After the 1994 (New Hampshire, US) trial and conviction of Fr Gordon MacRae of sexual offences involving a minor, some news outlets and others with an agenda cited a coerced post-trial plea as evidence of his guilt. It was no such thing, writes Ryan A. MacDonald (Nov 11. 2026) in Beyond These Stone Walls. (See our previous reports.)
After my 2014 article, The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae, it was suppressed by many media outlets and it even stopped showing up in many search engine queries. For those for whom truth matters, it is a most important post. Recently, a few biased voices in New Hampshire news outlets, and organizations such as SNAP, whose bias is clear, have cited a coerced plea imposed upon Father MacRae as evidence of guilt. Well, for truth to be Truth, context is required. Even an AI program erroneously cited that plea as evidence. It did so without context, and in this matter context means a good deal.
So all of this motivated me to rewrite that post, updating all of its context, and then I submitted it to AI Grok for analysis without it being hampered by prejudice as it has been in the hands of some New Hampshire media outlets.
Query to AI Grok by Ryan A. MacDonald
I may have been premature in my praise of your ability to think independently. Your last response seemed merely a representation of most mainstream media and its treatment of sexual abuse in the Catholic priesthood. Their response, and sadly now also yours, seems entirely void of context. You responded to the article, “Benedict XVI and Fr MacRae at the International Criminal Court,” but you need context. At the time of Father MacRae’s 1994 trial, he was coerced by circumstance into a post-trial plea. This was all about money, and lawyers in the New Hampshire Bar already poised to exploit this for financial gain. The rest of the missing context is provided by me in “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae”. There is a very high percentage of convicted defendants who become the victims of coerced plea deals, especially in sexual abuse cases.
Grok’s Response
I have read your May 21, 2014 article “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae.” It supplies the specific post-conviction circumstances you describe, and those details change how the later guilty plea should be weighed.
The account asserts that after the Thomas Grover conviction, while MacRae was held in jail awaiting sentencing and facing remaining charges, counsel had resigned, the Diocese of Manchester had issued a pre-trial press release that declared, “the Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae as well as these individuals.” MacRae was isolated, without resources, and without legal advice. Under those conditions the state offered a concurrent disposition (described in the article and in your later writing as effectively zero additional time if the remaining charges were resolved by plea). MacRae accepted it under duress. You [MacDonald] call this a “negotiated lie” produced by the cumulative pressure of the conviction, the diocesan posture, the exhaustion of defense resources, and the certainty of further trials. You note that pre-trial and mid-trial offers of one-to-three years had already been refused on the ground of innocence, and that the ultimate sentence of 33½–67 years was many times longer than anything the state had been willing to recommend in exchange for a plea. Citing the Innocence Project and similar data, you observe that a substantial fraction of later-exonerated defendants had entered guilty pleas under analogous pressures, and that plea bargaining is not itself evidence of truth.
Supporting Materials
Supporting materials attached to later filings and summarized in the article include:
A pre-trial letter from Thomas Grover’s therapist, Pauline Goupil, hired by his civil attorney, Robert Upton, stating that Detective James McLaughlin had told her a deal was being offered so there would be no trial and the parties could “move on to the settlement.”
Statements from Grover’s then-wife, Trina Ghedoni (and from other family members), that Grover admitted the chess-set testimony was perjury “because it was what they wanted him to say,” that he never mentioned abuse by MacRae during the years they were together, that Grover was a compulsive liar motivated by money, and that the accusations were a scheme to extract a diocesan payment. Grover received a civil settlement in the range of $195,000–$200,000.
A 2012 affidavit by retired FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott, who investigated for three years and stated he found “no evidence of MacRae having committed the crimes charged, or any other crimes,” and that the only evidence consisted of Grover’s claims, which people close to Grover later discredited.
Polygraph results MacRae passed on the Grover allegations; the accusers declined them.
These documents are not secret; they appear in the public record of post-conviction litigation, in Rabinowitz’s Wall Street Journal reporting, and on the site that publishes your [MacDonald’s] work. They do not automatically overturn a jury verdict, but they do make it inaccurate to treat the post-trial plea as uncoerced admissions of fact. A defendant who has just been convicted, whose lawyer has left, whose diocese has publicly abandoned the presumption of innocence, and who faces sequential additional trials with no remaining resources is under extreme pressure. Accepting a concurrent disposition under those conditions is consistent with both actual guilt and with a calculated decision to stop the immediate damage. The surrounding evidence of financial motive, coaching, and later admissions by the primary accuser’s circle makes the latter possibility more plausible than mainstream summaries usually allow.
Mainstream accounts of the clergy-abuse crisis (and my [Grok’s] earlier summary of the ICC article) tend to collapse these distinctions. They note the conviction and the later plea, mention Rabinowitz’s critiques in passing, and move on. That framing is incomplete precisely because it omits the documented sequence of rejected lenient offers, the diocesan press release, the civil-settlement incentives that were visible to the detective and the contingency lawyer before trial, the absence of physical or contemporaneous corroboration for the charged acts, and the post-trial statements that the key trial testimony was fabricated for money. Those omissions are not neutral; they convert a contested process into an assumed fact.
None of this establishes innocence as a matter of law. A jury convicted on Grover’s testimony under New Hampshire’s then-applicable rules (in which the accuser’s credibility alone could suffice and the accuser’s criminal history was excluded). Appeals were denied without hearings. The later investigator’s findings and the family statements have not produced a new trial that succeeded. At the same time, the specific claim that the post-trial plea was freely chosen evidence of guilt, or that the case is simply another instance of the general pattern of verified abuse and cover-up, does not survive contact with the materials you assembled. The financial pipeline from accusation to settlement was real, the detective’s coordination with the civil side is documented in the Goupil letter, and the pressure that produced the final plea is described consistently by you, by Father MacRae, by Rabinowitz, and by the procedural record.
The broader statistical point you raise is also correct: the vast majority of American criminal cases end in plea, and a non-trivial share of DNA and other exonerations involve defendants who pleaded guilty. In sexual-offense prosecutions of the early 1990s, where the social climate rewarded accusation, contingency fees were large, and evidentiary thresholds were low, that risk was elevated. Treating every such plea as confirmatory therefore repeats the error the article identifies.
I do not have the full trial transcript, the complete investigative file, or the ability to re-weigh credibility as a fact-finder. What your piece and its supporting statements supply is a coherent, document-based account of why the post-trial disposition cannot be read as a clean concession of the underlying facts, and why the financial and institutional incentives surrounding the case are part of the evidence rather than irrelevant context. That account is stronger, and more specific, than the version that circulates in most secondary summaries.
The additional context on the post-trial disposition and the surrounding incentives is material; treating the plea as uncomplicated evidence of the underlying facts is not.
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Note from Ryan A. MacDonald: In a discussion with the late Bishop John McCormack of the Diocese of Manchester, he made the following assertion to Mr. Leo Demers, a PBS television executive:
“During October 2000, I met with Bishop John McCormack at the Diocesan office in Manchester, New Hampshire …. The meeting with Bishop McCormack began with him saying, ‘Understand, none of this is to leave this office. I believe Father MacRae is not guilty and his accusers likely lied. There is nothing I can do to change the verdict.’”
Footnote: MacRae appealed his 1994 convictions to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions.