UNITED STATES
Lexology
Sedgwick LLP
Cara Vecchione
USA March 7 2017
In Nat’l Union Fire Ins. Co. of Pittsburgh, PA v. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, No. 653575/2014, 2017 WL 748834 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., N.Y. Cty. February 27, 2017), a New York trial court held that the Diocese must pay multiple self-insured retentions per year — one per occurrence — in a coverage dispute involving claims that foster care agencies affiliated with the Diocese negligently placed ten children with an abusive foster mother over a twenty-two year period.
The trial court tracked the reasoning of the Court of Appeals in a separate coverage dispute concerning claims of sexual abuse by a priest, Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Nat’l Union Fire Ins. Co. of Pittsburgh, PA, 21 N.Y.3d 139 (2013). In Diocese of Brooklyn, the Court of Appeals made clear that the “unfortunate event” test should be applied to determine whether separate incidents are characterized as one occurrence, absent policy language demonstrating an intent to aggregate the incidents into a single occurrence. The Court of Appeals dismissed the argument that the acts of abuse should be deemed a single occurrence because they amounted to “continuous or repeated exposure to substantially the same general harmful conditions.” Applying the “unfortunate event” test, the Court of Appeals held that numerous incidents of molestation by the same priest against one plaintiff constituted multiple occurrences, in part because the acts of abuse took place in several locations over a six year period and were not precipitated by the same causal continuum.
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