MORRISTOWN (NJ)
nj.com [New Jersey]
September 9, 2025
By Ted Sherman | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
The allegations of abuse date back decades.
A 15-year-old, then a student at the famed, all-boys Delbarton Catholic prep school in Morristown, claimed he was sexually assaulted by one of the Benedictine monks of St. Mary’s Abbey who oversee the school.
According to court papers, the student — identified only by his initials — reported the abuse the following year to the abbot who headed the school. He told the abbot the Rev. Richard Lott had sexually assaulted him and plied him and other students with alcohol, pornography and drugs.
Yet nothing was immediately done in response. Nor, as it would turn out, would any action be taken in response to similar complaints of sexual abuse lodged by other students over time, attorneys say.
More than 40 years later, the former student finally brought his allegations to court in a civil lawsuit against the school and the Order of St. Benedict of New Jersey, along with his alleged abuser.
The school and its leaders face dozens of other sexual assault lawsuits involving a number of former clergy and others once associated with the school. And in recent years, Delbarton has settled a number of similar claims against it.
But on Tuesday, after more years of legal sparring over the matter, the former student’s case became the first of those cases to go to trial in New Jersey, finding its way before a jury of four men and four women.
As the opening statements got underway before Superior Court Judge Louis S. Sceusi in a fourth-floor Morris County courtroom in Morristown, Lott, 89, sat on one side in court, dressed in a blue blazer and khakis. His accuser, now 65, sat alongside his attorneys wearing more casual attire.
Advocates say it marked the first clergy sexual abuse lawsuit to go to trial in New Jersey against the Catholic Church since the 2019 passage of the state’s Child Victims Act, which greatly extended the amount of time victims of sexual abuse had to sue.
An alleged culture of sexual abuse
The former Delbarton student has filed claims of negligence, misconduct, emotional distress, invasion of privacy, and the loss of his Catholic faith, seeking unspecified personal injury and punitive damages.
In his opening before the jury, attorney Michael Geibelson, who represents the former student, said Delbarton failed its mission by tolerating and ignoring a culture of sexual abuse that went back as far as 1954.
“They knew various monks were roaming the property abusing kids and they did nothing,” he said. “Keep the abusers. Get rid of the victims. That was the strategy.”
According to court filings, Lott — an ordained priest, monk and teacher — served as head of maintenance and groundskeeping at the Delbarton School and St. Mary’s Abbey. He made his home in the secluded living quarters of the school’s maintenance barn on the sprawling bucolic campus.
On New Year’s Day in 1976, with the school in recess for Christmas break, the alleged victim claimed Lott had sexually assaulted him and the school did nothing to stop the abuse.
Even before that alleged incident, Geibelson said Lott had been “grooming” the student and others. The attorney showed the jury a photo of a bare-chested younger Lott when he headed the school’s maintenance operations in the 1970s.
Lott was a chemistry teacher, a dorm prefect and hosted beer parties in the barn that nobody seemed to care about, drinking with students and campus workers.
“He was the ‘cool’ priest,” explained the attorney. “He then abused that trust.”
In depositions, the former student said he went home for Christmas during the break but returned to the Delbarton campus to work. At the time Delbarton was a boarding school. With the dorms closed, he said he stayed in the maintenance barn.
The student said he attended a New Year’s Eve house party in Mendham with Lott and then collapsed on a sofa in the barn when they returned. It was there that the alleged sexual assault occurred.
The attorney described a drunk kid who had downed one too many beers and the oral sex performed by the priest that followed. He said the alleged victim’s life “had been destroyed” and his experience at Delbarton.
Geibelson told the jury the student at one point worked up the courage to write a letter about the abuse to the school’s abbot, Brian Clarke. He said the abbot later told him Lott had “acknowledged the incident,” but the administration never did anything about it.
The letter was left in his desk drawer until Clarke discarded it, the attorney said, because “it was bad for the reputation of the school.”
Clarke died in October 2019.
In his opening to the jury, the plaintiff’s attorney outlined a long list of others he claimed were abused or assaulted by the priest — drawing a call for a mistrial from defense attorneys when he characterized what happened as a “blitz rape.”
According to the court filings, which were referenced in his opening statement to the jury, Geibelson said Lott had also abused an initiate monk of the monastic order and at least two other young men at the school, who are all listed as witnesses expected to testify in the case.
The plaintiff stayed at school another semester and then arranged to graduate early. He has never felt safe, according to his attorney.
“He has spent most of his life running. An attempt to outrun the pain inside him,” Geibelson said.
Lott voluntarily left the campus a year after the then-15-year-old reported the abuse, but not before the priest sexually abused another student in a similar matter, according to the attorney.
And even after Lott left, the court briefs said he was allowed to remain a member of the Order of St. Benedict until 2006. That’s when he was finally dismissed for his prolonged absence, not for sexual abuse, according to the court papers.
Delbarton and the Order of St. Benedict denied the allegations in court filings.
“It is undisputed that there were no eyewitnesses to the alleged sexual abuse,” lawyers for the order wrote in a pre-trial brief.
Lott also denies that he ever sexually abused the plaintiff and denies he every had sexual conduct with the teen or any other person, the defense lawyers wrote.
In an opening statement of just minutes, attorney James Barletti, who represents the school, said there was contrary evidence on every claim made by the plaintiff.
Referring to the New Year’s Eve party, he said not one person who attended could say the accuser had been there. He added that the student was not even supposed to be on campus during winter break.
In the court filings, lawyers for the school added that Lott denied going to a New Year’s Eve party and had been at a church to say Mass in Lakewood that day.
“It’s a ‘he said-he said’ situation” said Barletti. “Wait until you hear all the evidence.”
At the same time, he told the jury that despite the allegations, the student accuser had continued contact with Lott over the years after he left Delbarton.