SOUTH ORANGE VILLAGE (NJ)
Politico [Arlington VA]
May 12, 2026
By Dustin Racioppi
In New Jersey and California, the Catholic university is seeking depositions and upwards of $110,000 for legal costs.
One of the country’s top Catholic universities won a big victory earlier this year when a judge dismissed a whistleblower lawsuit brought by its former president. But for Seton Hall, the legal battle is far from over.
The university is best known for its acclaimed basketball program and its law school, whose alumni include federal judges, state lawmakers and two former governors. But lately, attention has focused on how the university’s new president, Monsignor Joseph Reilly, was elevated to the role despite a 2019 investigation that found he failed to properly report sexual abuse allegations when serving as a seminary leader at the school.
The university is now waging a campaign in New Jersey and California courts to extract information — and money — from the former president and a person the school believes leaked information about the investigation into alleged clergy abuse within its ranks.
It is the latest turn in a kind of cat-and-mouse game that’s unfolded for roughly 18 months amid the abuse scandal at the North Jersey-based university: Subpoenas issued, taunting emails and claims of reputational damage over the whole thing.
The details of the 2019 investigation — spurred by allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick — are now at the heart of Seton Hall’s efforts against its last president, Joseph Nyre, and Eric Spitz, a California businessperson and former newspaper co-owner suspected by school attorneys of “ongoing misuse” of “confidential and privileged materials,” according to court records. Lawyers for Seton Hall have subpoenaed Nyre and Spitz to sit for depositions, turn over documents and collectively pay upwards of $110,000, court records in California and New Jersey show.
“Mr. Spitz has been directly implicated in the unlawful receipt and potential further dissemination of Seton Hall’s confidential and privileged information by Dr. Nyre,” Peter Villar, a California-based attorney for Seton Hall, said in court papers.
Spitz, who co-owned the Orange County Register, is defiant. He characterized Seton Hall’s “lawyers and chancellors” as protectors of McCarrick, who was convicted of abuse at a canonical trial and defrocked by the pope, and said they have taken “a cardinal’s predation of seminarians and children and laundered it” through the legal system.
“The institution is not the law and his heirs are not the law — the law, today, is whatever I am willing to say out loud, and I am saying their names,” Spitz said in a statement.
Seton Hall did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Nyre, who was president from 2019 to 2023, filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Seton Hall after he stepped down. Then the school filed a lawsuit last year against Nyre, accusing him of unlawfully accessing and disseminating confidential documents connected to the 2019 investigation into McCarrick.
That investigation was never publicly released, only summarized by Seton Hall, which said McCarrick “created a culture of fear and intimidation” and sexually harassed seminarians. But in late 2024, after Reilly succeeded Nyre as president, POLITICO reported that investigators determined Reilly knew of sexual abuse allegations years earlier as a seminary leader but did not report them.
Backlash from advocates, a handful of state lawmakers and then-Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat who is now New Jersey’s governor, led the archbishop of Newark to order a review of that 2019 investigation last year. But that stalled after Seton Hall lawyers effectively blocked Nyre from being interviewed.
And in a sprawling but separate sexual abuse case, a judge chastised Seton Hall for not disclosing the existence of the 2019 investigation and said lawyers for victims “had to find out about it in 2025 in POLITICO.” She ordered the school to turn over a trove of documents.
Before Reilly’s official promotion, emails started circulating to the Seton Hall community and others from a Gmail account with current Newark Archbishop Cardinal Joseph Tobin’s name but purporting to be from “a group of concerned alumni” warning against making Reilly president, according to court records.
“Do the right thing,” an email from September 2024 read. “Get in front of this story. We beg you.”
One of Seton Hall’s lawyers, Tom Scrivo, was copied on “numerous” emails from that account and they “often referred to confidential documents belonging to Seton Hall,” he said in court papers.
About three weeks after Seton Hall installed Reilly as president, the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office issued a subpoena to Google seeking “ANY and ALL identifiable information” related to the Cardinal Tobin email account, according to a copy of it posted online.
Even though a judge this February dismissed Nyre’s whistleblower suit, the university has continued its own case against him. And it has homed in on Spitz on the other side of the country, asserting he’s “directly implicated” in alleged leaks of confidential information.
The school issued a subpoena in California for Spitz to appear for a deposition in January, but he did not appear. Spitz, who writes columns for various news outlets including Real Clear Politics and the Wall Street Journal, “self-identified as a journalist” and has sought protection under California’s shield law protecting journalists from divulging sources.
Seton Hall is trying again to depose Spitz later this month. Both sides claim it has all caused damage. In a January email, Spitz emails Scrivo “to stop harassing me,” that he has lost sleep and money, and that his wife is “apoplectic,” according to court records.
Seton Hall, meanwhile, said in court documents that Spitz’s alleged actions caused “irreparable harm,” including “damage to the University’s reputation, good will, and business prospects.”
The university is seeking about $30,000 from Spitz and $80,000 from Nyre for legal costs and fees. Armen McOmber, an attorney for Nyre who declined to comment for this article, challenged the school’s billing estimates in court, calling them “grossly excessive and unreasonable.”
“At its core, SHU’s application reads less like a good-faith fee submission and more like an attempt to punish” Nyre, he wrote.