NEW JERSEY
The Record
THURSDAY, MAY 16, 2013
BY MATTHEW MCGRATH AND ABBOTT KOLOFF
STAFF WRITERS
NEWARK — A man who says he was sexually abused by a priest as a teenager made a public plea Wednesday for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark to reconsider his case five years after it rejected his allegations.
Richard C. Gee said at a press conference that members of an archdiocesan review board determined that he was not a credible witness after he testified before them in 2008. He accused the late Rev. John Nickas, a former pastor of St. Rocco’s Church in Newark, of molesting him in the early 1980s when he was 16 years old and staying at a homeless shelter run by the parish.
The accusations were made as the archdiocese is embroiled in a controversy over the review board’s recommendation that the Rev. Michael Fugee be returned to ministry after his conviction on a charge of criminal sexual contact was overturned by an appellate court on a technicality. Fugee, 52, was an assistant pastor at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church in Wyckoff when he allegedly groped a 13-year-old boy in 1999 and 2000.
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