C8

ASK AMY

Sisters should be partners in their ailing father’s care

Dear Amy: I have a somewhat shaky

relationship with my sister. She has a history of dishonesty and theft. She has stolen from me and was caught shoplifting. Because of this, we were estranged for several years but have recently begun to reestablish a relationship.

She is currently the primary

caregiver of our father, who is in declining health and lives near her. I live in another city. Because she is in charge of his finances, I worry that she will take advantage of the situation when he eventually passes away.

When the time comes, how do I ensure that any payments to his estate (from the previous sale of a home) are divided between us equally? Given her history, I don’t trust her,

but given the instability of our friendship, I’m concerned that if I bring up this subject, she will overreact (as is her nature), shut off communication and cut me off completely. How do I make sure that my father’s wishes are respected? He has a will, but I do not know if there is a copy filed with an attorney. I have tried gently broaching the subject of his final wishes with our father, but he is showing signs of dementia. Should I contact an attorney?

Distrustful Sister

Your father may have decided to divide his assets unequally. Before getting an attorney involved (which would definitely affect your relationship with your sister), you should keep your eye on the present situation, which is your father’s care. You should visit (personally) to

determine if your father is receiving the care he requires. When he needs more, will your sister be able to handle it? Can you help? A professional geriatric care

manager can help the two of you to come up with a plan — and of course your family will have to figure out how you will finance it. His financial records need to be accessible to both of you.

If your sister is caring for him full time, this will be draining and stressful for her. Can/should she be compensated for the care she is providing for him? You don’t mention that you value

what your sister is doing for your father. If you approach her with the idea that the two of you should be partners in his care, this will go a long way toward building an open and trusting relationship.

Dear Amy:

“Charlie” and I have been platonic friends since high school. We’ve joked about dating but have never given a relationship between the two of us much thought. Now, we have both graduated from

college and moved to the same city and are living together as roommates. Recently he has begun complimenting me about my body, playfully touching me and sometimes even cuddling with me at night. I’m not sure whether he is interested in pursuing a relationship or if he just thinks we’ve grown closer as platonic friends. I would be interested in pursuing a relationship but don’t want to compromise our friendship. How do I know if he really likes me or is just a close friend?

Lucy

It boggles the mind that you would let someone cuddle you at night and yet not be brave enough to ask a simple question, i.e. “Hey ‘Charlie,’ why are you spooning me?” You two are friends. Friends should be able to talk to one another, even if it’s awkward.

Dear Amy: “Wondering” wrote to you about a family friend who she thought was gay from the time he was young. She said his parents were about to tell her of his sexual orientation and she wondered if she should tell them she had already known this. I came out more than 20 years ago.

Really, I was dragged out, kicking and screaming.

One of the things that has helped me through the years is when I asked someone directly if they already knew I was gay, they almost always said yes. I found comfort in knowing that they knew and it made no difference in our friendship. It helped me to learn to better to accept myself.

Out and Proud

Thank you.

Write to Amy Dickinson at askamy@ tribune.com or Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.

© 2010 by the Chicago Tribune Distributed by Tribune Media Services

MEDIA NOTES

Mainstream news outlets see a return on their investment in ProPublica

media notes from C1

his motivation is simple: “I can’t stand the abuse of power. I can’t stand corruption. I can’t stand the powerful taking advantage of those with less power.”

