Broderick Miller has spent about half of his life behind bars, but the 45-year-old wants it known there’s an explanation.
“The whole reason I got locked up was because I was using drugs,” Miller said in an interview at a Maryland prison. “The whole reason I was using drugs was because of the deacon.”
Cinder block walls, a heavy metal door and a large hallway window enclose the room where Miller, who goes by “Brodie,” recounted in April how he turned to a Catholic church in Baltimore when he needed food as a teen, only for a clergyman to prey on his vulnerability.
Deacon Thomas Kuhl began assaulting Miller around 1995, at first offering food or money for sex, Miller alleges in court documents. When Miller’s nerves got in the way of Kuhl’s desires, he introduced the teen to heroin to calm him down. It didn’t take long for Miller to get hooked, and for Kuhl to leverage Miller’s addiction to prolong the abuse for a decade.
For as long as he remembers, Miller suppressed pain and guilt with opioids and other drugs, often committing burglaries or other thefts to support his addiction and earning more than 20 years in jail or prison. Each time he was locked up and thereby forced into sobriety, Miller endured nightmares — like Kuhl throwing him into a pit of needles.
Miller once hoped these details would make it into a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Baltimore, but now his story is laid out in a form submitted in the church’s bankruptcy case. His is one of more than 170 claims submitted to date, and he asked that it be made public, rather than shielded in court records like the rest. His filing comes ahead of a hearing Monday in which six sex abuse survivors will testify about their torment — the second such proceeding — and about two weeks before a May 31 deadline for claims.
“It might give somebody else the courage to come forward and share,” Miller said of his decision to tell his story publicly. “I mean, why not? I had such a horrible life … This might be my chance to do something good.”
For a decade of rape and the lifelong aftereffects, Miller is asking for $25 million, the impact of which could be both practical and profound.
“I don’t have any big vacations or diamond rings or none of that s— planned,” Miller said. “My big intention is to be normal, to walk into Safeway and buy eggs and not have to steal them.”
The archdiocese will have an opportunity to challenge Miller’s claim, if it wishes.
But the church years ago acknowledged there was merit to his story, and it added Kuhl last year to its list of personnel credibly accused of abusing children.
Fending for himself
Miller collected baseball cards and rode bicycles like a normal kid, but his childhood was anything but ordinary: His parents suffered from drug addiction and he often was hungry.
“Me and my sister had to fend for ourselves,” Miller said. “There was times I had to go steal out the gas station to feed my mom.”
In 1995, when he was 15 or 16, a friend mentioned a deacon at a church in Highlandtown who gave money to boys in the Southeast Baltimore neighborhood who needed clothes or food.
Following Mass at Our Lady of Pompei one day, Miller’s friend told him to “holler at him, talk to the deacon,” the claim says. “Hey, young man,” Miller recalled Kuhl saying, before reaching into his breast pocket and handing him two or three $5 bills.
About a week later, Kuhl came across Miller on Eastern Avenue, according to the claim. He gestured to Miller to climb into his blue Ford Bronco, offered the teen food and began asking questions, “trying to figure out my parental situation, you know: Was I going to be easy for him?” Miller recalled. Then abruptly, Kuhl “asked me had I ever had sex with a man?”
“I was a kid, I was, like, laughing. I had a nervous smile or something like that,” Miller recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t be shy. Don’t be nervous. Get over here.’ I remember he touched me.”
After assaulting Miller for the first time, Kuhl gave him his phone number — which Miller can recite to this day — and implored him not to tell anyone. Miller said Kuhl told him to call if he needed something. He did two weeks later.
“I was desperate,” Miller said.
When Miller called, Kuhl would pick him up and assault him in the car, a vacant house or Kuhl’s home on Woodbourne Avenue in Homeland in North Baltimore, according to Miller’s proof of claim form. The deacon generally gave Miller $35 each time.
But Kuhl grew frustrated that Miller’s nervous laughter was getting in the way of his sexual function, according to his bankruptcy court claim. One time after he picked up Miller, Kuhl stopped in a house off Greenmount Avenue, the claim says. Afterward, he produced a capsule and dumped out its white, powdery contents.
“He said, ‘Try this. It’ll calm your nerves,’” Miller recalled.
Miller didn’t know it was heroin, but liked the way the drug made him feel. Before long, maybe a matter of weeks, he was addicted and his dependence on Kuhl intensified.
Kuhl, a diabetic, later taught Miller how to use heroin intravenously, according to the claim.
The claim said the deacon drugged and raped Miller approximately 185 times from February 1996, when the deacon introduced him to heroin, to about October 1996, when at 17, he was arrested for the first time for stealing to support his addiction.
“I said back then, ‘This is going to be my life. I’m going to be a drug addict and a sex toy for him,’” he recalled.
Kuhl’s abuse continued for years as Miller cycled in and out of prison, sobriety and relapse, but became less frequent because he came to view Miller “as a drug addict, and someone who was not clean,” the claim says. At one point, Kuhl suggested Miller could make money by selling himself to other men on the street.
Coffee and cigarettes
Kuhl was bald, bearded and bespectacled, Miller recalled.
He wore short-sleeve, button-down shirts and used suspenders to hold his pants up to his “beer belly.” He collected antiques and listened to classical music, drank Folger’s coffee and smoked Tareyton cigarettes.
