To be clear, I'm not talking about the accusation that the Rev. Jerold Lindner sexually abused nearly a dozen people, including his own sister and nieces and nephews, nor the fact that one of his alleged victims beat him up. Pedophile priests are a dime-a-dozen, unfortunately. And incidents of revenge beatings of pedophile priest, while less common, are not unexpected.
This, on the other hand, is quite extraordinary:
Larry Lindler, a retired Los Angeles police officer, said he last saw his brother more than two decades ago after he walked in on him molesting his 8-year-old daughter during a visit. The two were playing a game called "blankie" in which Lindner asked the little girl to lie over his lap like a blanket and then wiggled around as if trying to get comfortable.
"The last contact I had with him personally was the day after I caught him with my daughter and I told him he best get in his vehicle and leave," he recalled. "I said, 'If I go out to the truck and get my off-duty weapon out of the glove box, you're a dead man."
A police officer, of all people, catches his brother molesting his daughter and he does nothing about it? He doesn't, at the very least, report him? It's hard to be judgmental of the parent of an abused child. At the same time, as a police officer, it's hard to believe Mr. Lindler didn't realize that sweeping his brother's pedophilia under the rug will allow Rev. Jerold Lindner to go on molesting little kids and, in the process, destroy countless lives without, as it turns out, any accountability whatsoever.