Amy Berg was an Emmy Award-winning news producer for CBS and CNN news. Her hard hitting investigative pieces have focused on women in prison, toxic pollutants, battered women, and poverty. But the issue of clergy abuse had a particular resonance for her. When Berg contacted a notorious pedophile, the former priest Oliver O'Grady—who had been deported to his native Ireland after serving seven years after being convicted of sexual abuse—astoundingly, he eventually agreed to participate in a film on the subject. Berg's resulting documentary, Deliver Us From Evil, presents not just a portrait of O'Grady—along with several of his victims, their families and advocates for change—but it delivers a searing indictment of the Catholic Church's continued refusal to deal with the issue.
In person, Berg is a delightful contrast to her subject matter. Bright, articulate, and warm, she delightedly confessed ( after her grueling five years of work on the film ) that the press tour for the movie offered a nice respite before diving into her next heavy-duty project.
Windy City Times: This was one of the hardest films I've ever sat through because, as you know, O'Grady is so likeable. He's one of the most compelling villains I've ever seen in a movie.
Amy Berg: Yes, yes.
WCT: You want to hug him but then when he starts to talk about what turns him on and that scene in the park where's he looking at the children is so ironic and horrifying. So, first of all, why did he agree to make the film? Is he just so disassociated from what he did? Is he like this extreme narcissist?
AB: It's hard to answer that question because I can't get into his mind but I know that he wanted to do the film for a number of reasons and I think some of them are what you just said. He's not very connected to his abuse; he had this urge to apologize but, more than that, I think it was the hypocrisy of his superiors that were climbing in power and seeing them in their glory while he was kind of left with a very invisible life, I guess. This felt like something important for him. And I think his story is very important because it shows how this Foley thing happened. It shows how we hide the problem.
The reason I wanted to interview him was because of that statement issued by the Church in the summer of 2004 that they were going to get rid of all the homosexuals in the Church. I knew that people were going to believe that. Because people do believe that the reason why the Catholic Church is corrupted is because of homosexuality. I knew that they were playing this really well and I also knew that there was not a single study that links the two things together—pedophilia and homosexuality. I needed to explore that and show that that was not the case and Oliver O'Grady was the perfect person to go down that road with.
WCT: How did the apology letter that he wrote to the victims come about?
AB: He wanted to apologize. He thought this was the opportunity to do that and he actually thought these people would come see him.
WCT: That's a point in the movie where the mind just boggles. I kept flashing on that moment in the courtroom where Jeffrey Dahmer at his sentencing said, 'I'm so very sorry for what I did,' as if someone could apologize politely for something so heinous. How can someone apologize for raping a nine-month-old baby?
AB: Yes, because it's so crazy and it becomes a horror story at that point. And yes, he came up with that idea.
WCT: You juxtapose footage of O'Grady with survivors and the scene with the parents of one victim, in particular, is very emotional. When her father lashes out—it's just heart-wrenching—he says, 'This is not abuse. This is rape. He raped her.' It was tough to see but I thought, 'Thank you someone for finally calling it was it is and not softening the brutality of this crime.' It's not 'inappropriate,' it's 'rape.'
AB: Right. The Church kind of rests on these fluffy terms. It's the same thing as when I talk about the homosexual-pedophilia comparison: sex vs. rape—they are NOT the same and I think he explains that very well in that moment. 'He's not a pedophile. He's a rapist. He raped my daughter. Period.' You hear 'pedophile' and you can't picture what it is. You hear 'rape' and you think 'angry, violent.' 'Pedophilia' doesn't sound angry or violent.
WCT: It's very hard to see at the end, of course, that Bush pardoned at the behest of the Vatican the Pope who seems to have been part of this whitewash. But what about Cardinal Roger Mahony, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, who apparently ignored O'Grady's history while rising within the Church hierarchy himself? Will anything happen there?
AB: There is a criminal investigation happening right now in Los Angeles.
WCT: So he may not slip through?
AB: Yes but it would be the first time ever.
WCT: Let's talk for a moment about the Mark Foley page scandal because this film is very timely. Now a priest has come forward and admitted to 'inappropriate' behavior.
AB: The truth is that Mark Foley coming out and saying that [ he was abused by a priest ] is a service to everybody. It's huge. His admitting that this happened when he was a child is big. I knew that Foley had been abused by a Catholic priest the minute he said that he had had some kind of 'incident' with a clergy member. I feel like, at the end of the day, it's a cycle. We can hate Oliver but we can also look at the fact that what happened to him [ being the subject of familial abuse ] did have something to do with what he did to others. It's just going to keep going on unless we try to stop the cycle—and that's by being honest.
