Best of the Week — First Winner

AP reveals: Catholic nuns accuse clergy of sexual abuse

It was a #MeToo moment from the Vatican with a seemingly unlikely accuser – a nun.

Vatican correspondent Nicole Winfield’s interview with a nun, who broke a 20-year-silence about being physically assaulted by an Italian priest, and reporting by Uganda correspondent Rodney Muhumuza about the scope of abuse in Africa, resulted in the AP being the first news organization to chronicle the global impact on nuns of the #MeToo movement.

Their story, which included expert analysis and exclusive Vatican comment urging nuns to report and bishops to sanction abusive priests, earns the Beat of the Week.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Detainees in Yemen charge sexual abuse by Emeratis

for her harrowing investigation revealing widespread sexual abuses and torture in United Arab Emirates-run prisons in Yemen. https://bit.ly/2tDE0jY

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Pope publicly acknowledges clergy sexual abuse of nuns

for pressing Pope Francis about the sexual abuse of nuns by priests and bishops. Drawing on AP’s ground-breaking reporting in the past year, Winfield elicited the pope's first public acknowledgement of the problem, opening a new chapter in the Catholic Church’s sex abuse reckoning. https://bit.ly/2Go2yVz

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Sexual abuse is pervasive in Islamic schools in Pakistan

for successfully undertaking the daunting task of pursuing an investigation into sexual abuse. Gannon persevered for months to get interviews with children, families and top officials, and was able to show how sexual abuse is pervasive in Pakistan's extensive system of Islamic schools. http://bit.ly/2jhebR7

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP Exclusive: FBI investigating abuse by New Orleans clergy

reported exclusively that the FBI has opened a sweeping probe into sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans, marking a rare federal foray into such a case, looking specifically at whether priests took children across state lines to molest them.Mustian’s scoop, based on law enforcement authorities and others familiar with the probe, marked a major shift in strategy for federal authorities, who have rarely opened investigations into the Catholic clergy abuse scandals, particularly cases built around the Mann Act, a century-old, anti-sex trafficking law that prohibits taking anyone across state lines for illicit sex.Mustian’s detailed reporting found that many of the cases the FBI is probing in New Orleans allege abuse by clergy during out-of-state trips, including to Mississippi camps or amusement parks in Texas and Florida.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: Churches defend clergy loophole on child sex abuse reporting

joined forces to reveal how religious lobbying across the U.S. has protected a loophole that exempts clergy from reporting child abuse if the abuse is revealed in a spiritual setting. The subject had surfaced in Rezendes’ August investigation into the mishandling and coverup of child sex abuse cases by the Mormon church.The investigative reporters found similar dynamics playing out in all 33 states that have the loophole: The Catholic and Mormon churches, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses successfully defeated more than 130 bills seeking to create or amend child sex abuse reporting laws.AP’s reporting brought attention to the loophole and prompted at least one state lawmaker to say he would introduce a bill to close the exemption.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

NFL’s Saints accused of helping shape clergy abuse list

for advancing the story he broke a week earlier, now reporting exclusively on court filings claiming that work done for the area’s Roman Catholic archdiocese by the NFL’s New Orleans Saints went beyond “minimal” public relations work on sex abuse by clergy, and allegedly included helping to shape a list of credibly accused clergy that appears to be undercounted. Mustain also reported on a judge’s ruling that the AP can move forward with its case to have documents between the Saints and the archdiocese made public. https://bit.ly/3718pK7

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

In the US, Black survivors are nearly invisible in the Catholic clergy sexual abuse crisis

AP broke new ground in detailing how Black victims of Catholic clergy sex abuse have largely been overlooked.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP first with report of abuse, cover-up by French clergy

broke news with an early scoop on the staggering scale — hundreds of thousands of victims — in a long-awaited report on sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church. That was just the start of a week of powerful and delicate AP coverage of France’s first nationwide reckoning with systemic church abuse, cover-ups and decades of trauma.On the eve of the report’s release, Paris-based senior field producer Masha Macpherson and video journalist Alex Turnbull tracked down an abuse victim who had inside information about the findings — notably, an estimated 216,000 children had been abused by clergy over the past 70 years. Their on-camera interview saw massive use.The following day, reporter Sylvie Corbet, senior producer Jeff Schaeffer, Macpherson and other Paris staffers, working closely with AP Vatican authority Nicole Winfield, produced fast-moving, comprehensive coverage on the release of the 2,500-page report. AP had live video, six video edits and two stories, including emotional reaction from victims and bishops; victims’ groups shared AP's stories online. And Schaeffer found a searing, intimate way to tell the victims’ side of the story in all formats: through the eyes of actor Laurent Martinez, who was abused by a priest and is working out the trauma onstage.https://aplink.news/30jhttps://aplink.video/tpthttps://aplink.news/sirhttps://aplink.video/v1t

Best of the States

‘Sundays After’: Portraits of resilience in the wake of clergy abuse

Photographer Maye-E Wong wanted to find a new way to tell the stories of those who suffered from clergy abuse, emphasizing that they were survivors, not victims. 

Her plan: She would photograph them with a Polaroid camera, then soak the prints and release the thin fragile membranes that held the images. The images were imperfect – wrinkled and distressed – but they endure, a metaphor for the survivors they portrayed.

Wong and reporter Juliet Linderman traveled the country to interview and photograph survivors, spending days with them and listening to their stories. The result was a stunning presentation that set AP viewership records and earned praise from both the subjects and the public.

