Joyce Seelen, the lawyer who represented the woman, estimated that she has handled 50 cases of clerical abuse in 20 years, covering Methodists, Episcopalians, the Church of Christ and the fundamentalist Church of the Nazarene.

”In my practice, I have not seen institutions taking steps to correct the problem,” Ms. Seelen said. ”Every one of the churches that we’ve been successful against walked into court and said, ‘We didn’t know, and if we had known, we would have done something.’ Over and over and over, what we saw was they didn’t know because they didn’t want to know.”

That case in 1992 was the first time church leaders were held responsible for what one of their employees did. It was a Colorado case against an Episcopalian priest.

So I’m going to go with “not hyperbole.”