A West Palm Beach lawyer who had advocated for and represented sexual abuse survivors for the past 20 years had his home raided on March 15 by agents armed with three warrants. According to the Miami New Times, as soon as the agents came through the door they found him “actively downloading child pornography using peer-2-peer software.”
Michael Dolce was a longtime Sunday school teacher who was known for being one of Florida’s most active advocates for reforming reforming sexual abuse statutes. Now, he’s facing 20 years in prison on a child porn possession charge.
Dolce, claimed to be a survivor of child molestation and made a name for himself lobbying for HB 525, a bill passed in 2010 that removed the statute of limitations for cases involving the sexual abuse of victims under the age of 16. His work was met with opposition from the Catholic Church and even criminal defense lawyers’ associations who said that litigating decades-old molestation claims would be unfair.
“The law was protecting the predators. They were encouraged under the law to silence their victims, to threaten them,” he said in an interview after the bill was passed. “It was an amazing day [when the bill passed]. I wept with joy. I was overwhelmed by relief.”
In an interview from 2009, he said that he had been teaching Sunday school for 14 years. His professional profile said he “brings to his work the insight and commitment of a survivor, having himself been the victim of sexual abuse as a young boy at the hands of a sadistic predator.”
“We fight a fight that can often lead to a disappointing end, but we still have to fight it because what happened to our clients cannot be allowed to continue,” Dolce said in a 2020 trade magazine interview.
The FBI said said that during the raid, they were forced to enter his residence “as a result of a forceful breach on the door when Dolce did not respond to commands by law enforcement to come to the door. Tactical surveillance and entry teams revealed that Dolce was alone in the residence, awake on a bed at the time FBI personnel first knocked.”
The FBI’s affidavit says Dolce’s Samsung laptop had folders open containing multiple illicit images. One subfolder was titled “Sweet Pedo Stars” and had images of a girl between the age of 9 and 11. Agents say at least 1,997 child porn images were on the computer.
Dolce is behind bars awaiting his arraignment, which is scheduled for mid-April.
