Kamala Harris is emphasizing her experience as a prosecutor in her campaign for president, which is drawing attention to her decisions as a district attorney two decades ago — including how she handled victims of sex abuse by Catholic clergy.

Some advocates for victims say she didn’t help them when she could have — particularly during a seven-year period when she had control of personnel files of Catholic priests accused of sex crimes.

It’s not a new claim; critics have made it during at least two of Harris’ prior runs for higher office.

Joey Piscitelli, 69, a clergy sex-abuse victim and activist, told the Register that when Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011, he couldn’t get documents from her, couldn’t get a meeting with her, and couldn’t even get an acknowledgment that he’d tried.

He estimates he sent her a half-dozen letters and participated in about a half-dozen protests outside her offices, to no avail.

“I’ve been a registered Democrat all my life. I don’t have any problem with the Democratic Party. I have a problem with her, though,” Piscitelli said in a telephone interview. “For me it’s not a political thing. It’s about her behavior and track record.”

The Register contacted spokesmen for Harris, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, on Friday, but did not hear back by deadline.

No Documents

Getting justice for sex abuse is one of the pillars of Harris’ political career. One of her biographers, Dan Morain, described her in his 2021 book, Kamala’s Way: An American Life, as “a prosecutor who had held the hands of victims of sex crimes.”

It’s also part of her current presentation as a presidential candidate.

“As a prosecutor I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse,” Harris said in a Milwaukee suburb July 23, during her first rally as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

But Piscitelli finds Harris’ pitch exasperating.

Piscitelli told the Register he was sexually abused by a priest about 55 years ago, starting when he was a freshman at what was then known as Salesian High School in Richmond, California, about 12 miles northeast of San Francisco. In 2006, a jury awarded Piscitelli $600,000 from the priest and from The Salesian Society, a judgment that a higher state court upheld on appeal.

Piscitelli is the Northern California leader of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), which tracks clergy sex abusers and tries to help victims.

He told the Register that he and other clergy sex-abuse victims met in 2003 with Terrence Hallinan, the district attorney of San Francisco at the time, about documents Hallinan had obtained concerning priests accused of sexually abusing minors, including personnel files from the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Hallinan, who died in 2020, showed the activists a room stacked with boxes of files and said he planned to release them to the public, Piscitelli said.

But that December, Hallinan was upset in his reelection bid by a candidate The San Francisco Examiner at the time described as “a virtual unknown” — Kamala Harris.

Harris, said Piscitelli, never produced the files. And when he informed her office in writing that his abuser was listed on the staff of a church in the area, he said, she made no public statements and never responded to him privately either.

He said he tried letters, fliers posted around the city, and protests outside her offices seeking the files, all to no avail.

“She was protecting and aiding and shielding the predators and the diocese by not releasing those documents,” Piscitelli said.

San Francisco had two archbishops during Harris’ tenure as district attorney — future Cardinal William Levada and Archbishop George Niederauer. Both are now deceased.

Peter Marlow, spokesman for the archdiocese, told the Register that the Archdiocese of San Francisco cooperates with the district attorneys in the three counties that make up the archdiocese “and has always done so, regardless of who the elected district attorney is.”

Asked by email if the archdiocese asked Harris not to make the clergy files public, Marlow responded, “We have no knowledge that anyone from the Archdiocese of San Francisco made any such request.”

Piscitelli’s abuse took place in Contra Costa County, not in San Francisco. The documents he sought were not for his own case, he said, but rather to publicize the names of predators in other cases.

“If you had a kid in grammar school in fifth grade and there was a child abuser there, would you want the names released?” Piscitelli said. “You want to know who these priests are and where they’re at. Absolutely.”

Piscitelli said he has heard that the documents were at some point thrown out. A current spokesman for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office could not be reached by deadline.

Not Sufficiently Supportive?

Piscitelli’s lawyer, Rick Simons, offered the Register a nuanced view of Harris’ conduct.

