SOUTH ORANGE VILLAGE (NJ)
Politico [Arlington VA]
November 29, 2025
By Dustin Racioppi
An attorney for former president Joseph Nyre said the New Jersey school is trying to “silence the truth.”
An investigation ordered by a high-ranking cardinal into clergy abuse at one of the country’s top Catholic universities seemed poised to clear a major hurdle when lawyers sat down last week with a key figure holding potentially damning information.
But for the second time in six months, nothing happened when former Seton Hall University president Joseph Nyre was ready to dish — and his attorney says it’s because the school is trying to “silence the truth.” Nyre showed up, the attorney said, but school officials effectively blocked him from answering any questions.
It’s the latest point of conflict in an investigation spurred by POLITICO’s reporting on Seton Hall’s current president, Monsignor Joseph Reilly, who was named to the position despite previously facing allegations he mishandled sexual abuse claims on campus. Just this month, a state judge ordered Seton Hall to turn over roughly 20,000 pages of documents on those and other allegations and chastised the New Jersey school for not doing so years earlier.
The aborted interview is more than just discord between Nyre and his former employer. Cardinal Joseph Tobin, who sits on Seton Hall’s governing boards, promised the school’s “full cooperation” and a “transparent review of the facts” when he hired the law firm that sought to interview Nyre.
“Unfortunately, Seton Hall did not get the memo and continues to do everything in its power to obstruct the investigation, in essence threatening Dr. Nyre with sanctions if he provides honest answers” to investigators, said Nyre’s attorney Armen McOmber.
Something similar happened before. In May, lawyers for the university blocked Nyre from participating in the investigation because, in their view, “contractual obligations” prohibited him from sharing any confidential information he may have as a result of his employment as president.
For the latest interview, the university pointed POLITICO to a judge’s order in a separate, ongoing lawsuit that said Nyre cannot discuss confidential information with investigators, essentially putting a judicial directive above the cardinal’s. The school declined to comment.
That friction between the court and the church appears unresolved.
“Cardinal Tobin stands by his earlier statement that there should be no restrictions on Ropes & Gray’s efforts to access all relevant information and witnesses,” the Archdiocese of Newark said in a statement. “Cardinal Tobin remains committed to a transparent examination of the facts and is optimistic that the review will be completed as expeditiously as possible.”
Tobin leads the Archdiocese of Newark and is a member of the College of Cardinals that selected Pope Leo XIV in May. In February, he hired Ropes & Gray to conduct a comprehensive investigation into a 2019 inquiry on clergy abuse.
That earlier investigation came in response to sexual abuse claims against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the longtime archbishop of Newark and Washington It found decades of sexual harassment and a “culture of fear and intimidation” under McCarrick, according to a summary published by the university. McCarrick died this year at age 94.
Reilly, who once served as a secretary to McCarrick, was not accused of abuse himself. But an action plan adopted by the university recommended he be removed from school boards and not hold leadership positions there. He took a year-long sabbatical and, after Nyre’s departure, became university president last year with unanimous support of the school’s Board of Regents and Tobin, who called Reilly “the right person at the right time for Seton Hall.”
Tobin said his inquiry would examine how the findings related to Reilly and “whether they were communicated to any and all appropriate personnel at the Archdiocese and Seton Hall University.”
Nyre was president of the university when the 2019 investigation by lawyers at Latham & Watkins concluded and its findings were delivered to university leaders through another law firm, Gibbons P.C. That 2019 investigation is the one a state judge ordered the school to provide after finding it violated a past court order.
Nyre left the presidency in 2023 and filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the university last year, claiming a series of retaliatory measures against him. Seton Hall filed its own suit against Nyre in February, alleging he downloaded confidential information after his departure. In that case, the judge issued a temporary restraining order and said Nyre could not share confidential information with investigations.
When attorneys sat down with Nyre last week for the investigation ordered by Cardinal Tobin, a Seton Hall lawyer “indicated” that the university refused to waive confidentiality for Nyre during the interview, potentially opening him up to sanctions, according to a letter from McOmber, his attorney, to a lawyer for Ropes & Gray.
McOmber said Nyre had gotten written authorization from Cardinal Tobin to participate in the investigation and had been assured that lawyers Seton Hall and the archdiocese had negotiated parameters for the interview, but that he couldn’t allow it to proceed because of “this last-minute threat.”
“Clearly, blocking the participation of a central witness to the events being investigated jeopardizes the credibility of the entire process, undermines the transparency of the Investigation, and obliterates any claim that the Investigation will be ‘independent’ as Cardinal Tobin has touted,” the letter says. “The University’s intent was, very clearly, to ensure that Dr. Nyre was not allowed to speak freely, openly and honestly about his relevant knowledge, in spite of Cardinal Tobin’s stated intentions to the contrary as to the Investigation.”