MILWAUKEE (WI)
WISN 12 - ABC [Milwaukee WI]
July 10, 2026
By Amy Fleury, Nick Bohr
The lawsuit claims school leaders were warned but did nothing.
A Wisconsin woman is suing the Milwaukee Archdiocese, saying she survived sexual abuse at the hands of her fourth grade teacher in 2013.
Kevin Buelow is serving a 26-year prison sentence for sexually assaulting girls at St. Matthias Catholic School in Milwaukee and Holy Apostles School in New Berlin.
The lawsuit claims St. Matthias school leaders were warned about the abuse but “chose not to meaningfully investigate complaints,” “report Buelow to law enforcement” or “restrict his unsupervised access to children.”
The suit also says leaders violated church policies put in place after the sexual abuse scandal in the early 2000s.
“Rules are only as good as their enforcement and training and being followed,” said the victim’s attorney Jacob Goodman on Friday. “You can enact all the rules you want and if people aren’t trained on them and there isn’t a culture of following them, they mean nothing.”
Goodman said the lawsuit states repeatedly that the girl lives with guilt because she wasn’t able to bring herself to report the abuse until she was 16, five years later. When her case became public in 2018, numerous other girls came forward at the school Buelow was then teaching at, Holy Apostles in New Berlin.
“She felt it was on her to have come forward sooner, which we allege in the lawsuit, and obviously it doesn’t fall on a child to prevent this from happening again,” Goodman said.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages.
A spokesperson for the archdiocese said they will not comment on pending litigation.