“His breath always smelled like coffee and cigarettes,” Miller said.
Before he was ordained a deacon in 1988, Kuhl was arrested for soliciting an undercover male police officer, according to a Maryland Attorney General report that documented almost a century of clergy abuse in the Baltimore diocese.
The pastor at Our Lady of Pompei, himself accused of abuse, apparently knew about the arrest before he hired Kuhl, said the report, which was released last year.
Nonetheless, Kuhl served in various capacities in the archdiocese, both as a teacher at Catholic schools and as a deacon, until 2006.
That year another man reported to the archdiocese that Kuhl and the man he lived with, another teacher at Our Lady of Pompei High School, sexually abused him in the mid-1990s when he was a student, the attorney general’s report said. The assaults happened for about a year on Saturday nights at the teachers’ house.
The archdiocese removed Kuhl and the other teacher from their roles. It forbade Kuhl from having contact with minors or performing clerical duties. But the report said the pastor at Our Lady of Pompei ignored the mandate, allowing Kuhl to preside over several services.
In 2009, the archdiocese paid $28,000 to the other man who said he was abused to settle his claim, according to the report.
“The victim also believed there may have been other victims because he ‘rarely saw Kuhl with men older than their early 20s,’” the report reads.
The archdiocese petitioned the Vatican for laicization of Kuhl in 2012, and Pope Francis dismissed him from the clerical state in 2015, the same year he died.
That was after a man incarcerated in Hagerstown sent the church a letter in 2011 saying he’d been abused by Kuhl from 1995 to 2005, beginning when he was 15. The report said the teen “met Kuhl when he was ‘bumming for food.’”
‘A fresh start’
That man was Miller, he said. After seeing news “about another incident going on in the church and I started thinking about the deacon,” he wrote the church and “told them everything.”
Baltimore Police detectives visited him to take a report, according to his claim. Weeks later, an archdiocesan official and priest followed suit.
The bankruptcy claim says they apologized and offered “therapy for life,” but explained he had no legal recourse because Maryland’s statute of limitations for child sex abuse lawsuits had expired for him.
Archdiocese spokesman Christian Kendzierski said the church contacted law enforcement after receiving Miller’s letter and offered him assistance. The church acknowledges “any instance of a child being abused is a horrendous experience and has life altering effects,” he said.
Miller was released from prison that time in February 2015, dropped off on the streets of Baltimore.
“My very first night home,” he said, “I slept in a port-o-pot,” at the corner of Art Museum Drive and Charles Street.
By May 2015, he had been arrested again after breaking into several cars at an engineering firm in Bolton Hill, court records show.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Charles J. Peters sentenced Miller to nine years in prison for three counts of rogue and vagabond, but modified the sentence so Miller could participate in a court-ordered drug treatment program.
Ahead of graduation from the program, his counselor wrote in a letter that Miller “made excellent progress in his recovery from both drug abuse and depression.” He also was completing a welding apprenticeship, but feared living on the street until he could secure a paying job.
“I know that he has shared this concern with you,” his trade program coordinator wrote in an email to Jerri Burkhardt, of the archdiocese’s Office for Child and Youth Protection, on Dec. 8, 2016. “I certainly hope that perhaps you may have resources to assist him with securing stable housing.”
Burkhardt wrote back the same day saying she hoped to help.
Miller said Burkhardt started to assist him by searching for housing resources, but pivoted to attempting to negotiate a settlement for his abuse. The archdiocese launched a private mediation program in 2007, reaching settlements with more than 100 victims of decades-old abuse.
The church referred Miller to a lawyer. Mediation was scheduled about a month later in front of a retired judge.
“During that time, I relapsed,” Miller recalled. “I took some Xanax and woke up in jail.” He pleaded guilty in a string of break-ins — at a meat shop, a jewelry store, a florist — crisscrossing the city-county line.
“We can track that his abuse is basically the cause of a lot of his criminal behavior and the drugs,” his public defender, Angela Shelton, said in court.
Baltimore County Circuit Judge Jan M. Alexander sentenced him to 12 years in prison.
The attorney helping Miller with mediation said in a letter to Miller that the archdiocese wouldn’t negotiate while he was incarcerated.
In a letter to Alexander, in which he pleaded unsuccessfully to be released from prison for drug treatment, Miller attributed the relapse to reliving his abuse in preparation for mediation.
About five years later, he was switching housing units in prison when he noticed an edition of The Baltimore Sun, which he rarely saw, by a trash can. The paper featured an article about the Child Victims Act, legislation that would erase time limits for sex abuse lawsuits.
“The first thing I thought was, ‘God wanted me to see this paper,’” Miller recalled.
He wrote to his current attorney, Joseph Donahue, on April 16, 2023, five days after Gov. Wes Moore signed the legislation into law. Attorney and client began discussing a lawsuit and going over Miller’s story ahead of the date the law was scheduled to take effect: Oct. 1, 2023.
To find out that that archdiocese declared bankruptcy before they could formalize a lawsuit infuriated Miller, he said.
“I felt like they raped me all over again,” he said.
But they refocused on filing his bankruptcy claim, hoping that he will be compensated for a life altered by abuse.
“It would mean that I don’t have to live in parks, abandoned houses, cars. It would be like a fresh start,” he said, calculating mentally his time in prison before announcing the sum: 22.5 years. “I got to see some of this life.”
