For over fifty years, I trusted the church with everything I had – my recovery, my marriage, my music, my service, my survival.
This is what it did with that trust.
My name is Joseph Donald Cormier. I am Acadian and Mi'kmaq, sixty-four years old, thirty-four years sober. I have served in five churches across three decades. I have been sexually abused by a priest, falsely accused by two congregations, publicly humiliated, privately sabotaged, and left suicidal by communities that preached unconditional love.
I did not build this site for revenge.
I built it because I am a witness. And a witness who stays silent becomes complicit.
This is a trial. The evidence is real. The defendants are named. The verdict belongs to you.
You are the jury.
Take your seat. The court is in session.
Before you examine a single piece of evidence, you are entitled to know why a man would place the most painful chapters of his life on public record – naming names, citing dates, submitting wounds as exhibits – when silence would be so much easier.
The answer is not complicated.
Before you weigh the evidence, you need to know who is standing before you. Not as a victim. Not as a statistic. As a witness.
My name is Joseph Donald Cormier. I am a proud Acadian and Mi'kmaq – a descendant of the spirit of Nombretu, of the Mi'kmaq people. I was born in Toronto in the winter of 1961, the middle child in a family where love was distributed unevenly and I came up short.
Six cases. Five churches. One priest. Sixty years.
Named defendants. Specific dates. Documented harm. And the 1700-year institutional history that made every one of them possible.
This is where the trial begins.