About David
Over his 45 year career, David Clohessy has been a community organizer, political consultant, and public relations consultant. He loves to help survivors, attorneys, journalists, and organizers.
From 1990-2017, David Clohessy was the national director and chief spokesperson for SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the nation's largest and oldest self help group for clergy molestation victims in all faith groups.
David is a graduate of Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. He worked as a community organizer for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a public relations director, and served on the staff of St. Louis Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr.
In 1991, David joined the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP), and went on to become National Director and spokesperson for the organization.
“Clohessy applied his professional skills in community organizing for labor and environmental groups to the issue of priest abuse. He staged press conferences and met with victims, steadily churning out mentions in news stories throughout the 1990s.
This was the decade when, for the first time, the Vatican began its crawl to finally admitting that something was very wrong in the clergy.”
— “The Survival of David Clohessy”, Danny Wicentowski, Riverfront Times, 2020
In that role, he has traveled and spoken extensively, holding media events and helping to set up local support groups in more than 50 cities. In 2002, Clohessy was one of only four survivors to address more than 200 US Catholic bishops at their historic meeting in Dallas. He has appeared a number of times on every major TV network, Sixty Minutes, the Larry King Show, the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Phil Donahue Show, Good Morning America, and been featured or quoted in thousands of news outlets around the world.
“…across the U.S. an angry choir of Catholics and non-Catholics alike demanded the Church expunge the predators lurking under its robes. The loudest voice belonged to David Clohessy, 46, national director of the 4,500-member Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). As an altar boy in Moberly, Mo., he says, he was repeatedly molested by Father John Whiteley—his dad’s best friend. “The greatest honor you could offer us might also be the hardest one,” he told the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “To radically change your behavior.”
…his work may have begun to heal a festering ill in one of the world’s famously self-protective institutions.”
— “David Clohessy: Advocate for the Abused”, PEOPLE magazine, 2002
At the premiere of Spotlight (2015)
Clohessy’s writings have appeared in the The Guardian, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Ms. Magazine, Religion News Service, Baptist News Global, Religion Dispatches, Religion Unplugged, the National Catholic Reporter, the Charleston (WV) Gazette, the Harrisburg Patriot News, the Kansas City Star, the Columbia Tribune and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
He received the Lifetime Achievement in Advocacy Award from the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma and the Distinguished Alumni Award from Drury University where he graduated in 1978 with degrees in philosophy and political science.
David lives in St. Louis with his wife, Laura, a union organizer with SEIU Health Care.
Since leaving his official role at SNAP, David continues to advocate for victims and is a leading voice for survivors. He is passionate about helping survivors, journalists and attorneys use the news media to expose those who commit and conceal child sexual abuse in institutional settings. (For example, in 2019, Clohessy personally did 11 news conferences in five days 'outing' predator priests in three states.)
Clohessy is a communications and public relations consultant. He has been a community organizer in low-income neighborhoods and a union organizer representing low wage workers. He has run political campaigns (helping elect St. Louis' first Black mayor and first female prosecutor and helping school districts and other public entities win tax measures).