NEW YORK (NY)
Rolling Stone [New York NY]
January 20, 2026
By Luke Cyphers
“It’s a little sad, and it ain’t hit me hard yet, but it will,” Daryl Powell said. Powell sued the church, alleging they were aware of decades of child sexual abuse
New York’s Riverside Church settled the first case resulting from a decades-long child sexual-abuse scandal in its basketball program, agreeing to terms Tuesday with former player Daryl Powell before the matter could go to a Manhattan jury.
Powell, the 64-year-old former college star who now works as a deputy sheriff in Virginia, testified to years of abuse by Ernest Lorch, the multimillionaire director and coach of the once-vaunted Riverside program. He testified that Lorch groped his genitals during frequent “jockstrap checks,” smelled his body when he’d come out of the shower, and routinely paddled his bare buttocks.
On Tuesday, Powell smiled broadly and shook the hands of his attorneys, Riverside’s lawyers, and jurors after state Supreme Court Judge Alexander Tisch announced the settlement, which the judge said was “confidential.”
“Thank you, everybody. Thank you,” Powell said in court as he gave a thumbs up.
“He is thankful for the result, but he’s more appreciative of the fact that he was able to tell his story,” Lawrence Luttrell, one of Powell’s attorneys, said to Rolling Stone. “That means more to him than any settlement amount.” (Luttrell declined to specify the terms of the settlement agreement.)
Powell’s was the first of 27 lawsuits against Riverside to go to trial under New York’s 2019 Child Victims Act, which allows plaintiffs who were sexually abused as children to sue people and organizations, such as the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic Church, years or, in some cases, decades later.
As detailed in a joint investigation by Rolling Stone and Sportico, the Riverside lawsuits produced thousands of pages of sworn deposition testimony from alleged victims about a dark chapter in youth sports history, creating a basketball version of the Epstein files.
Lorch died in 2012, and Powell’s trial focused on the church’s institutional responsibility for the abuse during the coach’s tenure with the program from 1961 to 2002. The settlement doesn’t end the legal saga for Riverside, with the other two dozen plaintiff cases still working its way through the courts.
“I’m glad it’s over,” Powell said in a brief interview outside the courtroom. “And for the rest of the surviving victims, I want to see them get justice.”
Attorney Paul Mones, who gave the opening argument for Powell, told the jurors the Powell trial “was monumental” in the lead-up to the remaining cases.
“The significance of it is that it’s the first case to ever go to a jury under the Children’s Victims Act in New York,” Mones tells Rolling Stone. “And the case itself, the evidence showed that not only that Mr. Powell was abused by Ernie Lorch, one of the most successful AAU basketball coaches in New York City history, but that Riverside had notice through a number of witnesses about the problem.” (Lawyers for Riverside Church did not respond to a request for comment.)
Jurors interviewed by the attorneys after the settlement said they found Powell’s and other players’ claims of abuse credible, but they wavered on what the damages should be.
Luttrell said he’s hopeful the other Riverside cases will play out in a similar manner. “That we agree what happened here is horrific and there was a lapse of judgment,” he said. “Then we stipulate the liability and get to the point of assessing damages, atonement and bringing closure.”
Several jurors looked surprised by Judge Tisch’s announcement of the last-minute settlement, but many smiled as the parties thanked them for their time.
Until Lorch’s ouster after a former player’s abuse allegations in 2002, the Riverside Hawks were celebrated for their success. The program put as many as 1,000 alumni on NCAA basketball rosters and saw more than 60 of them make the NBA, including Hall of Famers Nate Archibald and Chris Mullin, and more recent pro stars Metta World Peace, Lamar Odom and Elton Brand, the current Philadelphia 76ers general manager.
With Lorch’s money and the church’s institutional clout behind the program, Riverside sent top teenage squads to tournaments both nationwide and internationally, including to Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the former Yugoslavia. Lorch, who grew rich as a corporate attorney and CEO of a leveraged buyout firm, regularly supplied his players — many from New York’s poorest neighborhoods — with sneakers, gear, meals, and cash.
The Hawks’ elite travel teams created a template for today’s private-equity-infused $40 billion youth sports industry. But former players suing the church say all that success was built on a corrupt foundation of child sexual predation.
Powell did not allege abuse as extreme as some of his fellow plaintiffs, who have claimed that Lorch raped them, but his trial provided a test case for many of the fact patterns and issues in the other lawsuits.
For instance, Powell testified to Lorch’s use of the paddle and jockstrap checks, something other plaintiff witnesses in the trial said happened to them as part of Lorch’s alleged grooming pattern. The jury heard testimony about Lorch’s alleged sexual abuse from five other former Riverside players, two of them now deceased, who are also suing the church under the CVA.
Like many other plaintiffs, the all-city forward at DeWitt Clinton High School, who scored 20 points a game during his junior season at Division I Marist College in 1981-82, said he stayed with Riverside because of the opportunities the program offered.
Powell grew up in extreme poverty in 1970s Harlem, and he said Lorch became a “father figure” whose connections helped the player get into a powerhouse high school program, a junior college, and Marist. But the price was frequent sexual abuse after Hawks practices.
He left Marist with a year left on his scholarship, he testified, because he didn’t want anything more to do with the game or with Lorch and his legacy.
While Lorch’s abuse was a feature of the trial, the case hinged on Riverside’s alleged culpability and complicity throughout the decades. Powell’s attorneys argued that Riverside failed in its duty to protect the player and turned a blind eye to Lorch’s activities.
The defense presented several witnesses who said they never saw any indications of wrongdoing in the program, and argued Lorch was an independent volunteer — that if there was abuse, the fault lay solely with the coach and not the church.
The plaintiff’s attorneys — Mones, an L.A-based lawyer who litigated successful child sexual abuse suits against the Boy Scouts ofAmerica, and New Jersey-based Luttrell, who has brought several other CVA suits against Riverside — countered with their own witnesses. A pair of former coaches testified they left their Riverside jobs after being disturbed by Lorch’s “touchy touchy” behavior with children.
Powell’s lawyers also introduced documentation that Lorch, who began coaching the Hawks in 1961, served on Riverside’s board of deacons and board of trustees, as well as several church committees, and that the Hawks’ basketball success was touted multiple times in Riverside’s official newsletter. They emphasized there was no evidence of any formal guidelines or supervision of Lorch on the part of the church.
The other main issue before the jury was what damages Powell incurred. As an adult, Powell said he has had intimacy issues with women and mistrust of men, including in his law-enforcement job. An expert witness for the plaintiff said Powell suffered from PTSD and chronic low-level depression that would take 10 years of therapy at an estimated cost of $500,000 to properly treat.
Powell also testified that he was sexually assaulted as a 10-year-old by a knife-wielding stranger, before any of his encounters with Lorch. The defense had played that up as a greater cause of trauma than Powell’s time with Riverside.One of the jurors alluded to the prior incident in discussing the case with attorneys after the settlement, wondering how much of Powell’s difficulty was attributable to that incident.
Another juror said the fact that Lorch’s abuse dates back 50 years made the case “tricky,” a factor that may have factored into Riverside’s decision to go to trial. But based on the Powell case, it’s far more likely the remaining lawsuits will be resolved by settlement rather than jury trials.
As for Powell, after years of abuse and a lifetime of silence, he could walk out of court knowing his story had been told, and people believed him.“I’m okay,” he said in an interview. “It’s a little sad, and it ain’t hit me hard yet, but it will.”
By Luke Cyphers
Contributors: Cheyenne Roundtree