SOUTH ORANGE VILLAGE (NJ)
NJ.com [Iselin, NJ]
July 1, 2026
By Ted Sherman
Last year, the Archdiocese of Newark retained an outside law firm to review a years-old investigation at Seton Hall University that had become the focus of stunning allegations:
What did the school’s newly appointed president know about past sexual abuse allegations involving former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and who did he tell?
That report by the law firm of Ropes & Gray, commissioned by Cardinal Joseph Tobin, released on Wednesday, concluded that Monsignor Joseph Reilly, who was named Seton Hall’s president in 2024, had never been implicated in the earlier investigation.
The controversy over Reilly first surfaced in connection with a never-released 2019 report by another outside law firm, Latham & Watkins, into McCarrick’s alleged sexual misconduct on campus.
McCarrick, who died last year at the age of 94, had been accused of sexually harassing seminarians while he was Archbishop of Newark between 1986 and 2000. Reilly had served as McCarrick’s priest secretary from 1994-1995.
While serving as Archbishop of Newark, McCarrick was often on the Seton Hall campus, where he was president of the board of trustees. A summary of the Latham findings charged that he “created a culture of fear and intimidation” and sexually harassed men studying to be priests at the seminary at Seton Hall. But critics and alleged victims criticized the university for failing to provide any details.
According to documents and reporting by Politico in 2024, the Latham report said Reilly knew of sexual abuse allegations against others while working on campus and failed to report them. It said the investigation included recommendations that Reilly be removed from his then-position as a seminary leader and member of university boards, Politico reported.
Instead, he allegedly went on sabbatical for a year before returning as Seton Hall’s vice provost. Reilly became president of the school in July 2024.
Seton Hall later sued its former president, Joseph Nyre, charging that he illicitly downloaded and disseminated documents that ultimately found their way into news reports as he launched his own lawsuit against the university after being ousted in part of over his claims of serious misconduct by members of Seton Hall’s governing board.
Those cases are still ongoing, court records show.
Several New Jersey lawmakers sharply criticized Seton Hall for keeping the full Latham report confidential.
The 32-page report into Latham’s conclusions released on Wednesday found that the old investigation contained “no adverse factual findings regarding Monsignor Reilly.”
Nor did it find or allege that he witnessed any misconduct by McCarrick, the now deceased former cleric who was defrocked and cast out of the ministry by Pope Francis over decades-old sexual abuse allegations involving young men and boys.
The report said several of the representations in the university’s own Special Task Force letters “were inaccurate or inconsistent with the underlying record.”
Indeed, it said, the Latham report’s only references to Monsignor Reilly “are passing ones,” noting his efforts to improve communication and information-sharing among the Archdiocese of Newark, the Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall — which Reilly had once headed — and Seton Hall.
It repeatedly said that Reilly himself had never been personally accused of sexual misconduct.
The report was authored by Jim Dowden, a former federal prosecutor who co-leads his firm’s government enforcement, white collar criminal defense, and investigations practices, and Joshua Levy, the former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts.
Tobin, in a statement following the release of the report, called the review “a clear, candid account of the facts concerning Monsignor Reilly,” adding that he did not have any editorial input into the investigation.
“As the Ropes report makes clear, Monsignor Reilly was not implicated in the Latham report. The Ropes report further notes that Monsignor Reilly responded promptly to allegations of sexual harassment involving seminarians at Immaculate Conception Seminary in 2012 but did not follow the university’s Title IX reporting requirements — requirements on which he had not yet been trained at the time,” said Tobin, who is also president of the Seton Hall Board of Regents.
Tobin said the university resolved the matter in June 2020 after Reilly acknowledged his reporting obligations going forward, and no compliance concerns have arisen since.
“Nothing in this thorough report changes my firm view that Monsignor Reilly is a good priest with formidable experience and a deep commitment to a Catholic institution serving the church and the world. He is highly regarded across the Seton Hall community and has my full respect and confidence,” he said.
In a letter to the Seton Hall community after the release of the report, Reilly said the Ropes & Gray report affirmed “what I have known to be true all along.”
As detailed in the report, he said shortly after he became dean and rector in 2012, a seminarian came him and “conveyed an incident in which he felt he had been the victim of inappropriate behavior by another seminarian. After consulting with seminary faculty, I investigated the incident and found the claim credible. I dismissed the offending seminarian from the seminary soon after the victim’s complaint and reported the incident and the disciplinary action to the archdiocese.”
Reilly said there is never any place in the church, in university, or anywhere else for harassment or abuse.
“At the time, I believed I had handled this in the right way. In the years after the incident, Seton Hall instituted updated and consistent communication, training and guidance specific to the seminaries and the university in responding to complaints and allegations. While I addressed the matter appropriately in promptly dismissing the seminarian and reporting the incident to the archdiocese, I should have also communicated that incident to the university’s Title IX office,” he said.