Disclaimer.

This episode contains graphic descriptions of sexual abuse of miners that can be disturbing to some listeners.

Raoul Gonzalez only knew one rule when it came to his dad.

Never touched the crocodile skin briefcase.

It was heavy, polished or not the edges.

His dad carried it everywhere, on planes, into hotels.

Even when he came to visit Raoul, the briefcase remained.

At an arms bridge.

He never left his side.

He guarded it like it held state secrets, and as far as.

Raoul knew, it might.

Because Raou's dad was mysterious, everything about him felt a bit strange, the way he spoke, the way he showed up unannounced, like a character art of a spy movie.

Praauo knew his dad was an executive for the Shell Oil Corporation who had to travel a lot for work, so his visits were always an event.

He visited us like when we were really young.

I have the memories, like when he was going to go home.

I was really happy, like wow, my dad is coming.

And I was always at front of my house waiting for his car to arrive.

This is Raoul speaking years later.

In his thirties, trying to make sense of the man who raised him.

Raoul grew up in Cornavaca, a large colonial town just south of Mexico City, in a small house with his mom, Blanclada, his younger brother Christian, and his older half brother Omar, who had a different father.

His mom was loving, but strict, working class, deeply religious.

She met Rabul's father in Tijuana at a cafe when she was just nineteen and he was fifty six.

He said his name was Concer Rivas.

She was impressed by his fancy job at shell, but sometimes he hinted at something more.

He never lived with them, never even spend the night.

Said it was safer that way.

No, even when he went to visitors, he stayed in a hotel.

He didn't sleep in my house.

He came and went.

He'd show up for a week and then vanished for months.

Then one day he would be back like nothing happened, And every time it was the same routine.

Gives in hand stories about far away countries and a new destination in mind.

His dad's name was JOSEL Rivas, but that wasn't the only name he used.

He uses a lot of names.

The favorite name for him was Jose Rivas.

He uses Raoul as me senor Raoul, and the other one that is in my certificate when I was born, it says Jimelberto Gonzalez Rodriguez.

That's another name.

His dad never really explained why he had so many names.

He just said it was part of his job to keep them safe.

But eventually blanket demand that answers a reason for all the secrecy, so he told her the truth, at least his version of it.

My dad told my mom that he was a CIA agent.

Saying so much the aliases, why he didn't visit often, and how he had the money to take the kids on lavish trips to Disney World, to Spain, Italy, Colombia.

And he visited us like maybe three or four times in a year, like months.

But most of the times we traveled with him, sometimes my brother, my older brother Omar, sometimes myself alone with my dad, and sometimes the two of us with my dad.

To the kids, it felt like an adventure, like they were being pulled into something special.

Their dad wasn't like other dads.

He flew across oceans, he spoke different languages, he carried a briefcase, that no one could touch as a kid, I really imagine what might be in that briefcase, maybe maps, or all contacts, maybe even something top secret.

He never imagined it carried something that would destroy his life because a man with a briethcase wasn't with the CIA, He wasn't.

Even an executive as Shell.

He was Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a priest, a liar, and Raoul's father.

Because sometimes evil doesn't kick down the door.

Sometimes it pulls into your driveway, carrying gifts, wearing a suit, calling itself that.

My name is.

Alena Sadah and this is secret scandal, the many Secrets of Martial Marseil.

Episode seven, The Family Trips will be right back the tape you've been listening to was recorded by Jason Barry's an interview he did with Raoul Gonzalez in the early twenty tens as part of his investigation into the Legionaries of Christ.

You may remember Jason from episode three.

He's a journalist who first exposed Moselle in the Hartford Current.

Over the years, Jason spoke to dozens of people, victims, former priests, insiders, but this interview this one stayed with him and just the heads up, what you're about to hear is hard.

What Raoul went through as a child is painful, and from time to time you'll hear Jason's voice on the other side asking the hard questions.

Raoul's story begins when he was just a kid, right.

I grew up like a normal child on my neighborhood with my neighbors, my friends, and my brother.

Raoul lived in the typical Mexican neighborhood.

There was school, cartoons and soccer in the streets.

Raoul's idyllic childhood change in nineteen eighty seven when his father surprised him with a solo trip just for the two of them.

His mother wasn't invited.

She had to stay home to work and to care for Raoul's baby brother, Christian.

This time they went to a place Raoul had only ever heard about in geography class Colombia.

It's kind of some islands in Karagena or you have to get there by boat.

That's the only way.

They have like little hotels inside small hotels when you can have a night.

They also stopped in Bogota, the capital, at some point, but most of the memories from those trips blurred together, the airports, the taxi, the hotel rooms, except.

For one morning.

That one never faded, the morning when he realized his dad was in bed with him.

These abuse happened in the early morning.

I don't know exactly the time.