Fink, 41, who still lectures at Harvard

and Tulane but says she finds reporting more challenging, wants to change what she sees as a dysfunctional medical system. “This may be a vain hope or an idealistic hope,” she says, “but I hope that could help prevent some of the horrific experiences that were had in New Orleans.” There was a time when most major journalistic investigations were carried out by newspapers, when revenue was abundant and “I-teams” were all the rage. But with nearly all papers hurt by cutbacks and some in bankruptcy, ambitions have often been downsized. And that has left a vacuum for ventures that don’t have to worry about Wall Street expectations. Two years after setting up shop in lower Manhattan, ProPublica has earned substantial respect and a top-tier list of partners. The nonprofit has done nine stories with The Washington Post, 27 with the Los Angeles Times, eight with USA Today, six with the Chicago Tribune, six others with the New York Times, 13 with Politico and 10 with the Huffington Post. Other partners have included ABC, CNN, CNBC, “60 Minutes,” Newsweek, Salon, Slate and PBS’s “Frontline.” Gerald Marzorati, editor of the New

York Times Magazine, says Fink first pitched the hospital story before she joined ProPublica. “We as a magazine don’t have the resources to pursue a story like that,” he says. “So we sort of passed.” Once ProPublica got involved, the magazine worked with Fink through nearly a dozen drafts and provided fact-checking, legal reviews and photography. “Our magazine editing machine was engaged in bringing this to publication for a long time,” Marzorati says. “It was a real collaboration.” In some cases, Steiger says,

that includes about $200,000 from author Mary Graham, co-director of Harvard’s Transparency Policy Project and the ex-wife of Post Co. chief executive Donald Graham. Marzorati says he would be “wary” of media outfits underwritten by wealthy patrons: “What happens when the rich guys start ordering up stories where they know what they want? The temptation for news organizations will be to get their hands on a big, sexy investigation.”

LARS KLOVE/PROPUBLICA

PRIZE PARTNER:Sheri Fink of

ProPublica won a Pulitzer last week.

ProPublica does all the reporting, and in others has shared the reporting load with the news outlets. More than half the joint efforts with The Post have featured bylines from both organizations, including such Steiger hires as former Post reporter Dafna Linzer and former New York Times correspondent Jeff Gerth. On Friday, The Post ran a front-page

story by two ProPublica reporters on members of Congress holding fundraisers in luxury suites at Bruce Springsteen concerts. Some of ProPublica’s work runs only on its Web site, which Steiger hopes to make more prominent so he is less dependent on outside media venues. For now, Steiger remains heavily dependent on Sandler’s foundation, a situation that the San Francisco philanthropist calls unhealthy. Sandler and his wife, Marion, are major Democratic donors who have poured money into the liberal Center for American Progress and the American Civil Liberties Union. “I don’t know how democracy functions without strong investigative journalism,” Sandler says. In attempting to broaden its financial

base, ProPublica raised $1 million last year mainly from foundations, a figure

While Sandler is ProPublica’s chairman, he says none of the board members knows what the reporters are working on. “We told them from the beginning, investigate everything. . . . If we’ve done something, go after us,” he says. “If anything’s off-limits, it’s not a legitimate newsroom.”

But Sandler is not a fan of all

reporting. He complained bitterly about a 2008 story that the New York Times did on him and his wife. The headline was “Once Trusted Mortgage Pioneers, Now Pariahs.” When the couple ran World Savings Bank, the Times said, they championed an exotic mortgage later seen as “the Typhoid Mary” of the industry, and Wachovia, which bought the bank, wound up with huge losses. Sandler said he did nothing wrong other than misjudge the housing bubble. The Times has defended its work but ran four corrections to the article. Clearly, Fink’s work would not have been possible without Sandler’s backing. She made repeated trips to New Orleans and around the country to examine allegations that doctors and nurses at Memorial Medical Center injected patients with lethal doses of drugs. “It’s a very sad, tragic story,” says Fink, who recently left ProPublica and moved to Washington to write a book on the subject. “The newsroom was set up to invest in long-form, deep-dive investigative journalism,” she says. “That was a huge luxury.”

Anchor and anguish

Katie Couric dealt with death in two

very different ways last week.

