Souls fall into hell for sins of the flesh like snowflakes.
—OUR LADY OF FATIMA
In 2009, John Manly was adrift. Some days just getting out of bed was a struggle for the attorney. He was full of rage, drinking alcohol to take the edge off and popping off at work—at one point he was sanctioned $20,000 by a Los Angeles judge for accusing the diocese of withholding information about an abusive Catholic priest he was suing.
“You’re trying to withhold this until he dies!” Manly accused the attorneys from the diocese.
Manly’s father, from whom he’d once been estranged for roughly a dozen years, died of lung cancer in 2006. Years of representing victims in priest abuse cases had shaken his Catholic faith. He questioned everything, even whether life itself was worth living. One night, not long after the death of his father, Manly, himself a married father of four, took a lonely drive from his home in Costa Mesa down Pacific Coast Highway with a loaded Glock .45 handgun in the passenger seat. He was thinking about ending it all.
Manly’s life had reached a turning point years earlier in 1997. That’s when he met Ryan DiMaria and started a five-year court case that would change not only his personal fortunes but also the trajectory of his career. In the 1990s, Manly worked primarily as a real estate and construction defects attorney, defending large commercial developers. He excelled at thorny cases other lawyers avoided, so much so that colleagues took to saying, “When things get fucked up, call Manly.”
The work required Manly to deal with people and the press, and both came easily to him. But Ryan DiMaria’s legal case was something new for Manly. DiMaria had been sexually abused as a seventeen-year-old by a priest. And not just any priest. DiMaria had been abused by Monsignor Michael Harris, the longtime principal at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, Manly’s own alma mater.
Nicknamed “Father Hollywood” because of his matinee-idol looks and charismatic personality, Harris was perhaps the best public speaker Manly had ever seen outside of Bill Clinton and self-help guru Tony Robbins. When he gave communion to Manly during his time at Mater Dei, Harris would lock eyes with him and, in a dramatic low voice, say, “John, the body of Christ.” It was mesmerizing. But it was all a façade, an act designed to mask an abusive past.
DiMaria was abused when Harris was principal of Santa Margarita Catholic High School from 1987 to 1994, a school in Rancho Santa Margarita that Harris helped found after he left Mater Dei. It was no small thing for Manly, with his strict Catholic upbringing, to represent someone who was suing not only his church and a Catholic school but also Manly’s former high school principal.
In 2001, DiMaria’s case turned on a critical California Supreme Court ruling. The state’s highest court ordered the diocese to produce a 1994 psychiatric evaluation of Harris from St. Luke Institute, a church-owned psychiatric facility. The report revealed that Harris was sexually attracted to postpubescent adolescents and that there were multiple cases of young men who had come forward saying Harris sexually molested them. The church had proof Harris preyed on teenage boys for years and had buried it.
DiMaria had originally asked for $150,000 in his lawsuit, enough to cover his counseling fees. With the revelation that the church hid Harris’s abusive past, DiMaria was ultimately awarded $5.2 million, an historically large settlement for a priest abuse case. With this stunning outcome, John Manly’s career as an attorney advocating for victims of child sex abuse was on its way. For more than a decade, he would travel the country representing hundreds of priest abuse victims, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements for his clients. The work was rewarding professionally, and it made him wealthy, but it also brought with it memories of a past Manly had long since buried.
Manly’s father, World War II army veteran John C. Manly III, had been on the way to conduct a land invasion of Japan when two atomic bombs ended the war. His mother, Mary, was a talented opera singer who studied under legendary soprano Rosa Ponselle and later performed on national television. From his father, Manly had a sense of service to a cause bigger than himself. He joined the Navy Reserve after completing law school, serving as an intelligence officer before his discharge in 2004. From his mother, Manly inherited a flair for the dramatic, but it was his personal experience that led him to develop an intense hatred for bullies.
Born in San Mateo, California, in 1964, Manly and his parents relocated to Santa Ana when he was eight. His father, the son of a small-town attorney from Grinnell, Iowa, went on to become a paralegal for the army after World War II, helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals at military tribunals in the Philippines. The nameplate Technical Sergeant John C. Manly had on his desk in Manila now sits on his son’s desk inside a law firm in Irvine, California. Eventually Manly’s father took a job selling industrial batteries and phone systems.
