Hope this is the correct flair. Brought this show up in a comment elsewhere and wondered if anyone else had watched it and wanted to discuss it. Know Netflix has a very mixed track record, including in the true crime genre, but I thought this one handled the subject matter better than most, and did a decent job of showing her as a person, not reducing her to a corpse and a puzzle to solve.

Brief outline for those who haven't seen it, the crime at its core is the unsolved murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a nun and beloved English teacher at a prestigious Catholic girl's high school in 1969 Baltimore, MD (USA). But the broader story expands to cover horrendous abuses and an apparent coverup and conspiracy running through the entire thing (and hinting at even more gargantuan conspiracies under the surface).

This series is a painful watch, it's shocking and infuriating and anyone who is strongly emotionally impacted by accounts of sexual and religious abuse may not want to watch it, and certainly not without being mentally prepared ahead of time. But it's also one of the starkest representations of the dangers and mechanisms of unchecked patriarchy, patriarchy with safeguards removed or circumvented or subverted, that I've ever seen. And just as rare, the front and center heroes in this series are women in their 60s who are fighting for justice, who are good and mad about what was done to the teacher they loved, and who are good and mad about what was done to them. It's women speaking thoughtfully and frankly about the impacts of many different kinds of abuse on their lives. It's women emboldening and supporting each other, finding their strength in each other. And even if justice in any sense of the word is out of reach on behalf of Sister Cathy, and even if her murder remains unsolved, and even if accountability is never taken for the abuses these women experienced, I found their bravery and tenacity in the face of powerful and dangerous enemies to be deeply inspiring and admirable, and came away angry as hell on their behalves for the injustices they were subjected to.

There are also more than a few villains. There are some truly evil individuals, there are the institutions that empower, shield, and 'clean up' after them, there are collaborators and cowards, people threatened into anonymity, and there are more than a few dubious and conflicting testimonies to muddy the water of who was involved and to what extent. There's a reason this case remains unsolved, or many reasons, even if the broader outline seems clear.

Spoilers after this point, things I'd be especially interested in any thoughts anyone who's watched it might have, here there be dragons:

The complexity of this systematic sexual exploitation was staggering. The evil of using confessions to a priest to identify victims to target and to collect their deepest, darkest secrets to manipulate them with can't be overstated. That these women, especially Jean, took all of that pain to someone who not only was supposed to be safe to entrust with it but who she was told she HAD to or risk hell, only to have it used against her for further abuse, is heartbreaking.

It reminds me of men joking about women in prostitution, in porn, strippers, etc having "daddy issues" and using that to rationalize the sexual exploitation of them, like if they were molested as children, it makes them fair game for further abuse and exploitation, and by extension that they see incest/molestation of girls as something that benefits them.

And there was nowhere for them to turn. Priests, of course not. Maskell WAS their school counselor, and by the sound of it he had the whole school under his thumb and fearful. The police department was riddled with participants (if not all, the girls would have no way of knowing who wasn't in on it), was part of the conspiracy. The "gynecologist" was part of it (and I'd guess one of his roles was catching pregnancies early and performing abortions if any of these raped girls were impregnated). They were drugged, they were discredited, they were either already alienated from their families or the priests actively used their position of authority to alienate them. And they were told their eternal souls were forfeit if they didn't comply by these evil men who were given the authority of God's representatives on Earth. Students turned to Cathy and Cathy was murdered.

And then decades later, Jane Doe and Jane Roe, how the institutional self-protective mechanisms that remained in place only treated their claims as credible enough to bring to trial if they had multiple accusers, but would only prosecute those charges separately, a series of single he said she said cases, not he said, they said. How the Church offered them "services" disguised as good will, counseling and mediation, that were really intended to keep their claims "in house." How the Church shuffled priests accused of offenses into shadow "rehabs" under false pretenses and through that laundered them back out into the public (as later exposed by Spotlight).

Long-time hardened watcher of true crime, and the flood of letters streaming in made me cry. Jean had been trapped in this hell of these surfacing memories and doubting her sanity (and having others doubt her sanity) for so long. Until that happened, I was skeptical myself, it was just. so. much. And it was just real, and there was SO MUCH MORE. And all of that pain, the magnitude of the harm and destruction and ruin spreading out from these evil men was exponential, all these girls, their families; the sheer size of it may never be made known.

