Archdiocese of Toronto threatens sexual abuse accuser in legal defence

WARNING: This article contains details of abuse.

It was the late 1960s in Toronto and a young boy was standing on the edge of a subway platform considering something terrible. The torment he says he felt was becoming unbearable.

David Cullen, who was around 10 years old at the time, says he managed to find a nearby payphone to call his mother for help. He went on to spend much of the rest of his life in and out of doctors' offices and hospitals, dealing with chronic pain and severe emotional distress. 

He says he had no idea why, until five decades later.

In 2019, Cullen, 59, was reviewing test results with a team of doctors when one asked a pointed question: had he ever been sexually abused as a child?

That's when he says the memories came flooding back.

"I had buried it. I had buried it so deeply and it caught me off guard. I started dealing with shame right away," he told the CBCs The Fifth Estate in his first interview since launching a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto.

"By today's standards, I was a classic childhood sexual abuse victim." 

Cullen sued the church in March 2021, after he says he pieced together what had happened to him and after reporting it to the police and directly to the church.

According to his claim, he had been repeatedly sexually abused starting at the age of five by a Roman Catholic priest, who had been invited to his family home in Toronto to perform mass. 

That priest, he says, is Father James Sheridan, who died in 1987. 

The church defends itself in the lawsuit, saying the abuse never took place. 

Over four years, often while Cullen's mother was cooking dinner in the next room, Cullen says Sheridan groomed him and eventually performed what he describes as "ritualistic" abuse, on a monthly basis.

"He was a returning monster, and there was nothing I could do about it," said Cullen. "That's an awful lot to be putting on a little boy's shoulders."