This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2025.
Courtrooms are separated by invisible dividers. The plaintiff, prosecution and family of the aggrieved sit on one side. The defense and its attendant loved ones sit across the aisle.
The security line to get into the courthouse has no such split, which is how I found myself standing behind John J. McDermott, bishop of Burlington, on my way to cover a hearing in his diocese’s bankruptcy case. It was as close as I’d get to the senior priest who would be seated at the front of the room.
This particular hearing was not some procedural matter involving assets and debts, like so many in the case. Attorneys for the clergy sex-abuse victims who had claims against the church had struck a deal with the diocese and the judge: As part of the bankruptcy process, victims would have the chance to address the judge and McDermott directly.
I decided to cover the hearing as if I were a fly on the wall, a journalistic approach that Seven Days refers to as a “dispatch.” The goal is to bring readers into a scene — to describe how things looked, smelled and unfolded — without the distraction of context or commentary. It’s harder than it sounds.
I hoped to capture the emotional intensity of direct contact between the bishop and victims of the church’s abhorrent past. I wanted the survivors who chose to speak to be at the center of the story. It was their moment.
Then I realized the man next to me in line for the metal detector was putting his pectoral cross on the X-ray conveyor belt. I kept one eye on McDermott, curious to see how he conducted himself, a fish out of water. He wrote his name in the visitor log without any honorifics. He subjected his cross to inspection. He checked the video board in the lobby to figure out which courtroom to enter.
After we’d retrieved our belongings from the conveyor belt, I introduced myself, but the bishop, seeming slightly flustered by our chance encounter, wasn’t interested in chatting with a reporter.
I decided to start my story by describing that intimate moment. Because there’s no photography in federal courthouses, my art director commissioned an accompanying illustration that depicted a cross going through the X-ray machine. As much as the hearing was about the survivors, I reasoned, it was also a story about human vulnerability writ large.
Reaction to my choice was decidedly mixed. I heard from the leader of a clergy abuse survivors’ network who said he appreciated the story. But I also heard from a therapist who works with abuse victims and objected that the scene was dramatized “like the opening of a movie.”
“It seemed inappropriate to me,” the reader wrote.
A third reader took issue with my physical description of the bishop as having a pale, thin neck and noting that his “buzzed, military-tight” hair had “a bald circle in the center.”
Pointing out the bishop’s bald spot, according to this reader, “came across almost cruel.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Most Revealing Security Check”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
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