BREWSTER (NY)
Highland Currents [Cold Spring, NY]
November 15, 2024
By Leonard Sparks
Local religious institutions, counties fighting similar lawsuits
A jury needed only an hour on Oct. 31 to find Green Chimneys liable for the sexual abuse of a girl by one of its employees in the late 1960s. Four days later, the residential and therapy center for children with special needs, which has campuses in Brewster and Carmel, settled with the plaintiff for an undisclosed amount.
The case was the first of more than two dozen lawsuits filed in 2020 and 2021 against local institutions to reach trial under the state’s Child Victims Act. Enacted in 2019, the law gave adults a two-year window to begin civil actions for alleged sex crimes in which the statute of limitations had expired.
The lawsuits include at least five against the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and its residential St. Basil Academy in Philipstown and at least nine against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement at Graymoor in Philipstown and St. John the Evangelist in Beacon. Statewide, the CVA has led to about 11,000 lawsuits.
St. Basil opened as an orphanage on Route 9D in 1944 and operated as a private school until 1997. Today its residents live on campus but attend nearby districts. The 150-acre campus was a private estate before its purchase by the Greek Orthodox Ladies Philoptochos Society.
In one lawsuit against the academy, a man who lives in Illinois alleged that years of sexual abuse by a former director began in 1986, when he was 4 years old. He said in court documents that the first assault occurred when he and the Rev. Philip Koutoufas were sitting in a truck in the woods and the minister pulled down the boy’s pants and fondled his genitals. Later abuse took place inside Koutoufas’ home.
In addition to Koutoufas, who became the bishop of Atlanta in 1992 and died in 1995, another high-ranking Greek Orthodox official — Bishop Andonios Paropoulos, who retired in 2019 — has been accused by two former St. Basil’s students of abuse in the 1980s.
In a fourth case, a woman who entered St. Basil in 1983, when she was 10 years old, said the school’s practice of letting students stay with host families on holidays, vacations and weekends led to her assault by males on Long Island and in Brooklyn. (They are not identified in the lawsuit.) One male raped her in 1985, when she was 12, she said, and two assaulted her when she was 14.
In the fifth case, a man who lives in Pennsylvania said he was sexually abused between 1983 and 1986, when he was 12 to 15 years old, by a teacher and dorm supervisor he identified as Finley Everett Eubanks. The lawsuit alleges that Eubanks exposed himself to older male students and showed them pornographic films, fondled the plaintiff and asked for oral sex.
The man said the abuse stopped when he began to have girlfriends and became sexually active. But he said the experience left him with suicidal thoughts and persistent nightmares.
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese is also named in lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by a priest at St. Nicholas’s Church in Newburgh in 1977 and a priest at St. Nicholas & St. Marina Church in Brooklyn in 1985.
In each of the St. Basil cases, the defendants say the lawsuits fail to prove the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese or St. Basil had knowledge of any “alleged propensity” for sexual assault by its priests or employees, or that they were informed of any abuse. The judges handling the cases have so far rejected motions by the diocese and St. Basil to dismiss the lawsuits.
In one lawsuit against the Franciscans, a North Carolina man accuses “Brother Dominick” of abusing him in 1980, when he was 16 and living in Putnam County. He said Dominick “groomed” victims through activities such as baking desserts or going swimming. In a second, a Bronx man said he was twice sexually assaulted by “Father Tom” at the Retreat House at Graymoor in 1966, when he was 10 years old, during activities organized by the Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement. (The plaintiff died in January, and the case has been put on hold.)
The Archdiocese of New York has asked that it be removed from the lawsuits, saying it has no oversight over the Franciscans.
In a Beacon case, a 42-year-old New York man who attended first, second and third grade at the St. John School said he was abused by Father Ronald Fennell in 1987, when he was 7. (The school closed in 2001.) He alleges in court documents that Fennell approached him in the hallway and said the school nurse was out but that all the children were due for physicals. Taking the boy into a small room, Fennell allegedly “put his hands down the plaintiff’s pants, touched his genitals and told him to cough.”
Fennell was an assistant priest at the church from September 1987 to August 1989, according to the church website.
In a second Beacon case, a New York man said he was abused as a 15-year-old by Father Robert Carden when his family attended St. John the Evangelist in 1958. Carden was at the church from 1957 to 1961.
In addition to its clients who lived at St. Basil, the Herman Law Firm, based in New York City, represents 20 people suing Green Chimneys, which was founded in 1947 by Samuel “Rollo” Ross Jr. Nine of those plaintiffs named the late Robert Doig, a one-time caretaker for the program’s horses at its Brewster property and overseer, with his wife, of a girls’ dormitory.
The plaintiff in the case tried in Carmel last month, identified in court documents as MK, and others described Doig as a serial predator who assaulted them in the girls’ dormitory and horse barn. According to MK, within weeks of arriving in 1966 with her horse, older girls warned new arrivals to “watch out” for Doig, who often “stunk like booze.”
One month into the stay, as she lay in bed, Doig entered the dormitory and grabbed her breasts, said MK, who was 10. The incident began three years of abuse. Doig often cornered her in the horse barn, said MK, and sometimes hid in a closet to watch girls undress in the dorm.
A girl and her parents reported Doig to Ross, who “called the victim a liar and did nothing to investigate Doig,” according to MK’s lawsuit, and also ignored reports from other girls. MK claimed many female students were beaten after making accusations against Doig.
In its defense, Green Chimneys said it no longer has records for Doig or MK. Like St. Basil, it argued there is no evidence that it “knew or should have known” about the abuse or Doig’s “propensity to commit sexual abuse” before MK reported the incidents. Once she did, it said it “undertook proper actions” by transferring Doig from the girls’ dormitory and noted that MK said the abuse stopped. In court last month, a lawyer for Green Chimneys said Ross had fired Doig.
The alleged abusers named in the other cases against Green Chimneys include Ross, who died in 2018, and several former teachers and counselors.
In addition to these cases, three people have sued Putnam County citing the CVA. Judge Victor Grossman dismissed one case by a woman who said she was abused after Putnam sent her as a girl to the St. Anne Institute, a residential program in Albany. Grossman said the plaintiff failed to prove St. Anne should have known about the abuse, which she never reported.
In a second case, a man alleges that a counselor abused him at Berkshire Farm Center and Services for Youth (now called Together for Youth) in Canaan, New York, where Putnam sent him in 1981, when he was 13.
A third plaintiff said that after Putnam placed him in foster care with a Westchester County couple in 1977, he was abused by their son. That case is on hold because the company that insured Putnam County in the late 1970s is in receivership.
Dutchess County is named in lawsuits alleging abuse at the Children’s Home of Poughkeepsie, the home of a Jehovah’s Witness foster family and a youth program operated by the Archdiocese of New York.