SOUTH ORANGE VILLAGE (NJ)
NorthJersey.com [Woodland Park NJ]
August 19, 2026
By Kaitlyn Kanzer
A former seminary student at Seton Hall University says he was subjected to hostile treatment and a delay in ordination after he reported that he was sexually harassed by another seminary student in 2012.
The plaintiff, who is identified only by initials, named the university, the Immaculate Conception Seminary and the Rev. Msgr. Joseph Reilly in a lawsuit, which was filed in state Superior Court in Essex County. Reilly currently serves as Seton Hall’s president.
Andrew Misura, the director of media and marketing strategy at Seton Hall University, did not respond to a request for comment.
The plaintiff said he was a graduate seminarian when he experienced repeated and unwanted sexual advances and touching, including having his genital area grabbed by another seminarian. The lawsuit says the plaintiff reported the actions to Reilly, who was the rector and dean of the seminary, and to the vice rector in September 2012.
The complaint says a 2020 investigation by Nukk-Freeman & Cerra P.C. alleged that the seminary failed to follow the university’s reporting and investigatory protocols.
The plaintiff said that after the other seminarian found out he had reported him, the person confronted him and the alleged assaulter’s allies threatened and ostracized him. The suit also says seminary leadership treated the hostilities as the plaintiff’s fault, that Reilly attempted to delay his diaconal ordination and that the plaintiff was removed from “residential formation and active ministry” two months before his “anticipated priestly ordination.”
The suit says the heart of the case isn’t second-guessing “a religious decision” but that the university and a senior administrator received a report of repeated sexual harassment and assault and “failed to use the university’s required secular reporting process and
then allegedly permitted the foreseeable consequences of that failure to be used against the reporting student.”
A report issued last month by Ropes & Gray LLP about Reilly publicly confirmed the incident and said Reilly had removed the accused seminarian without making a Title IX report, according to the lawsuit. The suit accuses Seton Hall and the seminary of failing to “adequately train” Reilly as a senior administrator on “a policy governing sexual harassment reports.”
The suit says the accused seminarian learned that the plaintiff had reported him and demanded that he be told what was said. The plaintiff said he felt threatened and knew that the man was “socially aligned with a substantial cohort of other seminarians.”
The plaintiff said the other seminarian’s friends and supporters blamed him for what happened and ostracized him. The lawsuit says the hostilities continued until his third year and that he told seminary leadership it was related to his report. The suit says the administration treated it as “a mutual interpersonal problem” instead.
The suit says these difficulties led Reilly to try to delay or prevent the plaintiff ’s ordination as a transitional deacon, saying he was “not sufficiently ‘a man of community.’” After he was made a transitional deacon in 2014, the plaintiff said, he continued to face differential treatment, was passed over for senior liturgical responsibilities and was assigned menial institutional tasks.
He also accused the seminary of hiring a private detective to follow him. He said the detective tracked him to an apartment in Hoboken and would document his overnight absences but didn’t witness any sexual conduct.
Two months before the plaintiff was to be ordained, Reilly met with him and asked him if he was ready to be ordained and if he had anything he needed to disclose. The complaint says he admitted to a private relationship with a woman and that he wasn’t ready to be ordained but asked to stay as a transitional deacon.
The lawsuit says Reilly told him a private investigator had followed him and that he was required to leave the seminary residence, was not ordained and wasn’t allowed to continue as a deacon. The plaintiff was allowed to complete only his remaining academic work and was too “humiliated and alienated” to attend graduation, he said.
He sought to return to active ministry and continue toward priesthood, but before he could complete the process, Archbishop John Myers, who had said he should return, retired and Cardinal Joseph Tobin became the archbishop of Newark.
The suit says that after years of meetings with Tobin, the archbishop declined to return the plaintiff to ministry, and when he asked Reilly about it, Reilly said he had provided information and materials concerning the plaintiff but wouldn’t provide specifics.
The plaintiff said he didn’t recount what had happened to him because he believed Tobin had gotten a “complete and accurate institutional account” of what happened to him from the seminary, and that Reilly’s refusal prevented him from knowing whether the information given included the sexual assault, reporting failure and following retaliation.
Seton Hall announced that its Title IX policies complied with state law but were not consistently followed, leading to unreported sexual harassment incidents.
In June 2020, Reilly admitted he had failed to report the incident, misunderstanding his obligations, but that training later clarified it. He was later promoted to vice provost in 2023 and president in 2024.
“Plaintiff disputes that the absence of formal training excuses the institutional failures or the retaliatory and harmful conduct that followed after the actual notice of assault,” the suit says.
The plaintiff said he was later allowed to continue his pursuit of the priesthood at another diocese and was accepted by the Diocese of Brooklyn, restored to ministry and ordained in 2024.
The complaint says the plaintiff spent years sidelined as a result of his report while his classmates “progressed through years of ministry.”
The lawsuit accuses the defendants of several things, including negligence, negligent training, infliction of emotional distress and violating the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.