The trials themselves, gaslighting these women who were already doubting their own sanity due to the lingering trauma they were experiencing. How the symptoms of their trauma were used to discredit their claims of abuse. (I know recovered memory therapy has earned its abysmal reputation and skepticism, but repressing memories is a very real response to trauma. And as someone who has experienced a repressed memory, later confirmed, that surfaced seemingly out of nowhere, Jean's description rang very true.) I'm so glad Jean got her moment of defiance in court, and I hope that helped her get some of her own back; that woman is a force of nature to survive everything she has. And I'm so glad Teresa went back to school and got her law degree, which sounds like it was her version of the same thing (and found her description of just giving up on her dreams and doing the wife-and-mother thing after high school as a response to the abuse very poignant).

And how female socialization it all is, that these abused girls grew into women and had children and only then were able to really confront and condemn the things that were done to them, when enough time had passed that they no longer saw themselves in those girls anymore, but were able to see them as children who deserved protecting from this horror as much as their own children. And how the statute of limitations, combined with what we know about the usual nature of coming forward with abuse allegations, so often ensures that these allegations won't be actionable when they are finally able to come forward. and the Catholic Church stepping in to oppose legislation to help address that is telling as hell.

Joyce Malecki I can't figure out how she fits into this, beyond likely being another victim of these people. Wondering if she saw something related to Cathy's murder, or if she was just yet another casualty of these sick, sadistic men drunk on their own power and invulnerability. A random killing seems unlikely, but not impossible.

Sharon May I have no idea about Sharon May. I'm inclined to believe that she is largely just honest about the limitations of the justice system in regards to what evidence can be used to prosecute a case, and if the chain of possession was compromised beneath her, there would be plenty of opportunity to intercept any evidence that met that level But I wouldn't rule out her being compromised either.

Gerry Koob I don't know what to do with Gerry Koob in all of this. I find him slightly unsettling, and his relationship with Cathy (especially if she had just turned down a marriage proposal) makes him statistically the most likely suspect. And judging by his interest in Cathy and his wife, while he may just be attracted to women he sees as well matched and on a similar level, it's also very possible that he's a misogynist with a strong madonna-whore complex, pursuing 'chaste' women romantically and horrifically abusing 'impure' women secretly.

Also, as close as they appeared to be, if Cathy didn't tell him what she knew about the abuse at Keough, it likely means she didn't completely trust him, maybe thought he might be involved. Because if she was murdered over this, it means she likely told SOMEONE...and that someone was the wrong person to tell.

But while his story sounds very out there (even factoring in that priests might not be the most accurate at describing female anatomy) and I don't trust him, if Maskell was as sadistic and as untouchable as it sounds, I can't really rule out the possibility that someone from his circle would do something like that, something to shock and intimidate that wouldn't sound credible and wouldn't be believed. Hope for Cathy's sake he wasn't involved, since it sounds like she loved him.

Father Maskell and Father Magnus Maskell definitely seemed to be the dominant personality of the two, with both gathering and sharing information on the students between them. I see his use of the movie Marnie as another ploy, as the series outlined, but more specifically a way to fish for the most suggestible girls.

Edgar Davidson and Billy Schmidt I could easily see Maskell/ the larger abuse ring using one or both of these men, using secrets about them as leverage, to carry out some or all of the dirty work of Cathy's murder. Secrets either collected by the priests themselves at confession, as per their approach used to target the girls (were either Edgar or Billie Catholic?), or by using dirt on them collected by their connections in the police department (such as holding crimes over them; with Billy it could easily have been something related to being gay that was criminalized at the time, Edgar seemed to later be a volatile sexual predator who may well have been active at the time, without his wife's knowledge). "You help us deal with this and it never happened."

One of the things I appreciate about true crime coverage that doesn't just name and focus in on one suspect is it is it makes it apparent that dangerous and predatory men are more common than we often think of them; there are sharks all around us, and it's important for women to have some understanding of that.

Misc The mentioned (and disappeared) letter to her sister makes me wonder if Cathy weren't held captive for some time before she was murdered. That seems like a crucial piece of evidence to have been "misplaced," and it seems likely that's why it was misplaced.