2 Sexual Abuse Lawsuits Filed Against L.I. Diocese

By Daniel J. Wakin
New York Times
April 15, 2003

Using a scathing grand jury report as a road map, lawyers for nearly three dozen sexual-abuse victims filed a pair of lawsuits in Nassau County against the Diocese of Rockville Centre.

The suits, which name 17 priests and two religious-order brothers as well as Bishop William F. Murphy and other diocesan officials, accuse the church hierarchy of knowingly covering up molestation from the late 1960's to the mid-1990's.

In one of the cases, filed by the Manhattan lawyer Michael Dowd, 14 priests are accused of victimizing 23 boys. Mr. Dowd said six of the priests were not included in the grand jury report, which was released by the Suffolk County district attorney in February and documented the cases of 24 priests.

The other case was brought by Melanie Little, a lawyer in Garden City, N.Y., on behalf of 11 plaintiffs. It names three priests as abusers.

The diocese said it was not aware of the Little case, but said it would defend itself against the other lawsuit, "as any other institution in our society has a right and an obligation to do." It said diocesan officials would have more to say once they and their lawyers examined the case. Regardless of lawsuits, the diocese said, it would continue to "deal compassionately and responsibly with victims of sexual abuse."

The grand jury report said the diocese, which encompasses Nassau and Suffolk Counties, had for years labored to suppress the abuse cases by transferring accused priests, duping victims into keeping quiet and covering up crimes. The diocese denied the charges, saying it had taken all abuse cases seriously, and asserted it has adopted reforms to protect children.

The grand jury found that too much time had passed for criminal charges to be brought against anyone. But its conclusions were a gift to the plaintiffs' lawyers, who said it established that the church had a strategy to hide priests' wrongdoing.

"They didn't care about children," Mr. Dowd said yesterday at a news conference at his office. "They put the sexual predators ahead of the children they were charged to protect."

Two plaintiffs, John Salveson of Bryn Mawr, Pa., and Brian Dionne of Brooklyn, were also at the news conference. They said that after approaching church officials years after the abuse, they were effectively shunted aside, and still have yet to receive a satisfactory response.

"If Bishop Murphy had a shred of integrity, he already would have been on Brian's phone, on my phone," Mr. Salveson said.

The lawsuits are demanding huge amounts of damages and compensation -- $1.15 billion in the Little case and $300 million in Mr. Dowd's -- and their theories are similar.

Winning lawsuits over long-ago abuse has been extremely difficult because statutes of limitations for sexual-abuse crimes nationwide are relatively brief. For some types of claims in New York, it is three years after the victim's 18th birthday.

But the lawsuits filed today, which Ms. Little said were coordinated, seek to use allegations of fraud to overcome that obstacle.

Mr. Dowd argued that the diocese could not seek refuge in the statute of limitations because, he charged, it effectively used "fraudulent concealment" to prevent the victims from suing. The diocese's efforts to cover up the abuse, as charged by the grand jury, "was never made known to the victims," Mr. Dowd said, so they did not know enough to sue.

"You have an official body that found this as a matter of fact," he said. "There really can't be much doubt about it as fact."

He acknowledged that the approach, which he also used in a large-scale abuse lawsuit now weighing against the Diocese of Brooklyn, is untested in New York courts, but he said there was case law to support it in other states.

Ms. Little took a slightly different tack. She said state law allows lawsuits to be filed within two years of the discovery of a fraud, which in this case, she argued, was revealed in January with the grand jury report.

Referring to church officials in Rockville Centre, she said, "The fraud is that they were representing that the schools, the churches, were safe, when the reality was, they knew there were predatory priests lurking in them."

[ Photo Caption: John Salveson, a plaintiff, holding a picture of himself as a teenager. (Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times)]