ROCKVILLE CENTRE (NY)
The Free Press [New York NY]
October 6, 2025
By Laurie P. Cohen
A Free Press investigation reveals how dozens of Catholic dioceses are subverting the Child Victim Act, stopping lawsuits in their tracks and pressuring victims to accept pennies on the dollar.
The first person to sue the Rockville Centre Catholic Diocese after the passage of New York’s Child Victims Act was a man named Richard Tollner. It was August 2019, and New York was one of seven states that had created a law giving sex abuse victims a limited window to bring lawsuits no matter how far in the past the abuse had taken place.
Tollner, who is now 66, said that he had been raped—and molested multiple times—by a priest, beginning when he was 15 at St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary, in Uniondale, New York. The priest, Monsignor Alan J. Placa, was the “dean of discipline” at the school on Long Island, where Tollner grew up. In 1977, when he was 17, he reported the alleged rape to several authority figures at the school, including the rector. But nothing happened.
A quarter-century later, a Suffolk County grand jury investigated Placa as part of an extensive inquiry into clergy sexual abuse; he was said to have abused at least two others besides Tollner. Again, nothing happened; although the grand jury concluded that the diocese had protected at least 58 abusive priests, neither the diocese nor any individual priests were indicted. Placa, who has always denied the charges, was placed on administrative leave by the church, but was eventually cleared of the charges against him by the Vatican.
“I couldn’t wait to sue,” said Tollner, who had lobbied to get the new law passed—and whose lawsuit took aim at the diocese, the eighth largest in the country, overseeing 1.5 million Catholics as well as Placa.
Juries have proven highly sympathetic to sexual abuse victims, and Tollner’s lawsuit had the potential to bring him millions in compensation for what he had suffered. In a 2007 trial against the Rockville Centre diocese, a jury awarded $11.45 million in damages to a man and woman who were repeatedly raped by a youth minister as teenagers. In June 2025, a jury in New Orleans awarded close to $2.4 million to a man who was sexually abused when he was around 11 years old.
But Tollner never got the chance to argue his case before a jury. On October 1, 2020, with sexual abuse lawsuits piling up, the Rockville Centre diocese filed a “voluntary petition for reorganization” under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
“This decision was not made lightly,” said Bishop John O. Barres in a statement at the time. And perhaps that is true. But as a legal strategy it was a no-brainer, since its primary effect was to undermine the purpose of the Child Victims Act. Bankruptcy gave the diocese the upper hand, while the victims became creditors who will be lucky to get a fraction of what a jury might have awarded them.
As of July, 41 Catholic dioceses and religious orders have used Chapter 11 filings to deal with the decades of horrific crimes committed by thousands of priests. Those filings have stopped lawsuits in their tracks and forced victims to accept pennies on the dollar, a Free Press investigation has revealed. To put it bluntly, long after the Church looked the other way at clergy sexual abuse, it has now found another way to deprive the victims of justice: the bankruptcy courts.
It has long been standard practice for companies facing massive numbers of lawsuits—for manufacturing asbestos, say, or marketing OxyContin—to file for bankruptcy. A Chapter 11 filing does not require companies to be insolvent; they simply need to show “financial distress,” allowing them to restructure their debts while continuing to operate.
Chapter 11 shuts down all litigation, halting discovery, the process by which litigants gather documents and witness testimony to support their claims. It prevents additional lawsuits from being filed. It eliminates jury trials and instead shifts the ongoing cases to federal bankruptcy court, where any settlement requires a process of mediation between the bankrupt company’s lawyers and lawyers for the creditors. That mediation often takes years. Although additional claims can be made, they too are routed to the bankruptcy court, where claimants fill out standard claim forms rather than filing lawsuits.
Early on, said Marci Hamilton, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who represented abuse victims in many early clergy sex abuse cases, dioceses used some unorthodox defenses to wriggle out of their obligations to sexual abuse victims. “They argued that it was unconstitutional for them to have to provide discovery,” she recalled. “It was unconstitutional to interfere with any kind of exchange between a bishop and a priest. They called it the formation privilege. And they argued that you couldn’t punish them for doing nothing but forgiving. Because forgiveness was what their faith required.”