For an arresting package of inspired photography and sensitive, insightful reporting, Wong and Linderman receive this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP investigation: Guam’s ex-archbishop protected culture of clergy sex abuse of children

Knowledge of clergy sex abuse is widespread on the mainland of the United States. But it has long been a secret in the small, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic U.S. territory of Guam.

Washington-based investigative reporter Michael Biesecker, working with Atlanta-based enterprise photographer David Goldman and Seattle video journalist Manuel Valdes, helped to puncture that veil of silence when AP examined thousands of pages of court documents in lawsuits brought by abuse victims and then conducted extensive interviews.

The AP team detailed a pattern of repeated collusion among predator priests, with abuse that spanned generations and reached all the way to the top of the territory’s church hierarchy, ruled over by then-Archbishop Tony Apuron, who himself had been accused of the rape of a 13-year-old choir boy when Apuron was a parish priest.

The care and sensitivity of the reporting and images were essential to the project’s power. “To see my story told in this way gives me a lot of peace, that I have a purpose,” said Walter Denton, a former U.S. Army sergeant and survivor of abuse nearly 40 years ago.

For telling a sensitive and little-known story of systemic clerical abuse dating from the 1950s to as recently as 2013, Biesecker, Goldman and Valdes share AP’s Best of the Week award.

Best of the States

​APNewsBreak: Patients in three states accuse prominent Philadelphia doctor of sexual abuse

After a prominent Philadelphia neurologist was charged with groping several patients at his clinic, Pennsylvania reporter Michael Rubinkam began digging into the neurologist's past to see if he had been accused of wrongdoing elsewhere.

Reviewing documents in three states, and checking with medical centers and law enforcement, he was able to determine that at least 17 women in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey have stepped forward to accuse Cruciani of sexual misconduct that goes back at least a dozen years. Two days after Rubinkam’s story ran, Cruciani pleaded guilty to groping seven patients.

For reporting exclusively that Cruciani has left behind a trail of sex abuse claims in at least three states, and obtaining powerful accounts of how he was able to prey on vulnerable patients, Rubinkam wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Exclusive: Argentina priest sex abuse

for their exclusive investigation into a clerical abuse scandal kept secret for decades at a school that educated members of Argentina’s elite. https://apnews.com/27c405af70a2448ba3c8fa4f23a0852...

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Michigan State kept ties to coach accused of sexual abuse

for revealing that Michigan State University, already reeling from the Larry Nassar gymnastics scandal, had maintained ties to a prominent volleyball coach long after he was publicly accused in 1995 of sexually abusing and raping six underage girls. https://bit.ly/2HOFgWL

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

States divided on combating sexual misconduct

for a story showing the vast majority of state legislatures said they intended to make changes to sexual harassment policies this year in the wake of the #MeToo movement, but half of the chambers have made no changes yet at all. http://bit.ly/2NtCZ5W http://bit.ly/2NqmYOb

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP breaks news of US probe, subpoenas of abuse by Pennsylvania clergy

for breaking the news of the first-ever statewide investigation by U.S. prosecutors of abuse by Pennsylvania clergy, including exclusive details of what was in federal subpoenas. https://bit.ly/2CW8jsC

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP exposes Vatican’s failure in Mexico abuse case

for a cross-format, trans-Atlantic exposé of a 30-year cover-up of a horrific case of clergy sexual abuse in Mexico. The pair revealed how the Vatican’s reform of the Legion of Christ had failed, as the papal envoy who ran the Legion starting in 2010 refused to punish or even investigate the abusing priest or the superiors who covered up his crimes, many of whom are still in power and ministry today. https://bit.ly/38NCjmdhttps://bit.ly/2UiftPZ

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Girls abused by UN peacekeepers in Congo still await justice

for their searing look at the sexual abuse of young women and girls by UN peacekeepers in Congo and their quest for justice years later. Paisley Dodds, investigative reporter, London, Krista Larson, West Africa bureau chief, Dakar, Andy Drake, senior producer, Rabat, and Al-Hadji Kudra Maliro, reporter, Mavivi, Congo, for their searing look at the sexual abuse of young women and girls by UN peacekeepers in Congo and their quest for justice years later. http://bit.ly/2fwVk2I

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Clerical sex abuse disclosures skyrocket in pope’s Argentina

for their exclusive reporting showing that in Pope Francis’ home country Argentina, the number of clerics publicly identified as alleged sexual abusers has increased dramatically in the last two years. https://apnews.com/c62e2d5e692d4d33887a928a7d69839...

Best of the Week — First Winner

How Sri Lanka let U.N. peacekeepers get away with sexual abuse in Haiti

When The Associated Press last year started to look into the issue of sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers, one finding was a leaked investigative report detailing how a group of 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers preyed upon young Haitian children in a sex ring that lasted for three years. Beyond that was another startling find: The U.N. accepted a Sri Lankan general who was accused of being a war criminal to lead the investigation of another rape in the Caribbean country.

AP’s Katy Daigle traveled to Sri Lanka to score a rare, extended interview with Maj. Gen. Jagath Dias and question him about his role – and to press government and military officials on how they'd followed up on the allegations. In London, meanwhile, investigative reporter Paisley Dodds was tipped by sources to a State Department memo on the WikiLeaks site in which a former U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka raised concerns that that country’s military and government were complicit in war crimes during the 26-year civil war.

Their disclosures earn the Beat of the Week.