Defrocked former cardinal Theodore McCarrick charged with sexual assault in Wisconsin

Prosecutors in Walworth County have charged the defrocked former cardinal Theodore McCarrick with sexual assault in a 1977 incident.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced Monday that the state Department of Justice and Walworth County had charged McCarrick, 92, with one count of fourth-degree sexual assault.

McCarrick never lived or worked in Wisconsin but apparently made visits to the state.

Prosecutors say that McCarrick "engaged in repeated sexual abuse of the victim over time," according to a DOJ news release.

In the incident for which he is charged, prosecutors said McCarrick in April 1977 groped the 18-year-old victim while they were both staying as guests at a residence on Geneva Lake.

According to a criminal complaint, the victim was in the lake off a dock when McCarrick and another adult man entered the water as well. Both groped him and discussed his genitals, the complaint said the victim reported.

The victim tried to get away from the men and splashed and made noise, he said, according to the complaint. He got out of the lake with one leg in his swim trunks and ran to the house. He got dressed and asked for a ride to the train station, according to the complaint.

The victim said McCarrick began sexually assaulting him at age 11. According to the complaint, the victim reported several incidents in which McCarrick inappropriately touched or assaulted him before he was 18 years old.

McCarrick took the teen to lavish parties or events, the complaint said. The victim also reported that McCarrick had taken him to an event where several adult men assaulted him. The victim also said McCarrick had sex with him the day before the incident on Geneva Lake.

The Walworth County charge is the latest development in a years-long fall from grace for the once-powerful cardinal.

McCarrick is also charged in a Massachusetts case that alleges he assaulted a teenage boy at a wedding in 1974. He pleaded not guilty in 2021. In February, his attorneys sought to have the case dismissed, saying McCarrick, who lives at a residence for troubled priests in Missouri, has dementia and is not competent to stand trial.

McCarrick is the only U.S. Catholic cardinal, current or former, ever to be criminally charged with child sex crimes.

More: A timeline of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's rise and fall

According to the Associated Press, McCarrick's fall began in 2017 when a former altar boy came forward to report the priest had groped him when he was a teenager in New York. The next year, the Archdiocese of New York announced that McCarrick had been removed from ministry after finding the allegation to be "credible and substantiated," and two New Jersey dioceses revealed they had settled claims of sexual misconduct against him in the past involving adults.

Pope Francis defrocked McCarrick in 2019 after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused minors, as well as adults.

The two-year internal investigation into McCarrick found that three decades of bishops, cardinals and popes downplayed or dismissed reports of sexual misconduct. Correspondence showed they repeatedly rejected the information outright as rumor and excused it as an "imprudence."

The investigative findings released in 2020 pinned much of the blame on Pope John Paul II, who appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington, D.C., despite having commissioned an inquiry that confirmed McCarrick slept with seminarians.

Prosecutors in Wisconsin charged McCarrick after someone reported the abuse to the state Department of Justice's ongoing clergy abuse investigation.

Since launching the investigation in 2021, Kaul's office has forwarded two other cases to local law enforcement for charges: 33-year-old Remington Jon Nystrom in Waushara County for an incident that occurred in 2019 and 61-year-old Jeffrey Anthony Charles in Douglas County for incidents that occurred between 2005 and 2010.

The Wisconsin charge against McCarrick, fourth-degree sexual assault, is a misdemeanor. If convicted, he would face up to nine months in prison and a $10,000 fine.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story will be updated.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Theodore McCarrick: Defrocked Catholic cardinal sex assault charges