In court, recalled Hamilton, “I dismantled all those arguments.”
But when states began passing laws like the Child Victims Act—ultimately, 21 did so, as did the District of Columbia—many dioceses decided that their best course of action was to adopt the bankruptcy playbook.
“It was a brilliant tactic because the bankruptcy system makes it about saving the debtor,” Hamilton said. “So they were able to flip the lawsuits from the victims being at the center of it, to them being at the center. And the victims just became collateral damage.”
In New York alone, nearly 5,000 people claiming to have been abused by clergy or staff came forward during the two-year exemption period from the statute of limitations. In September 2019, just one month after abuse victims were allowed to file lawsuits, the Rochester diocese sought Chapter 11 protection. Rockville Centre was second. Overall, six of the state’s eight dioceses have filed for bankruptcy. (The only ones that haven’t are the Archdiocese of New York, based in Manhattan, and the Diocese of Brooklyn.)
“Bankruptcy eviscerates the whole architecture for ferreting out the truth,” Paul Mones, a plaintiff’s lawyer who has represented dozens of victims in Rockville Centre diocese cases, told me. “By removing cases from the civil justice system, there is no cross-examination of church hierarchy, and all the ways to tease out the injurious behavior of church abusers gets whitewashed. It’s all about how much money the entity has to distribute, and nothing else. Lawyers are reduced to being financial managers.”
The diocese pays the fees for its own bankruptcy counsel as well as for the lawyers representing the victims’ committee. Rockville Centre’s lead counsel, for instance, was the giant, multinational law firm Jones Day. The firm would sometimes have 10 lawyers at a court hearing. In February 2025, the bankruptcy judge approved a payment to Jones Day of nearly $52 million, with another $26 million going to the creditors’ committee lawyers.
In New Orleans, where the Archdiocese sought Chapter 11 protection in May 2020, Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond told the Vatican that the Archdiocese believed it would have to pay no more than $7 million to settle victims’ claims. So far, it has paid out nearly $50 million in legal and professional fees. This, of course, is money that could have been paid to sexual abuse victims instead.
“I think about bankruptcy as a big cash cow, and the lawyers for the dioceses and the creditors’ committees are milking it,” said Kathryn Robb, a lawyer and legislative advocate who has lobbied for Child Victims Act–type legislation across the country. “The survivors are getting pennies on the dollar and are being dragged through a process that takes four or five years.”
“Bankruptcy enables the dioceses to avoid jury trials with large verdicts,” said Mones, who represented the two victims who were awarded $11.5 million in the 2007 jury trial. “More importantly, it avoids the public exposure of the horrific decades-long behavior of the diocese.”
That, in fact, is another reason bankruptcy favors the church: Keeping negative information out of public view is an important goal for many dioceses. Virtually as soon as a diocese seeks Chapter 11 protection, its lawyers rush to seek protective orders requiring that all documents be placed under seal—a seal that usually remains even after cases are settled. These orders are almost always granted. Even if the information in the documents indicates a crime has been committed or a cover-up has taken place, law enforcement can’t access the documents unless someone alerts them. And it is considered a violation for anyone involved in the bankruptcy case to do that.
Take the example of Richard Trahant, a lawyer representing 82 clergy abuse survivors in New Orleans who uncovered a document in 2021 that revealed a priest who had sexually abused a 17-year-old girl had been named the chaplain at a school where Trahant’s cousin was principal.
“Is Paul Hart still at Brother Martin School?” Trahant texted his cousin. Trahant also emailed a local journalist, telling him to keep the Brother Martin chaplain “on your radar.” In both cases, he didn’t disclose details, because of the protective order.
Two weeks later, an article appeared in the local Times-Picayune newspaper detailing how a church investigation in 2013 confirmed the sexual misconduct but determined that the girl wasn’t regarded as a minor under church law at that time. U.S. bankruptcy judge Meredith Grabill ordered a leak investigation. Although the bankruptcy trustee found that someone other than Trahant provided the reporter with information about Hart, Grabill fined him a steep $400,000. (Trahant is appealing.)
