NEWARK (NJ)
Politico [Arlington VA]
November 18, 2025
By Dustin Racioppi
The judge found earlier this year that the university defied a court order.
A state judge is ordering Seton Hall University to turn over a trove of documents connected to a 2019 investigation into clergy abuse, a victory for survivors who’ve spent years in court seeking accountability.
The order by Superior Court Judge Avion Benjamin stems from reporting by POLITICO that Seton Hall’s president, Monsignor Joseph Reilly, did not properly report allegations of sexual misconduct when he was a seminary leader.
Benjamin has been overseeing litigation on about 450 claims of clergy abuse within the Archdiocese of Newark and at Seton Hall but expressed disbelief earlier this year when attorneys for the plaintiffs learned about the 2019 investigation, saying “they had to find out about it in 2025 in POLITICO.” In March, Benjamin determined that Seton Hall violated a previous court order by not disclosing those documents.
Benjamin’s latest order forces Seton Hall to share with those lawyers damning documents that named about a dozen priests, including Reilly, though he was not accused of abuse. The 2019 report showed that Reilly knew of sexual abuse claims, did not properly report them and was recommended to step down from boards and his leadership position at the time as a seminary leader.
Despite those findings, and after Reilly took a yearlong sabbatical, Seton Hall promoted Reilly to lead the university in July. It did so with the approval of the Newark archdiocese, led by Cardinal Joseph Tobin, who sits on Seton Hall’s governing boards.
In light of POLITICO’s reporting, New Jersey political leaders — Gov. Phil Murphy, Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill and three state lawmakers — called for the school to release the 2019 findings. The school resisted those calls; in the meantime, Tobin hired a law firm to conduct a follow-up review.
John Baldante, an attorney for abuse survivors, said the order means “Seton Hall can no longer cloak this information” under a claim of attorney-client privilege.
“Survivors of child sexual abuse are entitled to know what this investigation revealed and what, if anything, Seton Hall and the Archdiocese of Newark did to protect children in response to this investigation,” he said in a statement. “We anticipate that these documents will reveal additional examples of systemic behavior within both the Archdiocese and Seton Hall where the institutions failed to discipline priests accused of sexual abuse and ratified a culture that turned a blind eye toward the priest perpetrators who preyed upon these vulnerable children.”
Lawyers for Seton Hall and the archdiocese did not return a message seeking comment.
In 2018, the university hired a pair of law firms — Latham & Watkins and Gibbons P.C. — to investigate sexual abuse claims following credible allegations against Theodore McCarrick, the longtime archbishop of the Newark diocese and later the top Catholic leader in Washington, D.C., who died in April.
That review found decades of sexual harassment and a “culture of fear and intimidation” under McCarrick, according to a summary published by the university.
A separate memo with key findings of the investigation was delivered to the Board of Regents, the university’s governing body. It detailed how Reilly, then rector and dean of the school’s Immaculate Conception Seminary, investigated a student complaint of sexual assault “in house” and did not report it or follow the school and federal Title IX policies and procedures. It also said Reilly dismissed a seminarian in 2012 who was an alleged victim of sexual abuse without investigating the incident or escalating the matter, a violation of university policy.
Reilly, who once served as priest secretary to McCarrick, also told investigators that he received information about a 2014 allegation of sexual harassment at St. Andrew’s Hall, a seminary at Seton Hall, but did not report it.
Seton Hall has said repeatedly it won’t release the report because it is confidential under attorney-client privilege, and lawyers made that same argument in court.
But Benjamin did not fully accept that argument. Her order says the documents the school must turn over were part of a factual investigation. The Latham & Watkins law firm hired to conduct that investigation specifically said in its report to the school that Seton Hall was not its client, so attorney-client privilege wouldn’t apply.
The judge gave the university 30 days to produce the documents to attorneys.
Read the order here. [No link was provided in the article.]