WOODLAND PARK (NJ)
Bergen Record via NorthJersey.com
November 30, 2020
By Deena Yellin and Abbott Koloff
A priest who until last year worked as the New York Giants team chaplain has been accused in a lawsuit filed last week of sexually assaulting a young girl as two nuns held her down at a Montclair parish decades ago.
The priest, William Dowd, had been removed from ministry almost 20 years ago, after two men accused him of sexually abusing them as children at the same Montclair parish — but he was reinstated in 2007 after being acquitted in a church trial.
One of those men filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Newark last year accusing Dowd of abuse — a complaint that was settled last month with a payment to the plaintiff, according to the man’s lawyer, Greg Gianforcaro. He declined to specify the amount.
In the latest suit, filed Tuesday, a woman alleges that she was abused by two nuns at the Immaculate Conception parish school in 1969, when she was 8 years old. The woman says that two years later, in 1971, the two nuns took her to Dowd and held her down by her arms and legs while the priest raped her in the parish’s Madonna Hall.
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