Manly’s mother insisted on raising him in parochial schools. She had a quote from Our Lady of Fatima she was fond of saying: “Souls fall into hell for sins of the flesh like snowflakes.”
A staunch Catholic, Mary Manly made certain her son didn’t eat meat on Fridays, went to confession on many Saturdays, and attended St. Catherine’s military school in Anaheim during the week. Founded by Dominican nuns, roughly half of St. Catherine’s students boarded at the school. Not Manly. With his brush cut, pressed khaki uniform, his belt buckle and shoes shined daily, he’d board the public bus to school each day, mindful of the looks that often came his way during what was a period of mounting public sentiment against the Vietnam War and those in uniform. The atmosphere at the school wasn’t any more welcoming.
Manly remembers the physical violence—teachers who routinely struck him with wooden paddles and eighth graders who’d shove the younger students, like Manly, in the urinal and then pull the handle to flush, soaking his uniform.
“I just remember getting the shit kicked out of me. A lot,” he said of his time at St. Catherine’s. When he’d complain to his father about the bullying, the message he received in return was simple: “Fight back.”
When Manly was ten, his parents’ circle of friends and acquaintances included several members of the John Birch Society, a conservative political group that became a haven for far-right conspiracy theorists. One night, during a dinner party at his house attended by several couples, one of the male guests became drunk and started denying the Holocaust had ever happened. Manly wasn’t old enough at the time to fully appreciate his parents’ political beliefs, but he never knew either of them to hold any anti-Semitic views.
“Get the fuck out of my house!” Manly’s father hollered at his guest. “I had friends that liberated those camps. Get the fuck out!”
Manly watched, stunned, as his father, who rarely cursed, physically removed the man from their home. Manly’s father had hardly been raised in a progressive household, but he had a base-level understanding of right and wrong and would pass that quality on to his son.
Manly vividly remembers another encounter at one of his parents’ dinner parties that occurred during that same time period. His mother, the former opera singer, wanted him to join the All-American Boys Chorus, a choir group founded in Orange County in the early 1970s by Father Richard Coughlin, a gregarious priest from Boston with a thick Irish brogue. She invited Coughlin over for dinner and to meet her son. At one point during the evening, Coughlin took Manly into a bedroom, away from his parents, and had him sing a few notes. It was then that Coughlin explained to him that part of the choral practices involved doing military-style formations.
“We do inspections and they’ll inspect you in your underwear,” the priest said. Manly remembers staring at him, confused. Then he remembers freezing as Coughlin twice groped his genitals through his clothes.
Coughlin, Manly later discovered, had left a trail of sexual abuse, dating back to his days as a parish priest in Boston in the late 1950s. Of those who would later file civil suits against Coughlin before his death in 2004, five had been members of the All-American Boys Chorus, which Manly never wound up joining.
When Manly was fifteen, his parents went through a contentious divorce, and it was around that same time that another priest, a Jesuit who’d become part of Mary Manly’s social and religious network, began to play a far more influential role in her son’s life. Father Donald McGuire had been a parish priest in Chicago in the early sixties before traveling the world to lead retreats. He was perhaps best known as Mother Teresa’s spiritual advisor.
What Manly didn’t know as a fifteen-year-old was that in the early sixties McGuire molested a boy in Europe and continued to sexually abuse boys in Chicago while teaching at Loyola Academy. He was forced to move from the Archdiocese because he couldn’t get another assignment there. He went on to molest dozens of children in Illinois, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Convicted in 2008 on federal charges of taking a teenaged boy across state lines and out of the country for sex, McGuire was sentenced to twenty-five years in federal prison and died as an inmate in 2017. A series of criminal and civil proceedings against McGuire revealed the Chicago Jesuits concealed his crimes for more than forty years, enabling him to abuse dozens of boys.
When Manly’s parents were going through their divorce, it was McGuire who took Manly aside and told him he would be his foster father and that he shouldn’t have contact with his biological father. He frequently brought Manly to a retreat in Big Bear Lake, California, and, on multiple occasions, molested him.
