NEWARK (NJ)
New Jersey Herald [Newton NJ]
August 29, 2025
By Deena Yellin
A last-ditch attempt by attorneys representing the Delbarton School in its clergy sexual abuse case has failed.
On the eve of a landmark trial against the elite Morris County private school, its lawyer wrote to a state Superior Court judge on Aug. 27 requesting a delay and warning media coverage of the case has “irreversibly tainted the jury pool.”
As an alternative, Morristown attorney James Barletti wrote, potential jurors should be selected from outside of the region, since local residents would be more likely to have read recent reports about the case.
“Anything less would deny Delbarton and OSBNJ of their right to a fair trial,” Barletti said, referring to the Order of St. Benedict of New Jersey, the Catholic order that runs the school and nearby St. Mary’s Abbey.
Nonetheless, on Aug. 28, state Superior Court Judge Frank DeAngelis issued a decision denying both requests.
It is rare for a judge to make such changes so close to the actual trial date.
The proceedings set to open at the Morris County Courthouse would be the first trial among 39 lawsuits against the all-boys prep school in Morris Township and the order that founded it. It was filed in 2017 by a graduate, identified only as “T.M.”, who says that he was sexually abused at age 15 by the Rev. Richard Lott, then a monk, teacher and maintenance director at the school, in the 1970s.
The alleged victim said he wrote a letter reporting the abuse to Abbot Brian Clarke, the head of the school at the time. But Lott was not removed from his positions and Clarke later admitted that he never contacted law enforcement and eventually destroyed the letter, according to court records.
The case is poised to be the first abuse suit involving the Catholic Church to go to trial in New Jersey, where hundreds of similar cases are pending.
Barletti, of Gold, Albanese & Barletti LLC, argued in his letter that there have been a multitude of “one-sided reports in the media” in recent weeks, despite orders by the judge in a pretrial conference “not to try this case in the press.”
Many reports “refer to evidence leaked to the press which we believe would be inadmissible in this trial,” he added. “It is our position that those quotations, leaks and the media reports that followed have irreversibly tainted the jury pool in Morris County.”
An attorney representing T.M. called that “baseless and unfounded” in a subsequent filing. The complaints about media coverage and the jury were merely a “pretext for delay,” wrote Rayna Kessler of Robins Kaplan LLP in New York.
“There should be no surprise that a case of this magnitude — the first civil trial in New Jersey history alleging sexual abuse against the Catholic Church — has garnered media attention,” her response said.
Kessler said that her team has adhered to the court’s directive and did not provide interviews to the media. Granting any adjournment would set a “dangerous precedent, as it suggests that any media coverage would warrant an indefinite delay,” she wrote.
“The court’s jury selection process is designed precisely to address the parties’ concerns,” Kessler continued.
“This is an apparent attempt to delay the inevitable, where plaintiff has already waited more than eight years for his day in court.”