The CBS News anchor hosted a “Sesame Street” prime-time special on the subject, embracing Elmo and talking to military and other families that have suffered a loss about dealing with their children. Couric’s husband, Jay Monahan, died in 1998. “Having been there — having a 6- and

2-year-old at the time — and wishing I had more resources available to me, I thought this was something that could help other families,” she says. For herself, “whenever you’re talking about loss, it does uncover those feelings that have healed partially. I just felt I was in a position where I’d have complete empathy for these families that were profiled.” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called to thank Couric for making the program after a Pentagon screening. Couric also aired an “Evening News” piece from Haiti in which she focused on a 13-year-old boy, Pierre, who lost his parents in the earthquake there. On her first trip to Port-au-Prince after the disaster, the teenager was seen screaming while doctors worked on his broken leg, and although he is recovering, the earthquake destroyed his school. “There are a million stories like

Pierre’s,” Couric says. “Because he made such an impact, not just for me but for viewers, with his piercing cries of anguish, he really captured the pain of an entire country.” Colleagues say Couric was so moved she has decided to pay for Pierre’s education. Not every part of her job is depressing. She got to hang with the “slightly eccentric” Al Pacino for a “60 Minutes” profile that aired Sunday. Lately, says Couric, she’s been “exercising a lot of muscles.”

kurtzh@washpost.com

Kurtz also works for CNN and hosts its weekly media program, “Reliable Sources.”

ONLINE DISCUSSION Howard Kurtz

discusses the latest media news at

noon at washingtonpost.com/style.

S

KLMNO

He’s the Vatican’s persistent pursuer

anderson from C1

sponded to internal reports concerning sexual predators. And closer, he hopes, to forcing Pope Benedict XVI to agree that Roman prelates were slow to address abuses and must now work to prevent a repeat. “We’re chasing them. We’re taking bites out of their ass,” Anderson said aboard the flight from Chicago, vowing a new lawsuit against the Vatican. “They are spinning this thing in a way that is un- truthful. And the truth has to be known.” Anderson, who first investigated an abusive priest in Minnesota in 1983, is drawing international attention from the release of documents suggesting that the Vatican and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, failed to move against American priests who molested children. One was the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, a con-

victed child molester in Oakland, Calif. Another was the Rev. Lawrence C. Mur- phy, a Wisconsin priest who may have molested as many as 200 deaf children before his death in 1998. The Vatican has also been answering questions about Benedict’s actions when he was archbishop of Munich and, later, the leader of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which proc- essed thousands of abuse cases.

‘Gossip’

Vatican officials say Murphy’s case was properly handled. They point to Ben- edict’s condemnation of sexual abuse and his meetings with victims. A statement last week by the head of Vatican Radio suggested the church would work with civil courts. And on Sunday the pope met with sexual abuse victims in Malta, tell- ing them that the church would do every- thing in its power to bring to justice those responsible for abuse, according to a Vati- can statement.

Other comments have been less concil-

iatory. On Good Friday, the pope’s person- al preacher likened criticism of the church’s handling of abuse cases to “col- lective violence” against Jews, who suf- fered and died by the millions during World War II. At Easter Mass, Cardinal Angelo So- dano, a senior Vatican prelate, dismissed the allegations against the church and Benedict as “petty gossip.” Paradoxically, Anderson considered the response good news. “When you’re a fugitive from the truth, which I think they are, what you do is run or attack,” Anderson says. “They didn’t really deal with the facts. It tells you that they are clueless and that we’re getting to them.”

When the Murphy documents sur- faced, Anderson and his young colleague Mike Finnegan were thrilled. Anderson let loose with an expletive and crowed, “We’ve got ’em!”

Anderson soon issued an all-points

bulletin for documents that would con- firm his suspicion that the Vatican helped squelch investigations and quietly trans- ferred abusive priests.

‘Not going to get anything’

Over the years, Anderson has earned

millions from his lawsuits against the church and other institutions, collecting 25 to 40 percent of each payout. He esti- mated in 2002 that his victories had to- taled $60 million, but refuses to update the figure. He says his riches give him the freedom and power to pursue the cases he cares about and live the life he chooses. His of- fice in a former St. Paul bank building employs five attorneys. The chartered jet was a first — he calls the decision “mor- ally ambiguous” and “so Republican,” but says it saved time.