“It’s obvious to me that she wasn’t willing to push the issues as hard as Hallinan had. It’s not obvious to me that she did anything unethical or improper. Whether she could have done more and not crossed the boundary of unethical or improper — arguably, yes,” Simons said in a telephone interview. “I think the survivor community feels that she wasn’t supportive enough of them publicly.”

Simons told the Register he has represented hundreds of clergy sex-abuse victims since 2002. Certain district attorneys have been helpful to him, he said. Harris was less so. But Simons noted that when Harris’ predecessor, Hallinan, obtained the clergy sex-abuse documents from the Archdiocese of San Francisco more than 20 years ago, he was planning to pursue criminal prosecutions of priests who had abused minors decades before.

That’s something Harris couldn’t do. In June 2003, about six months before she took office, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision (in a case called Stogner v. California) finding that the California Legislature’s attempt in 1993 to expand the statute of limitations retroactively in criminal sex-abuse cases was unconstitutional.

That meant that while Piscitelli’s abuser and other abusers could still be sued civilly, they could not be prosecuted criminally.

Piscitelli acknowledges that point — to a point.

“But that shouldn’t have stopped her from releasing the names,” Piscitelli told the Register. “Because, in my opinion, all of them are repeat offenders, and they were able to keep doing it. We need to know who these people are, and where did you put them? She did a lot of harm by protecting them. She definitely was not protecting the victims. Absolutely not.”

Protecting Privacy?

Harris, 59, the current vice president of the United States, is widely expected next month to get the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in the November 2024 election, now that President Joe Biden has dropped out.

She served as district attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011, then as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017, and then as U.S. senator from 2017 to 2021, when she became vice president.

Piscitelli told the Register he contacted Harris after she became attorney general of California but got no response — though her successor, Xavier Becerra, agreed to a meeting not long after he took office. (Becerra is now the Biden administration’s U.S. secretary of health and human services.)

The clerical-abuse-documents story has come up during Harris’ past runs for higher office.

In 2010, when Harris first ran (successfully) for California attorney general, San Francisco Weekly published a story headlined “A Secrecy Fetish,” describing the newspaper’s unsuccessful efforts in 2005 to get the clergy-abuser documents from Harris’ office, followed by a seven-week effort in 2010 that ended with a written statement: “District Attorney Harris focuses her efforts on putting child molesters in prison. We're not interested in selling out our victims to look good in the paper. When this case was brought under Terence Hallinan, prosecutors took the utmost care to protect the identity and dignity of the victims. That was the right thing to do then and it’s the right thing to do now.”

The story surfaced nationally five years ago, after Harris, then a U.S. senator, began her first (unsuccessful) campaign for president. In June 2019, The Intercept published a story and video interview with Piscitelli. The story included a sentence saying Harris’ presidential campaign “did not respond to multiple requests for comment.”

Later that month, Harris’ campaign was contacted by Associated Press reporter Michael Rezendes, who was a member of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team that uncovered the clergy sex-abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002.

Rezendes’ AP story paraphrases a written statement from the Harris campaign as saying “she withheld documents regarding clergy sexual abuse from attorneys and news reporters to protect the identities of victims.”

Piscitelli told the Register that the statements made on behalf of Harris make no sense, because Harris could have had her office black out the names of victims before releasing documents to the public.

Joelle Casteix, a clergy sex-abuse victim who was the Western regional director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests when Harris was district attorney in San Francisco, told the Register that Harris’ explanation sounds like something a diocese worried about liability for clergy sex abusers might say.

“That’s a bad excuse,” Casteix said in an interview. “Survivors want those documents released, because it’s evidence of a crime and a cover-up. Secondly, we have seen documents all over the country released that have protected the names of survivors.”

Casteix called Harris’ behavior as a district attorney “extraordinarily egregious.”

She said, “You can’t say that you are law enforcement and fighting for survivors and then pull something like this.”