Robert Sullivan, 61, on ‘personal leave’ after Heather Jones, now 33, brought allegations, sexual in nature, to diocese
A Roman Catholic priest in Alabama is under investigation, church officials say – and he abruptly announced he is taking “personal leave” – after a woman alleged to his superiors that he traded financial support for “private companionship” including sex, beginning when she was 17.
The accuser, Heather Jones, has also alleged that the clergyman, Robert Sullivan, recently paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars to remain silent about it, a claim she supported with bank records, an email and a copy of a legal agreement.
Where would a priest even get hundreds of thousands of dollars? I thought they had their basic needs paid for along with a modest stipend? Probably some kind of pension?
And the obvious answer is embezzling donations, but it can’t be so easy to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from an organization that has accountants without them noticing.
You’d be surprised. It happens all the time, in lots of organizations. Sometimes the accountants are in on it, sometimes (more often) they’re incompetent.
Yeah the last company I worked at the CFO embezzled like $300,000 in two years, and we weren’t big, maybe 30 employees.
That CFO had a “Greed is Good” quote on top of an American flag poster in his office.
And that was after a previous CFO had secretly signed the company up for a bunch of grants and then pocketed that money for himself, and nobody noticed until one day he showed up in like $110,000 Porsche and claimed it was a “rental.”
That company was (and probably still is since it looks like it hasn’t completely died yet) so corrupt, I’m glad I got out before it imploded
Selling information from the confessional, maybe?