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Since he was elected Illinois Attorney General in 2018, Kwame Raoul’s biggest headline-grabbing splash came with the release of an exhaustive, 696-page report on sexual abuse by Catholic clerics in Illinois.

It also put him at odds with the church’s highest ranked prelate in the state, Cardinal Blasé Cupich.

“I was raised Catholic, confirmed Catholic. I sent my children to Catholic schools through the eighth grade. It’s difficult for someone like me who came up through the Church,” said Raoul. “All the time my parents lived in Haiti, it was the official religion of the country. It’s very ingrained in my cultural makeup.”

The five year report, which was initiated by Raoul’s predecessor in the office, Lisa Madigan, listed 451 Catholic clerics who had abused at least 1,997 children in Illinois. Previously, Illinois’ six Catholic dioceses had only publicly listed 103 names.

Cardinal Cupich said he was blindsided by the report, a statement Raoul denied. “We’ve been in communication with the church, all the dioceses in Illinois. The church disclosed 80 new names of abusers in just a couple of months after the announcement of our investigation. Then talking to survivors, there were more names that emerged that they had not disclosed,” said Raoul.

Raoul said his office was going to release the report a few weeks earlier but was told the Cardinal was going to be out of town. So the release was delayed. 

“So we waited, chose another date. Ironically, the Cardinal takes off for Rome on the day we release the report. And days later, he gives an interview on the steps of the Vatican where he says he’s surprised to hear 125 names that were not disclosed.”

Raoul says 62 of the 125 names to which Cupich referred were listed on a spreadsheet provided by the Archdiocese, substantiating that the abusers from these religious orders served within the Archdiocese. 

“So some of the names they didn’t want to disclose because they said, these aren’t people we govern. ‘These are people who are part of the various religious orders.’ However, if they ministered within churches in the Archdiocese, or in schools in the Archdiocese, they should be on one, centralized list,” said Raoul.

Part of the problem arises from the governing structure of the Roman Catholic Church. While outsiders think of the church as a top-down, military-like hierarchy, with authority flowing from the Pope to the bishops, the reality is more complex. Religious orders…such as the Jesuits,  Benedictines, Christian Brothers, Franciscans, Augustinians, and many others…operate semi-independently within a diocese. They are loosely under the bishop’s authority, but their members report directly to the head of the order. Religious orders operate most of the high schools in Chicago’s Archdiocese. Some orders have generally been less forthcoming about naming abusing members than has the archdiocese.

“The orders do bear responsibility but if you have these order clerics operating within you diocese, and they have child abusers among them, you the bishop also bear responsibility,” said Raoul.

Raoul said survivors provided names of alleged sex abusers that had not been publicly disclosed. Those names were then turned over to the relevant dioceses and religious orders involved. 

“We didn’t call balls and strikes. We didn’t make a determination of a single priest as being a substantiated case of sexual abuse. The church did. We just brought forth the evidence,” said Raoul.

Raoul explained the main reason for the report was “to offer some measure of healing for survivors who have no other means of addressing the very painful things they endured” because the legal statute of limitations has long run out on these crimes.

Raoul’s Evolution into Politics‍

Raoul’s parents, Dr. Janin Raoul, and his mother Marie Therese, were both Haitian immigrants who met in New York before moving to Chicago. His father practiced internal medicine in Woodlawn and worked at community hospitals.

“My father bought a house in Kenwood in 1967 for $32,000. There was an African-American owner who wanted to sell to another African-American. He was in financial trouble. So that’s how my father got such a good deal on basically this mansion,” said Raoul.

That house sits on the same block where another black politician, Barack Obama, would later buy a house for considerably more money. 

Raoul graduated from University of Chicago Lab School but was admittedly less than a stellar student. His major interest was basketball, but he wasn’t so good that he could earn a scholarship to any school he was interested in attending. He was strong in math, but not in language arts. 

There was considerable family pressure to follow his father into medicine, but Raoul’s older sister pursued a medical career, easing the burden on him. Raoul enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology, seeking to become an engineer. He hated it.

“I didn’t like seeing things in only one way, with only one right or wrong answer,” said Raoul. “It wasn’t inspiring to me at all.” He transferred to DePaul University, thinking he’d pursue a business career until he took a political science course.

“It was led by a professor who encouraged us to debate ideas loudly, passionately, even profanely. I liked to debate and there wasn’t a right or wrong answer,” said Raoul. “Finally, I found a course I looked forward to attending.”

After graduation as a political science major, he took a job with a company that provided packaging materials for McDonalds, traveling the country and meeting with corporate executives. 

Raoul grew up across the street from legendary Black attorney Jewel LaFontant, who encouraged him to go to law school. He enrolled at Chicago-Kent College of Law where he found the academic discipline that eluded him in his undergrad studies.

“Going all the way back to high school, when responding in class, I would start in French, the language of Haitian parents. I developed a hesitancy in speech that still exists today. I tend to overthink what I’m about to say. I think I have an undiagnosed reading disability as well, so for me to comprehend what I’m reading I have to read it several times. That helped in law school because reading for the law requires reading very carefully,” said Raoul.

Raoul was mesmerized by the rhetorical style and political substance of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington. And he lived in the ward represented by Washington’s City Council floor leader, Ald. Tim Evans.

“Washington’s death was devastating to me,” said Raoul. “It was as if I had lost an uncle, somebody I had known personally. I remember crying at the kitchen table watching the funeral. Then I said, someday, I’m going to get involved.”

