Whitesboro, N.Y. — It was always old Frankenstein movies. Or ghost stories.
“Any little thing where he got you alone in the dark,” Mary McLoughlin recalled. Then the priest at her family’s church would sexually abuse her, she said.
She was 11; the abuse happened numerous times, according to a lawsuit McLoughlin filed against the Syracuse Roman Catholic Diocese Wednesday.
McLoughlin’s suit was one of 38 filed against the diocese this week, a new wave of complaints under the New York Child Victims Act.
McLoughlin’s is one of the few filed against the diocese by women; most of the accusers have been men who alleged the abuse happened when they were boys.
McLoughlin, 66, says her abuser was the Rev. Conrad Somerville. At the time, he was in his 30s at St. Joseph’s school and parish in Utica.
The priest was trusted by McLoughlin’s family and that of the other girls in her school, according to the lawsuit filed by Jennifer Freeman of Marsh Law in Westchester.