We were waking up, and I feel like he was He started to pull out my pants and he introduced.

His Spanish, and the point of his Spanish in my well.

I don't know how to say the world.

There Will sometimes has trouble finding the right words in English.

But what he's trying to put into words is that his father sexually assaulted him.

He was just a kid, seven years old, but he instantly knew that this was not supposed to happen.

And that's when I moved.

I said, like, whoa, this is not right, this is not like I don't know, my instinct, like human instinct tell me, like WHOA, you can't.

So I moved and he stopped.

Some of his memories of that morning are hazy, like what exactly happened afterwards.

He still has trouble speaking about it.

He remembers a heavy paralyzing feeling.

Other things are crystal clear.

I remember that I had a breakfast, like my orange juice and my eggs.

It's not really sometimes normal that when you're seven years old you remember what you have for breakfast.

So that impression caused me, like I was eating, like having my breakfast.

I don't know what was going on in my mind.

What happened before that breakfast, the confusion, the fear.

He buried it deep, because when you're seven, you don't have the words.

You don't even know how to think about it.

Maybe it was just a bad dream, Maybe it was something strange that would never happen again.

So he lucked it away.

A couple of days later, I flew back to Mexico.

He got home, hogged his mom and said nothing.

My mom trusted him because he was my dad.

He was my dad, and like it's like if okay, if you have your dad, well okay, well go with your daddy, go on a trip.

It's no problem.

My mom never imagines that I was suffering abuses.

Blanca had no reason to doubt him.

No one thinks the father of their kids is molesting them.

She also had no idea that the man they called Rosse Rivas was actually a priest at the height of his power.

This was thirty years after he assaulted Joseb Aarbae in Rome.

In all those years, Mozille had been completely free to go on abusing innocent boys, and now even his son had become his victim.

Raoul never told anyone what happened on that trip to Colombia, not then, not for decades.

He kept it to himself.

And as hard as it is to understand, he still loved his dad, still trusted him, because that's what kids do.

They believe the people they love are good.

Months went by, and just like alvoys, once in a blue moon, his father would show up and announced, smiling, carrying the same crocodile skin briefcase.

He had that soft voice, that way of making everything sound like an adventure.

He told oh, he was going somewhere new, someplace far, but this time it wasn't just the vacation.

And he said, okay, Raoul, you are leaving.

You're traveling to Ireland to learn your English.

And I said to n English, okay, and I just like a boy, you just followed the instructions with my dad, and I traveled to Ireland.

He started classes at a regular public school in Dublin.

He was placed with a local family, strangers who treated him kindly, but everything fell foreign.

The city was gray and wet, and he really missed home Cornovaca.

But more than anything, he missed his older brother Homage.

Sometimes I treat I have.

I had trips to Spain to see my dad and to see my brother Omar, and in that trip happened the second abuse.

He was in Madrid and the hotel holiday inn.

My dad always said like he had a sort a pain in the leg, so we have to put our leg to his his leg to warm it up.

And okay, you have a short leg.

You're old, you are an old person.

Okay, But then he started to touching us so to bring us his hand to his pen is.

He always told us that how to kiss had to kiss him because he was That's the way we were going to learn how to kiss a girl when we grew.

Up and you were ten eleven years old.

Ten whoa, I can have to stop.

That's hard, it's hard, I understand.

Just went on for a number of years.

Yeah.

It was during one of those trips that Raould finally understood what was actually inside his dad's briefcase and why he never left his side.

Mazielle opened the briefcase once more and took out a polar camera.

He handed it to Raoul.

And he said, I told my brother Omar, like you have to take the photos and I have to masturbate him, because that's what's the instructions.

And I gave my brother the polaroid camera and we talked the photos and we like we kept a bunch of photos there and we didn't know what happened with the photos.

The photos went straight into the briefcase and then vanished, lost between pills, fake passports and magazines.

But he had a magazine, pornograph pornography, magazine parentheses.

He always show us pornography like magazines, a hardcore not women like hardcore pornographie.

He carried it like it was nothing, through airports, Vatican meetings, family homes, like he was just another bag.

That's how confident he was, just strolling through life with the evidence tucked under his arm, like no one would ever stop him, like he was above it all.

So making up my mind these days, like okay, what do you want the photos for?

So my guessing is, like my feeling is those photos maybe were passing inside other people like a pornography.

Matsiel had photos he took while molesting his own children, images that captured ra Mark in some of the most dramatic moments of their lives, and those photos disappeared.

No one knows where they are, for not knowing what happened to them is something he has to live with, the fear that they might still exist in a door somewhere or in someone else's hymns.

And even though in Mark their entire childhood, never spoke about it, not until their thirties.

They suffered this for nearly a decade, taking trips with their that slipping in separate rooms where each of them was abused, traveling with their father across countries.

