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DALLAS, TEXAS, June 15, 2002: Windle Turley, a Dallas attorney, is known for two of the nation’s most notorious lawsuits over priestly molestation. In 1997, Turley won what is still the largest jury verdict ever levied in the Catholic Church’s 20-year-old sex abuse scandal, US$119,603.500. Three years later, he followed up with a $400 million lawsuit against the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. It was dismissed in federal court, but Turley has refiled in state courts. According to Hare Krishna spokesman Anantanda Dasa, the organization did exactly what many have said the Catholic bishops should have done 15 years ago. But whereas the Catholics’ secrecy may have helped them, the Hare Krishnas’ honesty may have cost them, states this report. Long before Turley’s lawsuit was filed, the Krishnas admitted they had a history of molestation and other physical abuse in their religious boarding schools. They set up an office of child protection and hired an outside investigator, scholar E. Burke Rochford, to study the treatment of children. That report was devastating, but the Hare Krishnas published it anyway. And it was like handing Turley a lawsuit on a silver platter, states this article. The report provided lots of material for Turley’s suit. Turley says it’s not his fault the Hare Krishnas hanged themselves with Rochford’s report. The Krishna case alleges that dozens of children of Hare Krishna members were abused in the 1970s at church boarding schools in Texas, West Virginia and New York.

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