“He didn’t rape me but he certainly raped my psyche,” is how Manly describes the encounters with McGuire at Big Bear Lake.
For decades Manly buried the incidents from his childhood with Coughlin and McGuire. He never spoke about them, not even with his closest friends or loved ones. They remained locked in a part of his memory he wouldn’t allow himself to explore. Through the years, if a conversation ever turned to his childhood experiences with priests or his Catholic upbringing, he’d simply say, “We all have our stories,” or something equally dismissive.
Manly’s early legal career hardly reminded him of the sexual abuse he’d endured as a child. Most days he was just trying to figure out a way to pay the bills. He graduated from Pepperdine Law School in 1990 flat broke and remembers pulling quarters from the ashtray of his 1983 Volkswagen GTI to pay for a movie. He was twenty-five, had $80,000 in student loans, and another $25,000 in credit card debt. The bank refused to give him a car loan. In the mid-1990s, Manly’s law practice consisted of one office cubicle he rented at the Irvine Spectrum for $300 per month. He had a secretary but couldn’t afford to pay her a salary, so she worked hourly from 5:00 p.m. until midnight.
All of that changed in 1997 when he took on the Ryan DiMaria case, a new turn that would ultimately lead to representing hundreds of priest abuse victims. To Manly, the seemingly endless stream of shattered lives—mostly men struggling with anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts because of the sexual abuse they’d suffered as children—was “like drinking out of a fire hose.” The pressure, the stress, and the memories that the priest abuse cases conjured up within him almost destroyed him.
He was years removed from being the high-powered attorney with a national reputation, the fierce advocate for child sex abuse victims, who would meet Olympic gymnast Jamie Dantzscher in an airport conference room. Jamie was struggling as well. Neither of them was in a place mentally to put the sport of gymnastics on trial yet.
Valorie Kondos Field still calls Jamie Dantzscher the “GOAT”—Greatest of All Time. And for “Miss Val,” as she’s known to her athletes, to hang that label on any gymnast is saying something. Kondos Field led the UCLA Bruins to seven NCAA National Championships. Jamie played a pivotal role in three of those titles. Kondos Field still recalls Jamie’s first collegiate performance in 2001. She knew what Jamie had been through, the emotionally abusive climate Jamie experienced on the national team, and the toll it had taken on her. Not wanting to push her new gymnast too hard in her first competition, Kondos Field limited Jamie to two events, the floor and uneven bars. Jamie scored perfect tens in both. She would go on to register twenty-eight perfect ten scores as a Bruin, at the time a school record, and be inducted into the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame.
More than anything, her experience at UCLA made gymnastics fun again. She fell back in love with the sport. But she was far from healed, far from whole as a person. Jamie continued to struggle with an eating disorder that started when she was fifteen. As a UCLA sophomore, she barely ate enough to sustain herself. While training and competing that year, her daily diet frequently consisted of a cup of coffee in the morning, perhaps half of an energy bar or half of an orange, and then some chicken salad she would pick at later in the day. She once lost eleven pounds in a month, becoming so thin her coaches grew concerned and insisted she see a counselor on campus to discuss what was an obvious eating disorder.
For as much as she excelled at UCLA, life after college was a different story. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2005, as her friends started getting married and launching careers, Jamie was lost. It was the first time since her early childhood that gymnastics didn’t dominate every aspect of her daily life. Throughout her early to mid-twenties, she bounced from one gymnastics coaching job to another to pay the bills, went through a string of bad relationships, and self-medicated with alcohol. During one physically abusive relationship, she ended up getting chronic active Epstein-Barr virus, an illness with symptoms similar to mononucleosis. Jamie sank even further into a deep depression and started having suicidal thoughts. In 2010, she overdosed on sleeping pills and had to be hospitalized.
“I remember at that point just asking myself, ‘Do I want to live or do I want to die?’ I was even a little surprised at that point, ’cause I was like, ‘I want to live.’”
That same year, Jamie quit drinking. She found a psychiatrist she trusted, who cut back the antidepressants she was taking, and for about three years she stopped dating. At no time did Jamie consider that her ongoing cycle of self-destructive behavior might be attributed to the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager. That realization wouldn’t come until years later.