‘We were encouraged to be with younger boys’: breaking down a child molester priest’s secret testimony

In unearthed deposition, Lawrence Hecker pleaded the fifth 117 times, but still provided damning details of decades-long predatory behavior

• It wasn't a big deal': secret deposition reveals how a child molester priest was shielded by his church

The Guardian and CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana have obtained a long suppressed, eight-and-a-half-hour deposition of a 92-year-old Catholic priest charged with physically overpowering and raping a boy in a New Orleans church in 1975.

Taken in 2020 as part of a civil lawsuit demanding damages from him and the church, clergyman Lawrence Hecker provides in the deposition the most complete account yet of how the US's second-oldest archdiocese spent much of its recent history taking extreme measures to keep the public from finding out about his abusive past. The questioning - which the church has fought in court for years to keep hidden - also reveals steps the city's last four archbishops took to help him avoid accountability for decades.