• In the largest settlement for a sexual abuse case, the Catholic diocese of Dallas, in the US, agreed in 1998 to pay .4 million dollars to eight former altar boys and the family of a ninth boy -- who committed suicide at the age of 21, who were all victimised and sexually abused by former Priest Rudolph "Rudy" Kos. The diocese had earlier agreed to pay three other Kos victims .5 million. Kos, presently serving a life sentence for abusing the boys in three churches in or near Dallas in the 1980s and early-1990s, had previously served a year in a juvenile detention centre for molesting a neighbour. The settlements came after a jury awarded 11 plaintiffs .6 million in 1997 but the plaintiffs (and a 12th victim that filed suit after the award had been made) agreed to take the much lesser amount because they knew the diocese could not afford the larger payment. The bishop of the diocese, Charles Grahmann, issued a "deeply" felt apology when he announced the payment.
  
  
• In 1996, Canadian Roman Catholic bishop, Hubert O’Connor, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for sex crimes against native Indian women at a boarding school he ran in the 1960s. O’Connor was the most senior Catholic clergyman in Canada to be convicted of such offences.
  
  
• In 1996, UK Roman Catholic priest, Father Adrian McLeish, was jailed for six years after admitting 12 charges of sexual abuse of boys under 14, eight of possessing and distributing child pornography and two of importing illegal videos. For five years McLeish had been abusing boys, contacted through their families’ connection with the church. During sentencing, Justice Moses said, "You sexually abused four young boys, some of whom you groomed with a view to indulging your sexual desires." McLeish had also built a collection of child pornography that would have filled the 24-volume Encyclopedia Britannia 11 times over. Detectives said that some of his collection, that included 9,000 images, was the worst material seized in England.
  
  
• Rabbi’s assistant, Yehudah Friedlander, pleaded guilty in 1995 to sexually molesting a 15-year-old girl on a flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles.
  
  
• In 1995, Austrian Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, resigned his position amid claims he had molested up to 2,000 pupils, monks and seminarians.
  
  
• American ex-priest, James Porter, who admitted to molesting as many as 100 children in three US states, was charged with 46 counts of sodomy and indecent assault committed against 32 people 30 years earlier in a southern Massachusetts diocese. Porter eventually pleaded guilty, in 1993, to 46 charges of sexual misconduct. A year earlier, Porter had been convicted in Minnesota of molesting his children’s baby sitter in 1987 and sentenced to six months jail. While a priest, Porter had been confronted by his superiors over sex abuse claims on at least five occasions in 1963 and 1964, where the claims were backed by solid evidence, but was simply returned to parish work after in-house counselling.
  
  
• US television evangelist preacher, Jim Bakker, and his wife Tammy, once had 600,000 religious followers. But when news got out about Bakker’s affair with church worker, Jessica Hahn, his popularity plummeted. Worse was to come when Bakker was indicted then later convicted and jailed on fraud charges associated with his PTL Ministry.
  

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