The Very Strange Story of Michael Geilenfeld’s Judicial Lottery Results.
Posted by Ed Folsom, February 27, 2025.
(Photo: Dept. of Homeland Security via Miami Herald)
Michael Geilenfeld founded the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys in 1985, in Haiti, and continued to run it until at least 2010. At some point toward the end of that run, a Haitian journalist broke a story that Geilenfeld was sexually abusing the kids in his charge there. A Freeport, Maine, man, Paul Kendrick, got wind of the story and undertook a campaign by blog and email to get Geilenfeld prosecuted. Kendrick’s campaign led to Geilenfied being arrested by Haitian authorities, but Geilenfeld was released after spending 237 days in jail when witnesses failed to appear for a court hearing.
Geilenfeld and an affiliated North Carolina-based charity, Hearts with Haiti, sued Kendrick in federal court in Maine, alleging that Kendrick’s allegations were false, defamatory, and worth millions in damages. In 2015, a federal jury in Portland awarded $7 million in damages to Geilenfeld and $7.5 million to Hearts with Haiti. That award was subsequently overturned because the federal court had no jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place, given that Geilenfeld was located outside the U.S., in Haiti, at the pertinent time.
Geilenfeld and Hearts with Haiti then sued Kendrick in state court, in Maine, eventually resulting in a 2019 settlement in which Kendrick’s insurers agreed to pay Hearts with Haiti $3 million, and Geilenfeld nothing. But that was not the end of things.
In January of 2024, Geilenfeld was arrested in Colorado on federal charges out of Miami involving the alleged sexual abuse of Haitian orphans at St. Joseph’s Home for Boys. According to a report in the Miami Herald, last Thursday, February 20, 2025, a federal jury found Geilenfeld guilty “of six counts of engaging in illicit sexual contact with minors in a foreign place and one count of traveling from Miami to Haiti for that purpose.” Each of those charges carries a 30-year statutory maximum. Sentencing is scheduled for May 5.
That’s some crazy stuff. Imagine being Paul Kendrick, getting tagged by a federal jury in Maine for $14.5 million, about half of that for allegedly defaming a guy who later gets convicted by a federal jury in Miami for doing substantially the same thing you were ordered to pay $7 million for saying he did. It would probably seem even more absurd if the damages award hadn’t already been set aside for a lack of jurisdiction that was discovered only after the trial already took place.
On the other hand, imagine being Michael Geilenfeld, thinking you’ve mastered the “no defense like a good offense” thing to the tune of $7 million, only to have the award set aside for technical reasons, and then ending up convicted of basically the same conduct you received the $7 million defamation award for, after your righteous indignation shtick lost its shine.
Imagine being a member of the federal jury in Maine that awarded $7 million to Michael Geilenfeld.
So weird…
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