News & Events

 Poly Prep Country Day School, one of New York’s most prestigious private schools, has agreed to settle a landmark lawsuit claiming its longtime football coach sexually abused hundreds of boys over a 25-year period and that officials covered up the assaults for decades.The settlement ends a three-year legal and public relations battle that divided parents and alumni and turned the elite Brooklyn school into a symbol of institutional indifference to sexual abuse in youth sports. The explosive suit, filed in 2009, claimed officials at the Dyker Heights prep school knew that coach Phil…

The Times this week released about 1,200 previously unpublished files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on volunteers and employees expelled for suspected sexual abuse.Times investigative reporter Jason Felch will discuss the files on a Google+ Hangout at 2 p.m.The files, which have been redacted of victims’ names and other identifying information, were opened from 1985 through 1991. They can be found in a database along with two decades of files released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court in October. The database also contains summary information on about 3,200 additional files opened fro…

When hundreds of victims of sexual abuse agreed in 2007 to settle their claims against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles for $660 million, they did so with the understanding that confidential church files that contained the full story of what officials knew, and when they knew it, would become public.That agreement, however, is at risk of being undermined. A court-appointed referee has ruled that the names of church leaders who are not accused of abusing children should be redacted from the files before those documents are publicly released early next year. Why? The referee argues …

The Times on Tuesday released about 1,200 previously unpublished files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on volunteers and employees expelled for suspected sexual abuse. The files, which have been redacted of victims’ names and other identifying information, were opened from 1985 through 1991. They can be found in a database along with two decades of files released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court in October. The database also contains summary information on about 3,200 additional files opened from 1947 to 2005 that have not been released publicly. Together, the material in the database …

This data­base con­tains in­form­a­tion on about 5,000 men and a hand­ful of wo­men who were ex­pelled from the Boy Scouts of Amer­ica between 1947 and Janu­ary 2005 on sus­pi­cion of sexu­al ab­use. The dots on the map in­dic­ate the loc­a­tion of troops con­nec­ted in some way to the ac­cused. The timeline be­low shows the volume of cases opened by year; however, an un­known num­ber of files were purged by the Scouts pri­or to the early 1990s

The top official at the Loyal Order of Moose and Moose International retired on Thursday, one week after he was accused of molesting a boy in Franklin County more than 30 years ago. William B. Airey, 71, left voluntarily and was not asked by the organization’s board to step down, spokesman Kurt Wehrmeister said yesterday. Airey could not be reached at his Aurora, Ill., home for comment. In their statement on his departure and his appointed successor, officials with the Moose organization, based in Aurora, did not address the lawsuit filed last week in Franklin County Common Pleas Court…

The Citadel’s internal investigation into the handling of a complaint about child molester Louis “Skip” ReVille has been delayed up to three months.Special Counsel Joe McCulloch said the school’s Board of Visitors had hired two firms to conduct the investigation. But one of those firms had become too expensive. The board has replaced it with another firm, but the switch has delayed the investigation, which originally was to be completed by the end of the year.The board replaced Manuel, Daniels, Burke International LLC with Margolis, Healy & Associates, McCulloch said. Consultant Anne Frank…

WORCESTER — A Roman Catholic priest who was indicted in Massachusetts on child pornography charges is in custody in Los Angeles.A spokesman for the Worcester District Attorney’s office says Lowe Dongor, who is also accused of stealing from his former parish in Fitchburg, is being held as a fugitive and could be returned to Massachusetts shortly.A grand jury handed up indictments in March charging the Rev. Lowe Dongor with possession of child pornography and larceny of more than $250.The DA’s spokesman, Tim Connolly, said Dongor was recently brought to Los Angeles from his native Philippines, w…

 VATICAN CITY — From its 17th century palace, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith monitors compliance with Roman Catholic moral teaching and matters of dogma for the oldest church in Christendom. These issues have little bearing on most of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. Faith, for them, rests in parish life and the quality of their pastors. In the 1980s, for example, when the CDF punished theologians who dissented from the papal ban on birth control devices, the 85 percent of Catholics who support contraception did not change their opinion. But as the CDF accelerates a…

Former Holy Redeemer head football coach Joseph J. Ostrowski agreed Tuesday to plead guilty and serve 25 years in federal prison for producing child pornography and engaging in what U.S. Attorney Peter J. Smith called the “sextortion” of youths in more than a dozen states. Ostrowski, 28, of Wilkes-Barre, “persuaded and tricked” computer users into “engaging in sexually explicit acts” that he viewed over Skype, the video chat service, according to one of two indictments returned against him earlier this year. Ostrowski extorted and attempted to extort nude photographs, images and live…

LONDON — A report published Wednesday examining the sexual abuse crisis that has shaken the British Broadcasting Corporation strongly criticized the editorial and management decisions that led to the cancellation of a broadcast last year that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse, some of it on BBC premises, by Jimmy Savile, a network fixture who had been one of Britain’s best-known television personalities.  The 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a former head of the Sky News channel who began his broadcast career as a BBC reporter, traced in detail what it described as “a chain of …

Excerpted from the MD Mama blog on Boston.com.In the wake of the news that a known sexual offender raped and molested children for years, many of them in a day care north of Boston, it’s hard not to be scared as a parent. You can’t help thinking: Could this happen to my child?It certainly brings home the fact that if your child is in day care you should be asking lots of questions — not just when you choose the day care, but on a regular basis. You should be sure that the day care is licensed; the Department of Early Education and Childcare has an online database and you can also call if you…

PORTLAND, Maine — An investigation by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland has substantiated an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor brought against a Catholic brother who served at an Aroostook County parish in the early 1970s.In a statement issued Saturday morning, the diocese said evidence was found to back up a claim by a Maine man who said Brother Paul L. Gauvin , now 73, sexually abused him in the early 1970s when he was an altar server at St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Madawaska.  Gauvin was the director of religious education at the parish at the time, according to Dave Guthro…