NEWARK NJ)
Star Ledger
Dec. 2, 2019
By Blake Nelson
Three years ago Sunday, Carolyn Fortney woke up in a hospital.
She had tried to end her life, she said, because of sexual abuse she endured from a priest decades ago. Her sisters were with her then, and three were next to her Monday in Newark, when the family announced a new lawsuit against Newark’s Archdiocese.
“Did they know he was a pedophile, prior to moving him to PA?” asked Lara Fortney-McKeever, one of Carolyn’s sisters who said she was also abused in Pennsylvania by the same priest.
“This day will help me to finally get the answers,” she said.
Sunday marked the beginning of a two-year window for people to file lawsuits against their abusers and the institutions that protected them, because of a new law that vastly expands when people are allowed to sue.
Even after the two-year window ends, on Nov. 30, 2021, people who were molested as children will still be able to file lawsuits until they turn 55, or seven years after they discover that they were abused.
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