NEWARK (NJ)
NBC News [New York NY]
October 16, 2025
By Corky Siemaszko
The verdict came a week after the same jury awarded $5 million in compensatory damages to a former student who said a monk assaulted him at the elite Catholic school.
The New Jersey jury that made history last week by awarding $5 million in damages to a Delbarton School graduate who claimed a monk sexually assaulted him decided Thursday not to impose further penalties on the elite Catholic prep school.
The four women and two men on the panel declined to award any punitive damages to the accuser, who has been identified only as T.M. during the more than five-week trial in Morris County Superior Court.
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of Thursday’s decision, T.M. released a statement calling the case a “seismic shift towards institutional accountability.”
“My hope is that by pursuing this nearly nine-year climb to justice, I can help others understand the profound and lasting impact of clergy sexual abuse — not just on the victims, but on their families, their communities, and their futures,” T.M. said. “No one should have to endure what I have experienced.”
His lawyers, Rayna Kessler and Michael Geibelson, also released a statement that did not directly address the jury’s decision not to award punitive damages.
“The evidence presented at trial showed that the Order of St. Benedict of New Jersey, the operator of the Delbarton School, enabled decades of child sexual abuse and systematically concealed it to guard their reputation,” it said. “This is the first verdict against Catholic Church-affiliated defendants for sexual abuse in New Jersey, and it sends a clear message: the culture of secrecy is shattered.”
In a joint statement, the school’s headmaster, the Rev. Michael Tidd, and the monastic order’s current leader, Abbot Jonathan Licari, said: “We are pleased and grateful that the jury in the punitive damages phase of this trial unanimously found that St. Mary’s Abbey and Delbarton School are not liable for punitive damages.
“The jury’s verdict in this phase of the trial is consistent with what they found earlier in the compensatory portion of the trial: St. Mary’s Abbey and Delbarton School did not know of the abuse found by the jury, and there was no intentional misconduct nor malice towards the plaintiff by the Abbey or School.”
Last week, the jury agreed unanimously that T.M. had been assaulted and found that the man accused of abusing him, the Rev. Richard Lott, was liable for 35% of the compensatory damages.
Lott is still a priest but is no longer a monk at Delbarton, nor is he affiliated with the school. An attorney for Lott, Mark J. Brancato, did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent after normal business hours Thursday.
The panel also ruled that Delbarton and its connected monastery, St. Mary’s Abbey, were responsible for the rest of the compensatory damages, or $3.25 million.
After the first ruling, Tidd and Licari put out a statement saying, in part, “we do not believe that the damages awarded in this case are either fair or reasonable.”
On the stand Tuesday, Tidd doubled down on that assertion.
“Reasonable people can reasonably disagree,” he said, according to The Morristown Daily Record. “Our position all along is that it didn’t happen.”
T.M.’s case was the first of 39 pending abuse cases to go to trial against Delbarton, which is on a sprawling 187-acre campus in Morristown and where the tuition for its 600-plus students is $48,725 a year.
Tidd estimated on the stand that the order’s total net assets were $164.3 million but added that they are tied up in property it would have to sell to pay settlements.
Asked whether it could sell the campus to raise the money, Tidd replied, “We could, but we would go out of business.”
T.M., now 65, accused the Benedictine order of “enabling” his abuser in a lawsuit this year, which named the school, the abbey, the monks and Lott as defendants. All the defendants denied the allegations.
On the stand, T.M. alleged that Lott plied him with liquor at an off-campus party on New Year’s Eve 1975 before he drove him to the barn on the grounds of Delbarton where the monk had his quarters. He said he was “tipsy” when Lott pulled down his pants and performed oral sex on him.
T.M. said he reported the alleged assault to the late Abbott Brian Clarke in a letter after he graduated in 1977. He said Clarke, who died in 2019, told him that Lott had admitted abusing him and that he would deal with him.
A 2018 deposition from Clarke was introduced at the trial. In it, he admitted destroying the letter T.M. sent him accusing Lott of assault “because it’s bad for the reputation of a school when there is sexual abuse associated with it.”
T.M. said in his statement Thursday: “I trusted him to ensure that Lott would be held accountable and that what happened to me would never happen to anyone else. That trust was betrayed.”
Lott, 89, testified that on New Year’s Eve 1975 he was more than an hour south of the Delbarton campus at a church in Lakewood, New Jersey.
Lott confirmed that Clarke confronted him about T.M.’s abuse allegation. He told the court he denied the allegation to Clarke.
Delbarton publicly acknowledged in 2018 that at least 30 men had come forward with allegations that, over three decades, 13 past or current priests and monks at the school had victimized them — in addition to a lay faculty member who is now retired.
Greg Gianforcaro, a lawyer who represented some of the accusers, said before T.M.’s trial that the order did not admit liability in cases that have been settled.
More than 30 more people came forward after the initial lawsuits with allegations of sexual abuse against the school’s monks. They have either filed their own lawsuits or joined existing cases, Gianforcaro said.
Corky Siemaszko is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital.