NEW YORK
New York Daily News
By Michael O’Keeffe / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, September 14, 2012, 9:04 PM
The judge overseeing the Poly Prep sexual-abuse lawsuit urged lawyers for the school and the men who say they were molested by football coach Phil Foglietta to reach a settlement at a hearing in Brooklyn federal court on Friday — and then gave them plenty of time to do so.
U.S. District Court Judge Frederic Block, citing scheduling issues, said he won’t hold a hearing until Feb. 11 to determine if the school covered up decades of abuse by Foglietta, preventing the plaintiffs from filing a case before the statute of limitations expired. New York state law requires survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file a case by the time they are 23 years old.
Block ruled last month that portions of the explosive lawsuit filed on behalf of 10 students and two day campers can proceed. Lawyers for the elite private school, which charges up to $36,000 a year for tuition, had argued that the case should be dismissed because the statute of limitations had long expired. But Block’s 40-page ruling said that argument may not be relevant because administrators may have lied about when they first learned that Foglietta, who died in 1998, was a sexual predator.
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