Ky. Judge Set to Rule on Diocese Settlement Complaints
By Jon Newberry
Kenton County Circuit Judge Gregory Bartlett said Tuesday he’ll rule within a week on motions to dismiss two lawsuits filed against Stan Chesley and his associate Bob Steinberg over their handling of the Covington Diocese sex-abuse class-action settlement that was approved in 2006. Covington lawyer Michael O’Hara, who represents Chesley and Steinberg, argued the complaints raised in the current lawsuits were already dealt with, and rejected by the court, in the earlier class-action case that formally ended in 2009. Chesley and Steinberg represented hundreds of victims of sex-abuse by Diocese officials in that class action, and O’Hara was their co-counsel. Claimants received more than $60 million, after fees, from settlement funds contributed by the Diocese and its insurers. Chesley’s law firm and other lawyers were paid about $18.5 million in legal fees, or 22 percent of the awards to claimants. Louisville lawyer David Ward, representing three claimants in the Diocese settlement, argued Tuesday that the issues being raised in the current litigation were never raised in the Diocese case because the claimants were never told what their lawyers were doing. “What Chesley and Steinberg were doing was concealed from the plaintiffs,” Ward told Bartlett. The court should permit their lawsuits to proceed so that they have a chance to discover the facts, Ward said. Bartlett said he wondered about a connection between the allegations made by the Diocese plaintiffs and issues raised in a separate case related to a $200 million settlement for victims of the diet-drug known as fen-phen. “I can’t help but wonder about whether publicity about Chesley’s fen-phen problems has contributed to this case,” Bartlett said at Tuesday’s hearing. “It just seems to be very coincidental. ... This is not the fen-phen case.”
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