You cannot hate Mater Dei High School or the Diocese of Orange enough.

There is a particular kind of audacity that only large institutions seem capable of:

It’s the audacity of an institution that failed to protect children deciding that the real problem is the survivor who spoke about it.

There is something deeply revealing about an institution that once failed to protect children deciding, years later, that the survivor who exposed it deserves the scrutiny.

Recently, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange subpoenaed and deposed me in litigation connected to abuse at Mater Dei High School.

I was not a defendant. I was not accused of wrongdoing. I was not even a party to the case. I am simply a survivor who refuses to stay quiet. Apparently, that was enough.

The Mater Dei Context They’d Rather Forget

When I was a teenager at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, my choir director, Thomas Hodgman, sexually abused me and at least one other student.

Documents later released from the school showed that administrators knew about the relationship and failed to report it to law enforcement. Hodgman admitted in writing to sexual relationships with students. The school allowed him to quietly resign.

Years later, when those documents surfaced publicly, the picture became unmistakably clear. Adults knew. They minimized it. They blamed the student.

This was not a misunderstanding. It was an institutional failure.

The settlement that eventually followed did not change that reality. It only confirmed it.

A Familiar Playbook

If you have spent years exposing abuse and cover-ups inside powerful institutions, you begin to recognize some pretty nasty patterns.

Subpoenas. Depositions. Aggressive discovery requests.

Sometimes these tools are necessary parts of litigation. But sometimes they serve another purpose entirely. Sometimes they send a message:

Rattle the cage. Make the process painful. Remind the survivor who holds the power.

It is an old playbook. And it is a revealing one.

The Discovery Dragnet

What happened next was extraordinary.

The Diocese subpoenaed thousands of my emails and social-media messages, reaching back years into my life (Hello! We are talking almost 20 years here). Their attorneys discussed subpoenaing my personal phone records and even my bank statements going back to 2012.

Consider that for a moment.

A survivor of abuse by a Mater Dei teacher—someone who had already spent years exposing abuse and cover-ups—suddenly found her personal communications and finances placed under scrutiny. And I was not even a party to the case.

The subpoenas did not stop there.

Dozens of my former Mater Dei classmates were subpoenaed as well—people whose only connection to the case was that they attended the same school during the same time period.

In the process, information about the survivor at the center of the case was “leaked” by the private investigator hired by the diocese, violating the very privacy survivors are so often promised will be protected.

This is what institutional litigation can look like when it collides with survivor advocacy: a dragnet that pulls in years of personal communications and the private lives of people who simply happened to be nearby.

None of it changed the underlying facts.

A coach abused students. Adults knew. And the institution failed to stop it.

Reform Is Measured by Behavior

For more than two decades, Catholic dioceses across the United States have publicly promised that the Church has learned from the abuse crisis.

They have issued statements about transparency. They have announced zero-tolerance policies. They have assured the public that protecting survivors and children is now the highest priority.

Those statements are easy to issue.

But the real test of reform is not what institutions say. It is how they behave when survivors continue to speak.

When a survivor of abuse becomes the target of sweeping subpoenas, when former classmates are dragged into litigation, and when years of private communications are combed through in search of something—anything—that might weaken a survivor’s credibility, it raises a simple question:

What exactly has changed?

*Ahem* NOTHING

Because genuine reform does not require survivors to prove, again and again, that what happened to them was real.

Why This Matters Beyond One Case

The legal case that prompted these subpoenas has now settled.

But the broader questions remain.

When institutions facing abuse allegations deploy sweeping discovery against survivors, advocates, and former classmates, it sends a signal about how power still operates inside systems that claim to have learned from the past.

For journalists, legislators, and anyone who has followed the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, the pattern is familiar.

Transparency often comes slowly. And it almost always comes because survivors insist on telling the truth.

A Final Word

If the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange believed that combing through thousands of my emails, discussing subpoenas for my phone records and bank statements, and hauling my classmates into depositions would somehow make me regret speaking about abuse at Mater Dei, they profoundly misunderstood who they were dealing with. Survivors are not intimidated by legal theatrics. We have already endured the far worse experience of being abused and then blamed for it. You can subpoena documents, dissect private messages, and drag witnesses into conference rooms with lawyers—but none of that rewrites history.

The abuse happened. Mater Dei knew.

P.S. For those of you thinking about donating to Mater Dei in honor of it’s 75th anniversary, maybe ask how much of that money goes to pay their $900/hour lawyers. There are a lot of them. Take my word for it.