Evans eventually lost his Fourth Ward aldermanic seat to Toni Preckwinkle. Thinking of politics somewhat romantically and with more than a little naiveté, a young Raoul put himself forward to avenge Evans’ loss and restore the Washington political legacy in the Fourth Ward by challenging Preckwinkle for City Council.

But as Harold Washington often said, politics ain’t beanbag.

He lost.

Badly. 

Twice. 

In 1991 and 1995.

“I was running selfishly for me. As I was in forums, people would tell me we had virtually the same response on questions. Not on everything but on a lot of things. So the question was, why was I running against an incumbent and someone who I mostly agreed with? I was running for myself as opposed to running for the greater good,” said Raoul.

After his second defeat, Raoul wrote to Preckwinkle and said if he couldn’t be an elected official, he wanted to be engaged. He started doing volunteer legal clinics, first out of Preckwinkle’s office and later out of the office of Fifth Ward Ald. Leslie Hairston (who Preckwinkle helped get elected).

In 2004, Barack Obama’s election to U.S. Senate created a vacancy in the State Senate, and Raoul happened to reside in Obama’s district. Problem was, powerful State Sen. Emil Jones favored another candidate for the position.

Raoul gathered a group of impressive financial backers, including John Rogers of Ariel Investments (who Raoul had known since childhood) and Jim Reynolds of Loop Capital. That, combined with the support of his onetime adversary Preckwinkle, and his onetime high school classmate. Raoul won the appointment.

As a Politician, Raoul Worked Across the Aisle

Just as Obama was leaving Springfield and Raoul was coming in, Raoul said Obama gave him some valuable advice.

“Kwame, you should really spend your time getting to know legislators from other parts of the state,” Obama told Raoul. “And really spend some time getting to know people on the other side of the aisle. Find out about their families. Discover things you have in common family wise and policy wise. He said, “if you do that, it will benefit you.”

Raoul said Obama’s advice paid dividends. Raoul became close to a conservative Republican senator, Tim Bivins who’s a former sheriff.  The two played basketball together.

“Tim knew how hard it was to fire a bad cop. He introduced a bill on police licensing who he could get no support for. Except for a guy named John Milner, a former police chief, and me,” said Raoul.

After George Floyd’s killing, Raoul made another run at Bivins idea. Bivins brought sheriffs to the table. Milner got police chiefs at the table. “And I had a good enough relationship with DuPage County States Attorney Bob Berlin that he helped get prosecutors at the table,” said Raoul.

Until then, you could only fire a police officer in Illinois if they were convicted of a felony or sex related misdemeanors. “As a result of our meetings, we came up with a more robust decertification process. It happened after I was out of the Senate but grew out of relationships I developed while there.”

While in the Senate, Raoul said he was also known for “taking on difficult assignments that had political consequences that nobody else wanted to touch.” He also sponsored legislation to protect the voting rights of minorities during redistricting, abolition of the death penalty, and a crack down on the payday loan industry.

In 2018, Raoul won a crowded eight-candidate primary that included former Gov. Pat Quinn for the Democratic nomination for Attorney General. He went on to a general election victory that fall and was re-elected in 2020.

Raoul as Illinois’ Attorney General

Under Lisa Madigan, the attorney general’s office focused on consumer protectionism and protection of domestic violence victims. Raoul has centered on ways to impact gun violence and its victims.

“There was an unwritten rule that denied victims compensation if they had done something historically to break the law or they were perceived to have contributed to their victimization. For example, a young man was shot, murdered, while shooting craps. A staffer was going to reject the mother’s claim for burial expenses. We changed that,” said Raoul.

Raoul also said his office has invested in a gun-tracing platform called Crime Gun Connect which is now available to police departments around the state. “It will show you time to crime from when a gun is sold from a gun dealer, say in Indiana, to the initial buyer. You can call up how often the gun had been used in a crime. It begins to give the cops data to trace gun traffickers because there are people who target sales to people they know are going to do bad things with guns,” Raoul explained.

Raoul’s office has also trained police departments statewide in how to use the Red Flag Act, which allows police to petition courts to confiscate guns from unstable people before they commit a crime. 

He’s also working with Chicago and suburban police to crack down on organized retail theft rings. “They’ve made a lot of busts due to the funding we provided. This isn’t ordinary shoplifting. It’s really sophisticated, with items monetized on on-line platforms and proceeds going to finance other criminal activities. Gun trafficking. Even terrorism,” said Raoul.

And Raoul said he’s collaborating with other attorney generals in other states on a bi-partisan basis to rein in social media sites that have had a damaging effect on young people. 

“We’re investigating and collecting data,” said Raoul. “The damage that’s been done is tremendous. You see it in your own family. You see it with folks you know. I’ve got friends whose kid was bullied into committing suicide. The anxiety that’s so prevalent in the younger generation. Algorithms that pull you into dark holes. We’re investigating and we’re going to go after them,” Raoul promised.

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Raoul’s Political Future – what he is Interested in

As for his own political future, some have speculated that Raoul could follow Barack Obama once again, in a run for the U.S. Senate if Dick Durbin decides to hang ‘em up in 2026. But Raoul flatly denied any interest in moving his work address to Washington, D.C. 

“First off, I just got re-elected Attorney General last year. But I don’t have any interest in going to DC. It wouldn’t be fulfilling for me. Durbin once asked me to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. About half the committee is former state AGs. And they all look miserable!” said Raoul. “I hold an incredible office where on a weekly basis you can do good with nobody else messin’ with you to dictate how you’re gonna do it!”

“The only office I would consider other than running for AG would be Governor,” said Raoul. “For similar reasons. You can get things done. I don’t want to be in office just to appear on MSNBC or CNN.”

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