Anderson has come a long way since he

struggled to pay the $50 monthly rent for the apartment he shared with his first wife and oldest son. “I went to law school because I was in the middle of a peace movement and a civil rights movement, and I felt power- less in the street,” Anderson recalls. “I flunked and got kicked out. I was at the bottom of my class. I was afraid. I was lost. I was rudderless.” After finding law school dry and re- mote, Anderson found meaning in the public defender’s office and a legal clinic at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul where he eventually earned his law degree. Calling himself “cause-ori- ented,” then and now, he represented in- digent suspects for seven years. “He was always committed to the less

fortunate, the underdog kind of thing,” says Mike Finnegan, a longtime friend and former public defender whose son and namesake is Anderson’s law partner. “At one point, Jeff had a record in our of- fice of 15 straight acquittals in jury trials. It’s unheard of. He’s persuasive in front of a jury or in front of a camera.”

son’s share of the winnings is deserved. “Back when Jeff started in the ’80s, he was footing the bill. People were saying, ‘The Catholic Church, you’re not going to get anything from them,’” says Finnegan, a lifelong Catholic. “If it wasn’t for him, the victims wouldn’t be where they are. Hopefully with this, the Catholic Church will be able to change and steady itself.” In 1983, Anderson’s first church case came through the door in the person of a young man who said he had been mo- lested by a priest. A bishop had given him $2,000, but the man and his family were not satisfied.

Anderson started digging and soon concluded that members of two Minneso- ta dioceses were lying. Less than a decade after Watergate, he thought of Washing- ton Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and said to himself that he was “in the middle of a [expletive] cover- up.”

‘Tipping point’

Anderson took depositions and found an anonymous source, his own Deep Throat. The church offered $1 million to settle in return for silence. His client per- sisted and the investigation grew. “That was a tipping point in my per- sonal journey,” Anderson says, his voice breaking and tears flowing. “All of a sud- den, the world changed and I began hot pursuit. I filed lawsuit after lawsuit and I haven’t slowed down.” Anderson says he has filed more than 1,500 lawsuits against the Catholic Church, plus 2,000 to 3,000 against other individuals and entities, including other denominations. He estimates that 75 per-

PETER SLEVIN / THE WASHINGTON POST

LONG TRAIL: Jeff Anderson, shown in his law office this month, has sued the Catholic Church since the 1980s.

The elder Finnegan believes Ander-

cent yield no money for himself or his cli- ents, often due to a statute of limitations. Early in his career, Anderson was called the “antichrist.” One critic labeled him a “scum maggot.” To another, he was a “bigoted shyster lawyer.” After he released the Murphy docu- ments, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights branded him “a radical lawyer who has made millions suing the Church” and supporting efforts to “weak- en its moral authority.” “I accept that I have no control over

what people think, and I don’t try,” An- derson says. Lawsuits and news confer- ences, he says, allow his clients “to feel a sense of recovery of power” and reveal truths “that would otherwise not have been known.” He believes his efforts “make it a little safer — or a lot safer — for other kids.”

Anderson considers his pursuit spirit-

ual: “I’m not sure I want to say this, but it’s the answer: It’s the pursuit of virtue.” Raised a Lutheran, he long doubted

God’s existence but now has “a great deal of interest in Zen Buddhism,” although he does not count himself an adherent. “Every day, I practice it as much as I can. I believe Christ was a student of Bud- dha,” he says, quickly adding, “I don’t know that. I find the same things running through every religion.” One day, he would like to question Ben-

edict under oath, an unlikely possibility. Vatican attorneys already are disputing U.S. jurisdiction in existing cases. “As the pope, he’s the guy,” Anderson

says. “He’s just a man who is occupying an office. He’s responsible for his own ac- tions.”

slevinp@washpost.com

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