In court, diocese blasts fired Catholic school teacher who was pregnant and unmarried
The Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph hit back hard Friday in Jackson County Circuit Court, defending itself against a lawsuit by a teacher who claims she was harassed and fired from a Catholic grade school because she was pregnant and unmarried.
“This case is not about abortion,” Joe Hatley, the lawyer representing the diocese, said in his opening statement. “It is about revenge.”
The schoolteacher, Michelle Bolen, filed the suit more than three years ago against the diocese — which consists of 27 Missouri counties, totaling 15,429 miles — and Carol Lenz, the former principal of St. Therese elementary school.
Hatley told jurors that as the trial goes on — it’s expected to last a few weeks — they would hear evidence that hours after being fired Bolen texted a friend, “I will not rest until Carol loses her job.” And he said, “Ms. Bolen was so intent on getting that revenge that she was willing to trash the reputation of Father Joseph Cisetti.”
Cisetti, who is the priest at St. Therese Parish, where Bolen was a member, sat in the courtroom alongside lawyers and Lenz. Hatley introduced him to jurors, “the one in the collar.”
The lawyer went on to outline a series of alleged job performance problems, including insubordination, violation of the school code of ethics, tardiness and leaving first-grade students unattended for two minutes.
He said those are “the real reasons” that the teacher’s contract was not renewed after 15 years at St. Therese.
“Ms. Bolen was an OK teacher. She was not a rock star,” Hatley said. “She was an adequate teacher, and she had issues following the dress code and accepting constructive criticism.”
Earlier, Bolen’s lawyer, E.E. Keenan, spoke for an hour and argued that Bolen, “a passionate teacher,” worked “under an annual contract that year after year was renewed.” He argued that Lenz “chose specifically not to renew the contract of this teacher Michelle Bolen after she told them she was pregnant, out of wedlock and would be pursuing this child.”
Keenan said as the trial progresses, evidence will support that Lenz and others at the school had it out for Bolen, that she was “targeted” because of her pregnancy. He argued that after nine years as principal at St. Therese, and having overseen 333 performance reviews, Lenz had never not renewed a teacher’s contract, until Bolen.
He said a school human resource officer would tell the court that Bolen had 14 years of “adequate employment with no significant performance issues.” Keenan referred to Bolen as a whistle-blower for reporting a teacher who she says touched her older son and another child in a way that made them uncomfortable.
That report, along with an accusation that Bolen discussed another teacher’s performance with a parent, would later be considered a school ethics code violation and included among the reasons given for her termination.
The lawsuit, filed Feb. 12, 2016, claims that when Bolen found out she was pregnant, she went with her fiance at the time to meet with Cisetti and he implied that had she “terminated her pregnancy, the school would not have to deal with whispering and the ‘scandal’ of an unmarried teacher being pregnant.”
The suit says that Cisetti told Bolen she had made the “right choice in terms of keeping the baby, but that she had violated the terms of her contract by being pregnant while not being married.” In that same conversation, according to the suit, Cisetti implied that if she had quietly had an abortion, she might have kept her job.
The suit says that Cisetti told Bolen she “could not return to sender,” but if she had, “they would not have been there that day having the discussion about her pregnancy and its repercussions.”
In court Hatley defended the frankness of the priest’s comments, saying his words were “taken out of context” and not intended to support abortion. As a priest he has a 40-year history of opposing it. And he said that because of Cisetti’s involvement with a previous, similar case, he had made it a policy to “never do anything that would force someone to choose between their job and their baby.”
Keenan said Cisetti had told Lenz and the assistant principal that they could not fire Bolen because they didn’t have enough evidence.
He also said that at the time, Bishop Robert W. Finn wanted Bolen to keep her job. Finn then left the diocese in April 2015.
“After he left they went ahead and terminated Michelle anyway,” Keenan said.
Friday’s opening statements came after three days of jury selection, an “unusually long” time, one attorney had said.
Testimony in the trial, before Jackson County Circuit Judge Charles McKenzie, will resume on Tuesday.
This story was originally published August 30, 2019 at 5:22 PM.
