Dick Nadeau
Dick Nadeau was sexually molested by Father Hector Cote csv while Nadeau was a student at the now defunct Cornwall Classical Classical College which was operated by the Viatorian priests (Clerics of St.Viator).
Nadeau became well known near and afar as the operator of the tell-all website projecttruth2.com website. It was in that capacity that Dick was eventually sued by Bishop Eugene Larocque and several other priest from the diocese of Alexandria-Cornwall and cited with contempt of court by Justice Colin McKinnon during the sex abuse trial of Cornwall lawyer and Church canon lawyer Jacques Leduc.
Prior to his contempt hearing in Ottawa Nadeau, who was then in poor health and without means to pay hefty legal fees, was advised by his lawyer to just go before the judge and apologize and the citation would be ‘purged.’
It didn’t happen that way.
The judge who found Nadeau guilty of contempt and fined him $1,000 was Justice J.D. Cunningham, the same judge who, according to the Canadian Judicial Council, pulled Justice James Chadwick in to replace McKinnon when the latter was obliged to recuse himself after his conflict of interest regarding Perry Dunlop and former Chief of Police Claude Shaver had been publicly exposed in court by Nadeau. (Chadwick turned the Leduc sex abuse trial into the trial and lynching of Perry Dunlop and granted Leduc his first stay. The stay was later overturned on appeal.)
Dick Nadeau had a lot to say but the Cornwall scandal. He spent hours and months and a small fortune tracking down and interviewing victims, witnesses and molesters alike.
The following is a small excerpt of Dick’s “Naming Names” which gives a little history of the Classical College, the names of three Viatorian priests who were sexually abusing young boys, and connections between the college and convicted paedophile “Killer Gagnon” and Crown Attorney Malcolm MacDonald:
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Naming Names
. . . . My interest in the full disclosure of the pedophile network in Cornwall began as I developed my own case against the Cornwall Classical College and its priests. The College was created shortly after the War, and opened as le Collège classique de Cornwall on a private basis laying the foundation of a liberal arts course as desired by the then Bishop, Bishop Brodeur. The College provided both high school and from 1953, when it became affiliated with the University of Ottawa, post-secondary education, but only in liberal arts. During the early fifties, students attended classes in three houses located on Lawrence Street between Montreal Road and First Street East. In 1953, the student body consisted of 80 students with 12 priests of the teaching order, Les Clercs St.Viateur, rotating from classroom to classroom. Les Clercs still govern several colleges in the Province of Québec and one on the outskirts of Winnipeg, Manitoba. They lived on site on Lawrence Street while students mostly from Cornwall lived at home.
In 1955, the College moved to brand new facilities located on Windmill Point in Cornwall’s East End. The student body within a few years grew to over 400 as some 200 boarders swelled the day population. Courses were taught in a strongly Catholic setting – very few staff members were laymen – and vocations for the priesthood were encouraged.
Indeed, the largest groups of graduates became teachers and priests while a handful went into medicine and law. The initial phase was open only to men, but in 1964, women were admitted in the hope of the College becoming a university institution. The College had hoped to coexist with the new St. Lawrence College as a full off-campus college of the University of Ottawa (by then, no longer a clerical but a lay university), but provincial regulations did not allow such an arrangement between academic and technical institutions. The College closed in 1968 due to financial difficulties. In that same year, St. Lawrence College, a technical community college, moved into the premises and is still there today.
The Clercs St. Viateur went far and wide to recruit boarders but mostly in the Province of Ontario where there existed large French Catholic populations such as Kitchener, Welland, Kapuskasing, Sudbury, North Bay and Penetanguishene. The priests also rotated within Cornwall’s Catholic churches saying mass on weekends and the like under the supervision of the Diocese.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, the College brought many young boys to Cornwall and pedophiles naturally followed. Many of those boys were from out of town and lived in dormitories and as a result, were sexually assaulted in the dorms, priests’ rooms or other places. I was sexually assaulted in the St. Francis de Sales presbytery by Father Hector Côté. Father Bérubé is charged with physical assault as well as reckless endangerment as he provided boys for others to sexually enjoy. There were no less than 300 charges plus against Rev. Jean Primeau, who died upon his knowing that he was going to be charged by OPP Project Truth. Through my search, I found several students who had committed suicide and who had died of aids. Many preferred not to join the lawsuit as they had kept silent all these years and did not want to reopen old wounds that could affect their family and their careers.
…..
Martial (Killer) Gagnon was a well known pedophile in Cornwall`s East End and a close friend of the College, but especially to Rev. Paul Lapierre and Rev. Bérubé. To charge Father Bérubé with reckless endangerment, I had to prove that he knew that Killer was a pedophile when he told boys to spend weekends with him. He was charged in the late fifties and early sixties with sexual assaults but his case files have either disappeared from the archives or were destroyed. However, on checking with the Land Registry office as to the disposal of his property, since he had to get out of town, found that it had been transferred to Malcolm MacDonald for one dollar on January 31, 1964. The Cornwall Standard-Freeholder reported on January 21, 1964 the following:
“Given Probation on three counts. Martial Gagnon, formerly of Chevrier street, pleaded guilty to three charges of indecent assault when he appeared yesterday in magistrates court here. He was given two years probation on the condition that he stay away from Cornwall”.
This was the first connection that I had found between the College and its priests with the larger group of pedophiles in Cornwall.
