A Madison priest was acquitted late Monday in the alleged 2004 sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl, ending a trial that started last week.
Joseph Gibbs Clauder, 65, and his lawyer, Stephen Eisenberg, hugged and clapped one another’s backs after the verdict, by a jury of seven women and five men, was read by Dane County Circuit Judge William Hanrahan.
It took the jury about 10 hours to reach a verdict.
“There is a proverb,” Clauder said after the verdict. “Sometimes God puts us through troubled waters not to drown us but to make us stronger. I feel vindicated and stronger.”
In his closing argument Monday, Assistant District Attorney Robert Kaiser said the psychological pain the young woman endured since the events in 2003 and 2004 “are proof of what happened that day.”
She was patient and sincere as she testified last week, Kaiser said, even as the most personal aspects of her life were exposed to jurors. She had no motive to lie, Kaiser said, and the psychiatric conditions for which she was diagnosed were consistent with being the victim of sexual abuse.
Kaiser said her story came out slowly because the young woman was afraid of how her family would react. And prosecution psychologist Dr. Anna Salter testified that “(the woman) didn’t report because she didn’t want to go through this,” Kaiser said. “There’s nothing positive about reporting.”
The Rev. J. Gibbs Clauder, recently acquitted by the Dane County Circuit Court of criminal charges of sexual assault of a young woman, will now undergo a canonical trial related to the allegation. In coming weeks, the Diocese of Madison will undertake the preliminary steps in this process.
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