By day there were tourists posing for photos, visiting monuments, walking through historic cities, and by night, more abuse, more photos, sometimes with other people.

In Kartakna, we went to.

Rosarium, but with the difference that he hired prostitutes.

Two prostitutes.

Have the picture with my dad and the prostitutes as well.

Alongside those photos, Mazill also get pictures from their trips to the Vatican, like the times I met the Pope.

Yeah, we were in a small chapel and John Paul the second.

The Pope was offering mass there and I was on the really front of the chapel, and he came at the front to start shaking hands, and they shake the hand with him.

Laulil even got photos with the Swiss cards.

Do you ever compare all the photographs he showed you, the pornography on the one side and the photographs of you and the Vatican on the other.

Well, it's like a demon that transforms his himself, like when he wants to be a good person and he wants and when he wants to be a bad person, a good person when acts like our daddy, and a demon when he acts like a predator.

For years, Raoul couldn't make sense of who his father really was, but he was beginning to understand what many experienced that Mazielle had two faces, the face he showed to the world and the one he hid in the dark.

He was a father with gifts and stories, and a monster with a suitcase full of secrets.

But secrets can only stay hidden for so long.

Back in Guarnavaca, Blanca was finally going to figure out who Joser Rillas really was.

And what he had been hiding all along more than that after the break.

It was nineteen ninety seven, months after Jason Barry had exposed mysel in the Hartford Current.

After some years living abroad, Raoul had returned home to Mexico.

He was seventeen now.

He went back to school in Guarneralaca.

He tried to live like a normal teenage, tried to block out what his father had done to him.

For years, the visits became less frequent, the trip stopped.

But sometimes the past doesn't stay buried.

Sometimes it jumps off a new stand.

It was a.

Regular afternoon in Cornavaca, hot loud street full of vendors.

Blanca was running errands.

She passed the same corner she always did, with the same new stand she'd walk by a hundred times.

But this time something stopped her.

A magazine called Contendo.

Right there on the cover a face she knew, the square glasses, the sharp stare.

She knew it instantly.

It was a man she had loved and the father of her children.

But the name beneath it didn't say Josse Rivas.

It said Marcil Marciel de Goado, and the headline read, who are the Legionaies of Christ?

Blanka couldn't believe it.

And she saw this magazine called Contindo and whoa Like he said what and he bought the magazine.

That's it, and then she brought it to the house.

Raoul and or Mar happened to be home.

She showed them the magazine, almost like she was trying to prove herself wrong.

Raoul took one look on Froze.

The moment stayed with him.

You can hear it in his voice even now.

Maybe that's why you'll hear Raoul coughing throughout the interview.

It might be a nervous stick, the kind some people get when words get stuck in their throat, when memories start to surface but can't quite make their way out.

And I said, whoa.

The two of us went like, God, what's going on?

No, you knew it was your father.

Yeah, And then.

He called my mom said, al rawl, my dad, you are in a magazine and he said, no, really which magazine?

Contindo?

And he said, oh, it's not me.

And he said, okay, I'm in New York.

I have to take the first plane to Mexico to see what's going on.

And then he put in contact with me and he said, hey, Raul, I'm gonna send you this envelope with money, and you have to go to all the places puestos periodico.

His father told him to buy every copy of the magazine he could find, every newsstand, every store all of Cordnavaca.

Why it clean.

It took him all day.

And I started traveling, run downtown, all the hills courts and still buying up the magazines.

Even the guys that sells that magazine told me, hey, no, no, no, leave me someone, but I'm still buying for you.

I'm still buying this of you.

Okay.

I kept the magazines and he phoned me at night and he said, you have the magazines.

He said, yeah, I have the magazines.

Okay, I'm gonna send this guy with like a chauffeur with bags and you have to keep through how you say magazine magazines, put them on the bags and just take them away.

That's when it became undeniable for hours.

This was real.

His dad was also a powerful priest who ran an international Catholic empire.

And they said, whoa Catholic church the most powerful in the world.

And then we said, okay, that's why our dad told us that where he worked, the people were really dangerous.

Well, couldn't make sense of it.

His mind was full of confusion, and the nile all dangled together.

But then he grabbed the magazine again and read the word abuser.

And that's when it clicked.

All the memories he had buried, kim brushing back, all the things he couldn't name for years.

It was all real and it had a name.

Now.

So did you say anything to him?

No?

Never, wow, Ma never had a conversation with him about being a priest.

Never, even after the magazine, even magazine.

Yeah, but we were so afraid of comfort him, like, ah, that's.

A liar, that's you.

So we were, to be honest, we were we were like really afraid of what was going on when we saw that magazine.

And so no one talked about it.

The family stayed silent, but things started to shift, Like the time Asil suggested to Blanca that Christian, their youngest son, should also go to Ireland to study English when he turned eight, just like Raoul.