[Nadeau also notes that lawyer Sean Adams – who was one of three lawyers (Adams, Malcolm MacDonald, Jacques Leduc), involved in the illegal $32,000 pay off of Father Charles MacDonald’s alleged sexual abuse victim “D.S.” – inherited Malcolm MacDonald’s business after Malcolm’s death. Malcolm MacDonald, who died before facing sexual abuse charges, was the only one of the three charged with obstruction of justice.]
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20 January 2001: The Right to Know is the Bedrock of Democracy (the post which triggered Justice Colin McKinnon to cite Dick with contempt of court)
19 January 2001: Web site posting ‘damaged’ jury trial ; Court spectator scolded for forcing switch to judge alone
31 October 2007: ODE to Dick: Dick Nadeau Overview of Documentary Evidence presented at Cornwall Public Inquiry
Fall 2000: Looking out for Cornwall Crown attorney Murray MacDonald’s best interests (Re communication between James Bateman and Dick Nadeau after Dick succumbed to pressure to remove the name of Murray MacDonald from the Ron Leroux affidavit posted on Nadeau’s projecttruth2.com website (James Bateman had operated the original projecttruth.com website)
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Dick Nadeau was sexually molested by Father Hector Cote csv while Nadeau was a student at the now defunct Cornwall Classical Classical College which was operated by the Viatorian priests (Clerics of St.Viator).
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The Cornwall Inquiry website erroneously lists Dick as a member of the Victims Group. He was not. Dick told anyone who would listen that he was a stalwart, proud and loyal member of the Coalition for Action – the only group which applied for and was denied standing at the Cornwall inquiry. Several weeks before his death when he discovered that he was listed as a member of the Victims Group Nadeau contacted inquiry staff to ask that his name be removed from the list. To date that has not been accomplished.
Dick died 24 April 2006. May he rest in peace.
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Dick Nadeau is dead
Shortly after Dick Nadeau’s death I was asked by The Wanderer, a U.S.-based Roman Catholic weekly, if I would write a few words about Dick. I was happy to do so.
‘PROJECT TRUTH’ ADVOCATE DIES IN CORNWALL, WAS 66
The Wanderer, (11 May 2006)
by Sylvia MacEachern
CORNWALL, Ont. – Dick Nadeau, the controversial victim of clerical sexual abuse whose ProjectTruth.com web site alerted North Americans to the longtime operations of a pedophile clan here involving clergy, lawyers, police, probation officers and children’s aid society workers in 2000, died April 19. He was 66.
As he lay in a hospital bed, fighting for each breath before being put on a respirator, his final words were: “What’s going on in Cornwall?”
And that’s the measure of the man who championed the cause of the male victims of sexual abuse in Cornwall and fought tirelessly and passionately for truth and justice in a community rocked by scandal and rife with allegations of a pedophile ring and cover-up involving prominent men in the community including Roman Catholic clergy, lawyers, probation officers, teachers, doctors and businessmen.
More than three years before the Boston Globe uncovered the unseemly clergy sex abuse scandal in Boston that led to similar revelations across the United States, Dick Nadeau began posting affidavits from both victims and perpetrators in the pedophile clan on the Internet, and thus, for the first time, began publicizing information that the local police, Ontario Provincial Police, crown attorneys, local justices and officials of the Diocese of Alexandria-Cornwall desperately wanted to keep hidden.
Dick’s battle took it’s toll – physically, emotionally, financially and spiritually. Physically his health plummeted after Jacques Leduc, the married lawyer and canon lawyer for the Alexandria-Cornwall diocese won a stay at his first sex abuse trial and it declined with each subsequent travesty of justice, and each betrayal which mark the Cornwall scandal.
Emotionally Dick lived and breathed Cornwall, an emotional roller coaster.
He was cited for contempt of court after he exposed a judge’s conflict of interest during the Leduc trial. He, along with The Wanderer and James Bateman, were sued by the former Bishop of Alexandria-Cornwall, Eugene Larocque, and several diocesan priests – suits which were eventually dropped by the diocese to prevent discovery. He rejoiced at any meager sign that the truth was about to break loose. He despaired at every sign of cover-up, and over the treatment of every victim who was re-victimized by “the system,” and for Perry Dunlop, the young Cornwall constable who first blew the whistle on the pedophile clan and the cover-up in 1994, was prosecuted for doing so, and then was run out of town, his reputation in tatters after lawyers and judges turned him into the villain and let “alleged” molesters “walk.”
It was all too much for Dick to bear. Those close to him say it killed him.
Financially he spent every penny he had, and a lot he didn’t have, on Cornwall. His phone bills averaged $500 per month – money he just didn’t have. But he fought on, his health declining and sinking deeper and deeper into debt because he didn’t want any young boy to endure what he endured, and because he couldn’t conceive giving up the fight for truth ad justice.
His failing health and other external pressures forced him to give up the battle to take his suit against the Viatorians (Clerics of St. Viator) into the courtroom so the whole world would know what happened to him and other young men at the Cornwall Classical College run by the Viatorian priests.
He reluctantly settled out of court for a pittance. It paid the bills with little to spare.
Spiritually, he saw “the Church” as inseparable from the priests who molested him, the bishop and priests who sued him, the priests whom he believed eluded justice and the clergy whom he believed were tied into a pedophile ring. As the years went by and he watched the scandal unfold he became more and more adamant that no one deserved to be treated the way the victims were treated by “the Church” and that he would never again set foot inside a Catholic Church. He died with Buddhists at his bedside.
May this brave but tragic soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace.
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31 October 2007: BLOG A host of saints