A judge on Tuesday said she will review an internal Seton Hall report the school wants to hide from plaintiffs in a sex abuse case targeting the Newark archdiocese. (Photo by New Jersey Monitor)
NEWARK — New Jersey may be one step closer to knowing what Seton Hall University has been hiding regarding sexual abuse claims involving the school’s clergy.
Superior Court Avion M. Benjamin on Tuesday ordered Seton Hall to provide her with an internal investigative report the school commissioned on the sex abuse claims, saying she needs to read the unredacted report to determine if plaintiffs in a wide-ranging sex abuse case targeting the Archdiocese of Newark should get a copy.
Benjamin’s ruling is likely just one step in what could be a long slog toward learning what’s in the Seton Hall report. But it’s a step in the right direction, one that could lead us to discover the true scale of what looks like a massive cover-up at Seton Hall and in the archdiocese.
“The Catholic Church has always suggested that sexual abuse is just an isolated, bad apple, and our argument in this litigation is it’s not just a bad apple. It’s an orchard,” said attorney John Baldante, one of the lawyers representing hundreds of plaintiffs suing the Newark archdiocese.
The Seton Hall report — referred to as the Latham report after the law firm that produced it in 2019 — is at the center of a controversy involving the school’s new president, Monsignor Joseph Reilly.
Seton Hall commissioned the report as part of its effort to review the actions of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who led the Archdiocese of Newark for 14 years and was removed from ministry in 2018 over allegations that he sexually abused a teenager while serving as a priest in New York.
Politico New Jersey has reported the Latham report says Reilly knew about sex abuse claims when he ran Seton Hall’s seminary and did not properly report them. Despite having access to the report’s findings, Seton Hall officials chose Reilly to become its president in 2024.
The school has said news stories have falsely portrayed Reilly, but Politico has letters the school sent to Reilly in 2019 and 2020 that say Reilly knew about sexual misconduct claims involving seminarians “and did not report such allegations” to school officials.
Lawyers in the case targeting the Newark archdiocese — which was first filed in 2019 and later consolidated because there are so many plaintiffs — say they did not know about the Latham report until Politico first reported on it in December, even though defendants in the case (including Seton Hall) were ordered years ago to hand over relevant internal records. After a February hearing in the case where Benjamin expressed incredulity that the report had remained secret during the yearslong litigation, Seton Hall filed a motion for a protective order to keep the report private.
The school’s lawyers argued Tuesday in Benjamin’s Newark courtroom that attorney-client privilege shields the report and all accompanying documents from public view. Ruling otherwise, they argued, would create a “chilling” effect by signaling to other entities that internal documents could become public.
Or it could send a signal to other entities that when they uncover incidents of sexual misconduct, they can’t keep them a secret.
“The Seton Hall lawyer said a couple times that they were entitled to keep this secret and privileged because they had a common interest with the Vatican in preventing child sex abuse. But the fact that they’re fighting so hard even today to keep it secret shows you that’s not true,” Gabriel Magee, another of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, told reporters after Tuesday’s hearing.
It’s not clear when Benjamin will get her hands on the report and other documents (a Seton Hall lawyer said he did not know how many documents there are). But for the lawyers representing the hundreds of people who say they were abused by clergy in the Archdiocese of Newark, her Tuesday ruling is a victory.
“All of this really goes to the patterns and practice of the behavior within the Archdiocese of Newark and, specific to Seton Hall, within the institution of Seton Hall University. And how these institutions, whether it’s the archdiocese or its related entities, systemically and institutionally engaged in behavior to cover up and keep secret complaints and reports of sexual abuse. That’s really one of the major themes of our cases, and that’s what we’re going to hopefully prove when these cases come up for trial,” said Baldante.
Seton Hall’s lawyers declined to comment.
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