PHIADELPHIA (PA)
Legal Intelligencer
March 26, 2019
By P.J. D’Annunzio
A lawsuit claiming the Archdiocese of Philadelphia is liable for alleged child molestation by one of its former priests in the 1970s will remain in New Jersey court, a state Superior Court judge in Atlantic County has ruled.
Atlantic County Judge Christine Smith held that New Jersey was the appropriate venue for the John Doe lawsuit against defrocked priest Craig Brugger because some of the instances of alleged abuse took place in state.
Brugger, who died in 2010, was laicized in 2002 after abuse allegations against him surfaced. At the time the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilaqua told Brugger’s former congregation that the archdiocese took the allegations seriously.
“Like other priests who have been accused, Father Brugger will be treated fairly and with great compassion,” he said, according to a CNN report from March 2002. “At the same time, I need to assure you that the archdiocese will not tolerate acts of abuse against minors.”
In the Doe lawsuit, the plaintiff alleged he was sexually assaulted several times by Brugger from 1972 to 1976 when he attended St. Anne’s Parish in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, ending when he was 12 years old. The lawsuit alleged that the assaults occurred in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where the plaintiff lived; at Doe’s parents’ beach house in Brigantine, Atlantic County; and other New Jersey locations, including a rectory and a hotel, according to Smith’s opinion.
At one point Doe reported the abuse to the head of his parish, “Father Griffin,” but Griffin told him “these things did not happen and that people should not speak of these types of matters,” according to Smith. After a nun intervened, Brugger was transferred to another parish.
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