Nuisance Lawsuit Filed Against NJ Catholic Conference | New Jersey Law Journal – Law.com

Paolo Gallo/Shutterstock.com

Personal alarms went off for Ed Hanratty of Ridgefield Park last year, he said, when he read the Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing accounts by hundreds of victims abused at the hands of clergy.

“I felt like I was reading my own biography,” Hanratty said Monday. “I heard about people being touched inappropriately and the ramifications it had on their lives and having to deal with substance abuse issues.

“These were the same issues I’ve dealt with my whole entire adulthood,” Hanratty, 42, said while sharing his story Monday at a news conference in Elizabeth to announce a nuisance lawsuit filed Monday against the Catholic Conference of New Jersey and New Jersey Catholic Bishops.

It’s an uncommon route to litigation against a powerful institution, according to victims and advocates.

Hanratty’s nuisance suit, filed in the Essex County Superior Court’s Law Division, accuses the New Jersey Bishops of maintaining a public hazard by concealing the names and histories of known child abuse perpetrators within the Catholic Church.

“We want transparency,” said Hanratty—flanked by his attorneys, Jeff Anderson of Jeff Anderson & Associates, Rayna Kessler of Robins Kaplan, and Greg Gianforcaro—at the Renaissance Newark Airport Hotel.

Hanratty’s complaint demands that all five New Jersey Bishops release the identities, background information and histories of all clergy accused of sexual misconduct with minors—a list that the suit contends has largely been concealed.

The conference, reached by phone, declined to comment.

Not by coincidence, his suit was announced on the same day that Anderson & Associates made public what it calls the “Anderson Report,” which, according to the firm, lists the names of 311 priests and religious clerics who have been accused of child sexual misconduct dating back to the 1930s while they were assigned to parishes within the Archdiocese of Newark, Diocese of Camden, Diocese of Metuchen, Diocese of Paterson and Diocese of Trenton.

“You see their pictures behind us,” said Jeff Anderson, founding member of Jeff Anderson & Associates, which specializes in representing victims of clerical and child sexual abuse and is based in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area. He was referring to the easels containing posters lined with pictures of former and current priests.

The attorneys said there are three objectives of Hanratty’s complaint: to publicly disclose all agents, including priests, accused of child molestation and each agent’s history of abuse, pattern of grooming and sexual behavior and last known address; to publicly disclose the defendants’ documents on the agents, including priests accused of child molestation; and to discontinue defendants’ alleged practices and policies of dealing with allegations of child sexual abuse by their agents secretly, and that they work with civil authorities to create, implement and follow a policy for dealing with such molesters that will better protect children and the general public from further harm.

“We want documents and information and to force the bishops  to disclose this information to the public,” Gianforcaro said at the conference. “We are looking for the disclosure in this situation and we would hope that the bishops and Cardinal Tobin (the Archbishop of Newark) will work with us and not against us.”

Gianforcaro, who has a private practice in Phillipsburg, has settled at least 200 cases of sexual abuse cases involving clergy, he has said. He took Hanratty as a client late last year for his claims of abuse against a former priest while he was in the Newark Archdiocese.

Hanratty’s nuisance lawsuit requests all identifies and personnel files of New Jersey clerics and priests who have been accused of sexual misconduct on minors.

Hanratty said he wants to know why his small hometown—Ridgefield Park, a historically very Irish and Italian American town, which measures one square mile—had four offenders credibly accused from 1930 to 1995 of sexual misconduct, according to lists published earlier this year by the New Jersey Conference of Bishops. Those lists were made public by all five dioceses individually.

Hanratty, a freelance journalist and archivist at NBC News, said nothing was done to stop the chain of abuse—which is the basis for the public hazard element of his suit.

“During that 65-year period, if you grew up in a parish in Ridgefield Park, there was a 75 percent chance that you were exposed to an abusing priest,” Hanratty said. “Why is that? Why did no one stop it? Was Ridgefield Park unusually [unlucky] or just targeted for a reason? We deserve to know why.”

Starting when he was about 10, Hanratty claims he was victimized while an altar boy by Father Gerald “Gerry” Sudol, then a young priest at St. Francis of Assisi.

Hanratty alleges that Sudol’s conduct began as hugs after mass, which progressed to kisses on the forehead, and then kisses on the lips and open mouth kissing—conduct that continued until he was 14.

He said in 1994, Sudol was whisked away in the middle of the night and shipped elsewhere under the reasoning he was suffering from nervous exhaustion by the church, according to Hanratty.

Sudol has been permanently removed from the ministry, according to reports.

“We want transparency, and we want to find out what they knew about him, and why after he left they lied to us about his dismissal,” Hanratty said.

He claims the church hid the circumstances and stonewalled information for decades.

“The list [by the Anderson firm] is the single most important piece of this crisis,” Hanratty said.

“Great strides have been made over the years where survivors are believed and their motives are no longer questioned. But this is still only the tip of the iceberg.

“We can’t move on until we know why,” he said. “I hope today is the first day of the final chapter of getting to the bottom of this tragedy.”

The Anderson Report is a compilation of names of priests that had been accused of child sexual misconduct dating back to the 1930s—culled from news accounts, lawsuits filed, settlements and anything publicly written about them on the website bishopaccountability.org.

“We put this list together to have one source so you can see what they [the Church] knew, what years, and density of different perpetrators in different periods,” said Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine clerk from St. John the Baptist Parish in Minnesota and a member of the Anderson law firm.

Rayna Kessler, an attorney at Robins Kaplan in the firm’s New York Office and licensed in New Jersey, is filing the nuisance lawsuit on behalf of Hanratty.

“These documents are a large part of what this lawsuit seeks and what citizens of New Jersey deserve,” she said.

Michael Reck, a partner at Anderson & Associates who works in the firm’s New York and California offices, said the Anderson Report is coming out now because none of the five New Jersey dioceses have made a full, candid and complete disclosure of abusing priests.

“Some of that is in the Anderson Report now, not because institutions are doing the right thing,” Reck said at the press conference. “This institution has done that only because it is being forced to do the right thing.”

In Trenton, a bill to remove the statute of limitations on certain child sexual abuse cases was passed by the Assembly and Senate last month and is awaiting the signature of Gov. Murphy. The legislation would extend the statute of limitations for anyone who files their claims within the next two years; if the two-year window is missed, that person still has up to the age of 55 to sue; and if he or she misses the two-year window and is over the age 55, that individual can still sue under the bill.

The Pennsylvania grand jury report and the disclosure of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s history of sexually abusing seminarians and at least one minor in New Jersey were the impetus for the bill.