NEW YORK
Times Newsweekly
BY ROBERT POZARYCKI
rpozarycki@ridgewoodtimes.com @robbpoz
Things are getting personal in the fight over legislation designed to help child sex abuse victims seek justice from their attackers and those who may have protected them.
Maspeth-based Assemblywoman Margaret Markey told the Daily News on Tuesday that Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, leader of the Diocese of Brooklyn, offered her a $5,000 payment nearly a decade ago in exchange for dropping her support of legislation known as the Child Victims Act that would expand the statute of limitations for lawsuits over child sex abuse allegations.
Markey has advocated for the bill’s passage for more than a decade and it is currently under consideration in the state legislature. The Daily News is currently running a series of articles about the bill and supports its passage.
But the Diocese of Brooklyn, which leads 1.5 million Roman Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens, opposes the act, claiming that the bill’s provisions would open the church up to a fresh round of lawsuits that would put its parishes in financial peril.
Markey claimed that DiMarzio made the offer at a December 2007 meeting at his chancery in the nowclosed Bishop Ford High School in Brooklyn. The meeting, which focused on the bill, also included Assemblyman Joseph Lentol of Brooklyn, the late Assemblyman Vito Lopez, Monsignor Kieran Harrington (now communications director for the diocese) and Sister Ellen Patricia Finn, a child sex abuse victim’s advocate and former employee of Catholic Charities.
Markey told the Daily News that she saw no reason to report the offer at the time: “Who could I report it to? He said, I said,” she was quoted as saying in the report. Although she originally stated the meeting took place in 2010, she later corrected the date.
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