“I have seen hundreds of felonies that were never reported,” Trahant said. “By entering these protective orders, these dioceses can settle cases without anything being made public. They hide felonies in the bankruptcy vault forever.” (Sarah McDonald, the head of communications for the New Orleans Archdiocese, did not respond to repeated emails requesting comment.)
Although sexual abuse of children by clergy is a very old phenomenon, it wasn’t until 2002, when The Boston Globe published its groundbreaking series about the decades-long cover-up by the Boston Archdiocese, that it became a national scandal.
Tollner by then was in his early 40s. He was married and worked as a mortgage banker. His alleged abuse at the hands of Monsignor Placa was a quarter-century in the past.
When I asked him how he had borne up during the years after his abuse, he told me he followed the dictum of his father, who always told him: “Suffer, or work with what you’ve got.”
He also told me that he never wore short-sleeved shirts or T-shirts, no matter how hot the weather. “I used to wear them, and they made me look more attractive to Placa,” he said.
After the Globe series, grand juries across the country were empaneled to investigate clergy sexual abuse. Tollner was one of three survivors who testified against Placa before the Suffolk County grand jury. In February 2003, it issued a report alleging that the diocese was shuffling priests who had committed sexual crimes from parish to parish. Placa, who was called “Priest F” in the report, was one of those accused. However, with New York’s statute of limitations having long since expired, no charges could be brought.
Six years later, Placa faced a church tribunal in Albany. Tollner testified before the panel, but the tribunal found Placa not guilty of abusing him, and a Vatican disciplinary panel not only upheld that verdict but instructed the Rockville Centre diocese to “restore his good name.”
After the Suffolk County grand jury report, Placa joined Giuliani Partners, a firm run by his close childhood friend, Rudolph Giuliani. Now 81, he lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and is considered by the church to be “a retired priest in good standing.”
Reached by phone, Placa told me, “I’ve been investigated by everybody, including the Vatican, and have been found not guilty.” Referring to Tollner, he said, “Poor Richard. He’s a mess.”
Tollner became a pro bono lobbyist working to pass the Child Victims Act in New York State. For eight years, he also served on the board of CHILD USA, a nonprofit founded by Marci Hamilton that works to end child sexual abuse and has fought for statute of limitations reforms. For over a decade, he lobbied the New York state legislature to pass the Child Victims Act.
When the law took effect in 2019, he filed his lawsuit at 12:01 a.m. on August 14—literally a minute after the window for litigation opened.
His midlife activism was motivated “to protect children today,” he told me. “If someone doesn’t speak up, the perpetrators will continue to commit crimes.”
With the bankruptcy of the Rockville Centre diocese, Tollner’s righteous anger only deepened.
One of his former classmates was a man named Christopher Fernan, who also said he had been abused by Placa. He filed his lawsuit nine days after Tollner. In his filing, Fernan alleged that Placa had abused him “more than 100 times from 1974 to 1977.”
But Fernan will never get a penny from the Rockville Centre diocese. In 2021, he died, felled by heart failure. In fact, in the five years since the diocese filed for bankruptcy, nearly 10 percent of the abuse claimants have died, which of course is another reason why the bankruptcy favors a diocese. “These victims are generally in their 60s and 70s, and many are not in good health,” said James Stang, the lawyer for the unsecured creditors’ committee in the Rockville Centre bankruptcy. Tollner agreed: “Victims’ physical and mental health decline with age, and witnesses die,” making it harder for some victims to get settlements.
Witnesses matter because after a survivor files a claim, the law firms for the diocese review it for accuracy. Contemporaneous witnesses help bolster the credibility of the claimant. A victim whose witnesses have died will inevitably receive less money from a settlement than a victim whose claim is bolstered by the testimony of others.
“Chris Fernan was my lead witness, and he is dead,” Tollner told me. “I still have five living witnesses. And I am one of the lucky ones.”
