NEW JERSEY
NJ.com
By Louis C. Hochman/NJ.com
on August 06, 2013
MOUNT OLIVE — The Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson has cancelled plans to appoint the Rev. Brando Ibarra to a Budd Lake church — at Ibarra’s request — after township officials inquired about an allegation of sexual impropriety first made more than a decade ago.
But the priest’s lawyer, Bruce S. Rosen, says allegations are the result of a “ridiculous obsession” by accuser David Fagersten III, and has threatened to sue Fagersten over making them.
Rosen told NJ.com Brando has never been charged in connection with the allegations, doesn’t know of any criminal inquiry into the allegations and denies them outright.
“Beginning more than a decade ago, and resuming in the past few weeks (since it was announced that Father Brando Ibarra was to be appointed as pastor to St. Jude Church in Budd Lake), David Fagersten III has engaged in a campaign of falsely accusing Fr. Brando of a criminal and reprehensible offense which purportedly took place 15 years ago, as well as other vague and untrue allegations of misconduct,” Rosen wrote in a July 29 statement sent to NJ.com on Brando’s behalf.
In a series of letters to the diocese beginning in 2001, Fagersten alleges he and Ibarra were engaged in a sexually intimate relationship from February 1996 to June 1998. In a 2004 letter to Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli, he says that relationship “became dysfunctional and ended when Brando attempted to rape me.” In the various letters, he repeatedly refers to Ibarra as a “sexual predator.”
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