My mom wants, or like a Kate like my dad said, he I want to bring Christian with a holiday and my mom said no, wait, waitit wait, my dad said why because my mom said, you know why, Raoul, you know why.

You know what you did.

I'm not giving you my child.

It was the first time Blanca said it aloud, and the last time Mazille ever mentioned taking Christian anywhere.

By then, everyone in the house had seen the magazine, They read the accusations.

They knew, but this the closest Mazille ever came to a confrontation with his own family.

Raoul had always suspected his father wasn't who he said he was, but now that he knew it, he didn't know what to do with that.

He couldn't talk to his mom, he couldn't talk to his brother, so he just kept it all inside.

He tried to live like a normal teenager, tried to focus on school, but the truth kept slipping through the cracks like water in a sinking boat.

I felt like really bad.

I don't know how to express the feeling, but I was.

It was not normal what I was feeling.

He called his dad, hoping for help, that one person he should have been afraid to call.

But sometimes when you're drowning, you reach for the hand that pushed you in.

And Masiel, he said he just needed rest.

He told him to take a pill and.

I said, pasted one week or two weeks.

And he followed me again, he said, how are you feeling?

I said, no, I'm feeling worse.

I'm not getting any I'm not getting better.

So myself threw him to Madrid and took him to a psychiatrist, but not just any psychiatrist.

He called in someone he trusted, someone who wouldn't ask too many questions.

And then he told me, Okay, we're gonna treat you very well because you're recommended by the father or something like that, and.

I felt like secure.

I said okay, and then tell me what's happening with you?

And I couldn't never express that I had that all my life occurred abuses, but I told him that I was I had a feeling like I was thinking if I was almost sexual.

And he said, what do you think that?

I don't, oh, I think I'm homosexual.

Because I was feeling guilty that all the abuse, that I was guilty.

That my that abuse and I.

Kept the abuses going on and he said, the doctor said, no, you know howmosexual.

This is something that is going to pass.

Just nineteen couldn't figure out what he felt He didn't have words for any of it.

He kept looking for his dad for comfort.

But how do you ask for help when the person who hurt you is the same one telling you everything is fine.

I think that the worst part that really didn't The only time where I rest, that I could rest myself is when I sleeped.

When I was sleeping all the day, I was thinking, it's like it was like an obsession of what happened all my life.

If I was guilty of this, this is this was this my fault.

During this difficult period, Raoul staying in an apartment in Madrid, one that belonged to a friend of his father's.

He shared the space with a woman and a twelve year old girl, Norma and Normita.

He knowed them for years.

They were close.

Normita had even joined them on some other family trips around the world.

But the first time he met them was much earlier, when he was just a kid.

Raoul remembers getting a call from his dad inviting him to visit him in Rome.

He was eight or nine years old.

He picked me up on the airport on a Mercedes Bloo Mercedes and he brought me to this apartment.

And when I got into the apartment.

There was like three women and a little.

Girl, sad quietly looking around at these unfamiliar faces.

He didn't know who they were, so he asked, and that's when Massiel told him.

These are your your aunts, and this is your sister.

Okay, call her your little sister, like we say in Mexican Ermanita.

For anyone who didn't grow up in a Latino family, this might sound strange, but in Mexico, anyone close is considered family.

Your mother's best friend, your tea, the neighbor's next door also your tea.

Half the woman in your life are teas.

So Jaul didn't question that.

Not at first.

It just felt like another layer of strange secret world his father had built around him.

But now, ten years later, living in that apartment in Madrid with Norma and Urnita, with all the lights and secrets unraveling, it finally clicked.

Norma wasn't just a close friend.

Normita wasn't just the little girl who joined their family trips.

His dad, the man who lied about his name, his job, who spent years abusing him, who lived a secret life as a founder of a global religious empire, also had another family.

This is secret Scandal, The Many Secrets of Marcel Mazielle.

Sacred Scandal The Many Secrets of Marcelle Moselle is a production of AHA Podcast in partnership with Iheartmichael Tura Podcast Network, and is hosted by me Elena Sadah, written by Malissa Hendrix and Alvalosaspedes, Produced by Alvalo Cspes and Robert Tagarza.

Research and reporting by Robertagarza, edited by Jasmine Rometo with the help of Carmen Graterol.

Fact checking by Annabella Tovar, the vocal coach for me Elenezada is Ina Tabia.

Executive producers at A Her Podcast are Carmen graterov, Isaac Lee, and j H Khr.

Mixing and sound design by Patrick and Jones.

Original music by Darko and I Am based on Patrick Hart's original composition.

Executive producers that I Heard are Leo Gomez and Arlene Santana.

Alexis Cardosa also serves as producer.

Sircars Scandal was created by Melanie Bartley and Paula Varos