With victims and witnesses growing older and dying, “time wasn’t on our side,” Tollner told me. So he became the chair of the unsecured creditors’ committee and was instrumental in negotiating a settlement. The bankruptcy, he said, was depleting diocesan assets and wearing down abuse claimants, and he felt it was a priority to get them some compensation while they were still well enough to make use of it.
The $323 million settlement between the Rockville Centre diocese and its victim-creditors was approved by a federal bankruptcy judge in December. Some 600 victims who ultimately filed claims will receive payments, at an average of $538,000 per victim, though the amount will vary depending on the extent of the abuse the victim suffered.
The diocese believes the settlement is fair. “No amount of money can adequately compensate survivors of abuse,” said a spokesman for the diocese. But, he continued, “The diocese’s goal has always been the equitable compensation of survivors of abuse while allowing the Church to continue her essential mission. We believe the plan achieved those goals.”
But when you consider the crimes that were perpetrated—and the amount of money the victims would have gotten if Chapter 11 had not stopped jury trials—there’s not much doubt who got the short end of the stick. “Rockville Centre had some of the hardest cases,” Tollner said. “Many were raped and molested, sometimes by multiple priests.”
And few people took a bigger hit than Tollner. His lawyer, Jordan Merson, told me that his client’s claim would have been “worth millions had it been tried in state court,” adding that “Richard left a lot on the table by going along with a deal that other survivors wanted.” Tollner wouldn’t disclose his share of the settlement, except to say that it was less than “a million.” Lawyers in the case said most other victims got far less.
The Rockville Centre diocese was the first in New York to emerge from bankruptcy. In September 2025, the Rochester diocese became the second, when its bankruptcy judge signed off on a $246 million settlement to compensate 475 sexual abuse survivors. That settlement includes a requirement that the diocese release its “secret files” documenting abuse cases.
Mitchell Garabedian, the lawyer for 97 victims in Rochester, said that making these documents public was the victims’ demand from the start. “Victims and survivors want to make the church a safer place for children. The public must be aware that sexual abuser priests were abusing children and then sent to other parishes after the abuse was exposed.”
Although a handful of other dioceses—most notably the Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware, and the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico—are releasing documents detailing clergy sexual abuse, most continue to refuse. Rockville Centre’s Bishop Barres “could release the secret files today, if he wanted to,” said Garabedian. The diocesan spokesman told The Free Press that the settlement includes “the release of all documents pertaining to the case to an institution of higher learning.” But no such institution has been designated, the language of the settlement suggests that any such release will be limited, and the date of any release is years into the future.
Where, you might ask, is the money coming from?
One of primary assets of the Catholic Church in the U.S. is property, and sure enough, some of the $234.8 million the Rockville Centre diocese and its “parishes and other related entities” will contribute to the settlement will come from the sale of several properties, including 200 acres that belonged to a seminary. It was sold for $20 million. The diocese’s 136 parishes will contribute $53 million. And a little less than $3 million will come from Stang’s law firm, which represented the creditors’ committee.
Then there are the companies that have long provided liability insurance for America’s Catholic dioceses. The dioceses believe that their insurance should cover most if not all of the abuse settlements, but the companies have for the most part vehemently disagreed, and have gone to court to avoid having to indemnify sexual abuse claims. This is yet another stumbling block in providing compensation to victims.
In the Rockville Centre case, four insurance companies grudgingly agreed to pay $85.3 million, far less than the diocese wanted. And though they didn’t agree to that much until the last minute, at least they came to the table. In many other church bankruptcy cases, insurers have refused to negotiate, claiming that policies were never meant to cover acts that were “expected or intended” to occur, given the common practice of moving priests from parish to parish to cover up abuse.
This dispute is playing out most starkly in Manhattan, where the Archdiocese of New York (ADNY), which serves 2.8 million Catholics and faces 1,771 claims, is locked in a legal battle with Chubb, which began insuring the archdiocese in 1956. “Senior ADNY officials,” said Chubb in its lawsuit, “had known for decades that clergy members had and were committing sexual abuse” and they concealed that knowledge from Chubb. Chubb stopped insuring the archdiocese in 2003.
