PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial
By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net
The archdiocese caved; Billy Doe got paid.
That’s the depressing bottom line in the civil case of Doe v. Archdiocese of Philadelphia et al, according to multiple sources.
On the court docket today, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Jacqueline F. Allen dismissed both a motion for partial summary judgment filed by the former altar boy, and a motion for summary judgment filed by the archdiocese, as “moot,” because both parties had “settled all claims . . . in the instant matter.”
The settlement is confidential. As part of the settlement, Msgr. William J. Lynn, the archdiocese’s former secretary for clergy, was dismissed as a defendant in the civil case, according to sources. Billy Doe’s civil lawyers had also sued the estate of the late Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, the former archbishop of Philadelphia, but that claim too was settled, according to the court docket.
A trial in the civil case had been scheduled for Nov. 9th. Three defendants who had supposedly sexually assaulted the former altar boy remain in the case: former priest Edward V. Avery, the late Father Charles Engelhardt, and former Catholic teacher Bernard Shero. The trio of alleged assailants were the defendants at two historic criminal trials. Avery pleaded guilty on the eve of the first trial in 2012; the following year Engelhardt and Shero were convicted by a jury in the second trial on sex charges and sent to jail.
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