my knee-jerk reaction would have been to applaud Fr. Hoatson. Now I give these crusaders a little more scrutiny for personal motives. Why is Hoatson involved in this case? No sex abuse of minors has surfaced.
In August 2007 it came to my attention that a homophobic group of persons (they were anonymous)-under the guise of being concerned about pedophile priests-attempted to use the “gay-friendly” college and parish listings on cclonline.org to justify their entries on wikipedia that Archbishop John Favalora protected pedophiles and gay priests. These individuals refused to dialog with the rest of us, or substantial their allegations on Archbishop Favalora and priests they named as gay. They were eventually banned from Wikipedia, and their entries largely removed.
As the student said, there are two sides to every story.
Unfortunately for Mr. Keogan, (or Brother Keogan, if he’s still with the Christian Brothers), his career as an educator is finished either way.
The Rev. Marcial Maciel, a Mexican priest who founded the Legion of Christ religious order and was disciplined by Pope Benedict XVI after a sexual abuse investigation, died January 30, 2008 in Houston. He was 87.
Mariel was born in Mexico in 1920. He founded the Legion of Christ in Mexico City in 1941, and it is one of the fastest growing orders in the Catholic Church, with more than 700 priests and 2,500 seminarians in 20 countries.
It was well-regarded by the late Pope John Paul II in particular because of its conservative views, loyalty to church teaching, and its success in recruiting young men for the priesthood.
He was also “the greatest fund-raiser in the modern church, using his order…and its lay wing, Regun Christi, to attract wealthy supporters” said Jason Berry, who is producing a documentary on the sex abuse claims based on a book he co-authored, “Vows of Silence.”
Maciel’s reputation began to tarnish in 1997, when nine former members of the order accused Maciel of abusing them when they were boys, aged 10-16, in seminaries in Spain and Italy.
Maciel and the Legion vigorously denied the allegations and accused the men of forming a conspiracy to defame him. He appeared to have the Vatican’s full support until 2005.
That is when church officials, under the direction of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, reopened a canon law investigation that had been inexplicably squelched in 1999. Within days, Maciel announced he was retiring as head of the Legion, but denied it had anything to do with the accusations against him.
The accusers–two Americans, five Mexicans and two Spanish citizens–had tried for years to call their accusations to the attention of John Paul II but were unsuccessful. In fact, the Pope appointed Maciel as his personal representative to a high-level meeting on the Americas, signaling his full support of the priest, shortly after the allegations were publicized in 1997.
After John Paul’s death, however, Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, moved to sanction Maciel. He was arguably the highest ranking priest to be censured in the sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church.
“It’s a very hard time for me to speak. At this moment I am still trying to get my emotions under control,” said Juan Vaca of Holbrook, NY, one of Maciel’s nine accusers, when he heard the news of his death. “I am a believer in God’s mercy, so I think God is taking care of this situation, but at the same time I am still expecting some justice and truth to prevail on this earth.”