“There are over 1,100 cases where Chubb has issued a policy,” said Frank Napolitano, the chief administrator of the archdiocese. “We would love to process these claims as soon as possible, but we are hung up by Chubb.” Napolitano added that “we expect and are seeking coverage by Chubb for all or most of the liabilities, whether settlements or judgments, for the years where abuse occurred during Chubb policy years.”
The New York archdiocese is in a different position from the dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy: It is too wealthy to qualify for Chapter 11 protection. Because it owns well north of $1 billion worth of prime real estate, the lawsuits by victims have not put it in “financial distress.”
“We have the assets to cover all these claims, if need be,” acknowledged Napolitano, but added that those assets “are intended to be used for our pastoral, charitable, spiritual, and educational ministries.” Last year, the archdiocese agreed to sell its headquarters building to a residential developer for over $100 million. But of course it would prefer not to sell any more real estate than it has to. “The insured’s financial position is not a mitigating factor in an insurance company’s responsibility to live up to the policies that it issued,” said Napolitano.
Marci Hamilton describes the resistance of the insurers as “stonewalling.” But in an email, Chubb said that the archdiocese was the problem.
“The insurance that the archdiocese bought covers accidents—it does not provide compensation for knowingly allowing a pattern of abuse to persist for many years,” said Chubb in a statement to The Free Press. “There’s a reason insurance doesn’t cover this kind of behavior—it would reward those who facilitate criminal conduct rather than those who take vigilant steps to mitigate risk and protect children from abuse.”
In April, a New York state court found that Chubb is not required to cover costs for settling hundreds of sex abuse claims. The archdiocese is appealing.
The Diocese of Brooklyn is in a similar situation to that of the New York archdiocese. Its real estate holdings are significant, and Chapter 11 isn’t likely. In December 2020, with the diocese then facing more than 500 claims, its longtime insurer, Arrowood Indemnity Company, sued the diocese in December 2020, using the same arguments as Chubb. Unlike Chubb, however, Arrowood has been declared insolvent, in part because of the sexual abuse claims, and is in the process of liquidating. “Arrowood was the insurer for 65 to 70 percent of the Brooklyn diocese’s cases,” said Mones. “We will be lucky if they pay $100 a case.”
(A spokesperson for the Brooklyn diocese said that it has settled more than 600 cases since 2017, “and is working to resolve the remaining cases in a fair, equitable, and just basis.”)
Stephen Jimenez sued the Brooklyn diocese in August 2019 when the litigation window opened. He alleged that a teacher at his Brooklyn Catholic elementary school had fondled, molested, and repeatedly raped him for nearly four years starting in 1963, when he was 10 years old. The teacher, referred to as “Brother Romanus” in the lawsuit, is alleged to have taken Jimenez to steam rooms and gay bathhouses for sex. Jimenez said he reported the abuse to the diocese in 2002. Brother Romanus is deceased. “The only thing the diocese ever offered me was counseling with a nun in Boston,” Jimenez told me, an offer he rejected. The diocese suggested he report the abuse to the Xaverian Brothers, the Catholic order that ran the school he attended. “They gave me a $75,000 settlement in 2003,” Jimenez said, adding he didn’t release the Brooklyn diocese from legal action. (The Brooklyn diocese declined to comment about Jimenez.)
Jimenez, now 72, said he has spent decades in therapy, dealing with anxiety attacks and suicidal thoughts. He said he has never held a job for more than a year.
Jimenez was among those who spent years lobbying for the passage of the Child Victims Act. “We won our battle more than six years ago, and for the majority of us survivors, nothing has happened.” Jimenez blames the Brooklyn diocese for moving at a glacial pace to settle any of its cases. Jimenez’s case was scheduled to go to mediation in the spring of this year. A date hadn’t been set because lawyers for the diocese told Jimenez’s counsel that they were waiting on another of the diocese’s insurers to commit. Jimenez told me that in May, the diocese canceled the mediation without explanation.
Jimenez looks at it this way: “After everything that has happened to people, the dioceses, their lawyers, and insurers are hoping survivors will die and they will have to pay less.”
