No one said the lawsuit isn’t legal. The problem is that the lawsuit is impeding the canonical process. As a priest, that should rank higher with him than the civil legal process. Once the canonical finding were made, he could still sue if he truly needed to.
On the NDA, yes they are common business practice, but usually to protect proprietary information developed by the company. His business does not have that. There is nothing proprietary about the catechism or working of the Catholic faith. In any case, he specifically stated in the lawsuit that he was protecting personal information about what happened at Santa Cruz Media. That is very unusual and not what standard NDAs were designed for.
It is not common business sense to pay an employee $100,000 to sign a document that says they can’t talk about conversations or interactions at work that have nothing to do with the actual product or process the business creates. The NDA isn’t to protect the method Santa Cruz Media uses to burn CDs! It is to stop someone from talking about how Fr. Corapi conducted himself at work. My :twocents: says that is very strange.
Thanks for your post, Mrs. Sally.
By the way, every company for which I worked that required me to sign NDAs (sometimes, there’s more than one version of NDA used) I had to sign as soon as I stepped in the door on my first day of work. Among the clauses in an NDA was a clause saying that I could not in any way disclose to anybody the name of the department there that I worked, the names of any of the other employees who worked there, etc. If I was caught doing that, I’d be fired right there on the spot.
I thought at the time that was rather a strange clause – until my new boss told me that this was how that company protected themselves from headhunters who were always wanting to “snatch” (meaning - offer a job at a different company – usually a competitor) my new employer’s most valuable employees. If that happened, then the monetary value of that employee’s knowledge, skill, experience was lost. And it would happen just that quick! At which point, my employer’s company would become handicapped in the business world until they spent money to find and hire a new employee who may, or may not, have as much knowlede, skill, and/or experience as the employee who’d been snatched by a headhunter. All because one of that company’s employees had loose lips and said the name of a coworker who otherwise would not have been known. It’s not that the company was so much “secret.” It’s just a reality of business.
NDAs are not used only for proprietary information developed by the company. They also are used to protect the product’s uniqueness. Part of Santa Cruz’s product is his writings and videos of which he is the author. As every other author, the author’s reputation is part of the unique source of the package you’re buying.
Therefore, the NDA required of Santa Cruz’s employees to sign includes not (well, for lack of better word off the top of my head) “dissing” the author of Santa Cruz’s (the business) products.
It’s pretty clear that there’s at least one employee at Santa Cruz who wants to slander him. That person is claiming “something that happened at Santa Cruz media.”
As such, it’s the best financial step to take for him to pay the person to sign a document which says that that person will NOT continue (or start) to disclose whatever it is that the accuser is accusing him of.
Once the horse is out of the barn (i.e., the slander has been said) there’s literally no way to bring the horse back in. Better analogy – once you pick the feathers from the chicken and throw those feathers in the air, there’s really no way to pick up all those feathers and put them back on the chicken. However, that chicken is now running around without any feathers on him/her at all. Not their fault.
I do understand that SOLT does not, nor necessarily should, operate like a business in America according to American law.
Which is exactly WHY his superior(s) originally told him to go ahead – sue the accuser under American law. They knew and acknowledged to him that after all, SOLT simply does not have the resources, training, or knowledge of how to act as defense lawyer on behalf of SOLT’s “employee” - Father John, in this case.
Instead, all SOLT literally can do is tell him to discontinue living independently that he originally signed up for … and along with the other SOLT priests living independently to now take up a lifestyle that was never the official lifestyle for all priests in that organization.
Hail Mary …
St. John Vianney, please pray for Father Corapi and all priests…
