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New Jersey may soon give sexual abuse victims more time to sue
By Matt Friedman
A bill to expand New Jersey’s statute of limitations on sexual abuse lawsuits appears on its way to passage after being stalled in Trenton for years, thanks in part to the release last year of a Pennsylvania grand jury report into sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. “Every single day that passes without changing this law is a reminder to [victims] that they don’t matter,” said state Sen. Joe Vitale (D-Middlesex), the bill’s sponsor. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted, 8-1, Thursday to approve the bill, NJ S477 (18R), which allows victims of child sexual abuse up to 37 years after they turn 18 to file a lawsuit against their perpetrators and the institutions that harbored them. Beyond the age of 55, victims would have seven years from the time they realize the abuse has damaged them to file suit. It’s a massive expansion of New Jersey’s current law, which only allows adult victims just two years from the time they realize the abuse has damaged them to file suit. “New Jersey at this point has some of the worst civil statute of limitations in the country,“ said Marci Hamilton, CEO of Child USA, which seeks to expand civil statutes of limitations. “A two-year rule means the vast majority of the victims in your state have no chance at justice, and they have been shut down in the court system by this arbitrary deadline. Without this bill, you’re going to continue to choose not to know who the perpetrators are.” Among other things, the bill also retroactively extends a 2006 law that lowered the bar for proving negligence against charitable organizations — a provision the Catholic Church and lawsuit reform advocates are fighting. Previously, the law only applied to abuse after January 2006. “I believe the shock of this [Pennsylvania] report is what brought us to this moment and we are now on the cusp of undertaking one of the most extreme steps available,” said Alida Kass, president and chief counsel of the New Jersey Civil Justice Institute, a business advocacy group. This isn’t the first time a version of the bill has advanced in committee, having moved in both 2010 and 2012 before stalling prior to a vote in the full Senate. But the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report last summer that described a “systematic cover-up spanning decades by senior church leaders in Pennsylvania and the Vatican,” along with an ongoing similar investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office, appears to have paved the way for the bill’s passage. The bill is scheduled for a Senate vote and an Assembly committee hearing next week, and Gov. Phil Murphy has vowed to sign it. It is somewhat pared down from the previous versions, which lifted the statute of limitations entirely, something the state has already done for criminal sexual abuse cases. The New Jersey Catholic Conference had long opposed the legislation and hired one of Trenton’s most prominent lobbying firms, Princeton Public Affairs, to fight it. Patrick Brannigan, executive director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference, said his organization would support the bill with some modifications. But he took issue with some of the retroactivity and requested that the bill’s implementation be changed from December 2019 to January 2020 so it doesn’t coincide with the time frame for the church’s recently enacted victim compensation program. “While we recognize that no degree of financial compensation can adequately address the suffering endured, this program is a genuine expression of our remorse and our desire to make amends for past transgressions,” Brannigan said during Thursday’s nearly five-hour committee hearing. Around 50 witnesses testified on the bill, mostly in favor, and many of them said they were survivors of sexual abuse. Many told stories of abuse by members of the clergy. “They knew about this priest for years, 15, 20 years before my son was even born. And what did they do? They transferred him from parish to parish,” said Michael Mcilmail, whose late son, Sean, was abused by a priest in Pennsylvania. “You’re not going to bankrupt these people. They have so much money.” Not all of those who testified focused on clergy. Sarah Klein said she was molested by former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State physician Larry Nassar for 17 years, starting from when she was 8. “By the time I learned about Larry’s admission at age 38, that the almost daily treatments I received were in fact sexual abuse of a minor, my statute of limitations had expired 19 years earlier,” she said. Klein said that had Michigan State not enacted a 90-day window specifically for Nassar’s many victims to sue, she would have had no recourse. “Perpetrators and institutions are the ones who benefit from a bad statute of limitations. This must change,” she said. New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency Chief of Staff Katie Brennan, who alleges former Murphy administration staffer Al Alvarez sexually assaulted her, was among the bill’s supporters. Brennan filed a lawsuit against Alvarez and the state of New Jersey in January 2019 over the incident, which she said occurred in April 2017. Prior to that, Brennan had sought criminal charges against Alvarez, who denies sexually assaulting her. Prosecutors in two counties have declined to charge him. “I filed a civil lawsuit for sexual assault within the current two-year statute of limitations. I am the lucky one,” Brennan said. “We want to believe that the justice system works, that it’s set up to protect the vulnerable and that it will be there when we’re in need.” The only senator to vote against the bill was Gerald Cardinale (R-Bergen), who said he would prefer to make criminal penalties for sexual abuse stricter. He said he feared the bill would make some non-profits go under. “We will risk losing some of the good things that a nonprofit brings,” Cardinale said. “It will make us feel good that we did something, but it will deflect us from really attacking the problem.” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Nicholas Scutari (D-Union) criticized Cardinale’s sentiment. “If these organizations cannot police themselves, then we should do it for them,“ he said. “To me, everything they do that is good is overshadowed by the things that they allowed that are horrific.“
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