NEW YORK
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN MUELLER
AUG. 28, 2014
A lawyer for dozens of men who say they were sexually abused as high school students by rabbis at Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Manhattan asked a federal appeals court on Thursday to reinstate a lawsuit claiming that the school had covered up the misconduct for decades.
Contending that a federal judge who had earlier dismissed the case misconstrued the statute of limitations, the lawyer, Kevin T. Mulhearn, argued that the school, in Washington Heights, should be held accountable for hundreds of acts of abuse from the 1970s through the early 1990s because its complicity had only recently come to light. The case hinges, in part, on whether it was the obligation of the victims to pursue hints of a cover-up before school administrators acknowledged that they had known of the crimes.
The suit, filed on behalf of 34 clients, was thrown out in January by a federal judge, John G. Koeltl, who ruled that too many years had elapsed since the alleged abuse had taken place. Mr. Mulhearn countered in his appeal that the clock did not start ticking on their case until Yeshiva’s role in protecting the two rabbis accused of abuse was revealed in a December 2012 article in The Daily Forward.
The arguments provoked often stinging replies from a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which focused on when the former students could have known that Yeshiva had put them in danger by ignoring claims of abuse by the rabbis. The judges challenged the timelines sketched by both sides; they disputed the notion that the former students could not have pursued legal action before 2012, as well as Yeshiva’s claim that it was the students’ duty to raise complaints of a cover-up immediately after the abuse occurred.
Noting that Yeshiva had allowed the rabbis to remain on the faculty for years after students had reported being abused, Judge Reena Raggi suggested that that sent a clear signal of a cover-up, triggering the start of a three-year window when the former students were eligible to file a lawsuit. “How does that not put your clients on notice that the school was deliberately indifferent?” she asked.
Mr. Mulhearn countered that the cover-up had put the students in an impossible bind, preventing them from discovering Yeshiva’s role in the abuse even as the school continued to conceal its misconduct. The basis for the students’ complaint was that the school’s efforts to conceal earlier allegations had paved the way for his clients to be abused, he said, a fact that they did not discover until the university’s chancellor admitted in 2012 that he had known of the allegations and dealt with them privately.
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