Calif. Priest's Victim: 'He Was God'

It started with a 7-year-old girl innocently sitting on the lap of the playful "big kid" priest with the purple sneakers, and it quickly turned to sexual abuse that he framed as exorcisms. "He told me I had the devil inside me" as he touched her chest and genitals, Melinda Costello tells the New York Times in an interview describing former Oakland priest Stephen Kiesle, whose scandal is four decades later threatening to engulf even Pope Benedict. “I was terrified,” she says. “He was God.” (More Stephen Kiesle stories.)