Riverside Church Ordered to Pay $11.3 Million to Child Sex Abuse Victim

A former player for the Riverside Church basketball program was awarded $11.3 million by a New York jury Wednesday for the sexual abuse he suffered decades ago as a teenage member of the once-vaunted youth team. 

The plaintiff, identified in court documents by his initials, J.M., testified in state Supreme Court in lower Manhattan last week that he was sexually abused “eight or nine” times in the spring of 1978 by Riverside’s former sports program director, Ernest “Ernie” Lorch.

J.M., now 63, was 14 years old at the time of the abuse and living in a single-parent household in the Bronx. Lorch, who died in 2012 at the age of 79, was a powerful corporate attorney and executive whose Riverside Hawks basketball teams forged the template for the modern $40 billion youth sports industry.

On Wednesday, the six-person jury deliberated nearly five hours before finding Riverside was “reckless” and culpable for the player’s abuse, and ordered that J.M. be paid $7.5 million for past pain and suffering and $3.8 million for future damages. 

“He’s feeling that it’s gratifying to be heard, and it’s obviously a long time coming,” J.M.’s attorney, Lucas Franken, told Rolling Stone. “And the jury, after speaking to them, they believed us, they believed the truth we were conveying to them, and even with the fact that so much time had passed, it was common sense.” 

Riverside attorneys and church officials did not respond to email requests seeking comment Wednesday.

It was the second trial emanating from the sexual abuse scandal surrounding the upper Manhattan church founded by the Rockefellers, which for 40 years harbored the pioneering youth sports program and its multimillionaire pedophile coach. The first ended in a settlement for former Marist College star Daryl Powell in January just before the case was to be handed to the jury.

In his testimony, J.M. described Lorch as “the ultimate alpha male in the gym. Father figure. Everybody deferred to him.” He then told a harrowing story of how Lorch used that status to abuse him, including rape and forced oral sex.

J.M. filed suit against Riverside in 2019, shortly after New York passed the Child Victims Act, which allowed survivors of child sexual abuse a two-year window to bypass statute-of-limitations laws and sue for damages for actions done to them as minors, years or decades later. Previously, state law had consistently prevented survivors from filing suit more than a year after an incident of abuse.

In closing arguments, Franken asked that jurors award his client $25 million for “full, fair compensation for what this man suffers. … And that’s just for the past.” He left it to the jurors to determine future damages.

J.M., now a San Francisco Bay Area resident, was one of 27 plaintiffs alleging Lorch sexually abused them as children. All but one of the plaintiffs participated on Riverside’s sports teams while Lorch was in charge, from 1961-2002. As Rolling Stone and Sportico have reported, the Riverside plaintiffs all allege that the church should have known that Lorch was abusing children.

While a few of the accusers played for Riverside’s football team, also coached by Lorch, most were involved with the prestigious basketball program, which launched the careers of more than 60 NBA players and hundreds of major college standouts. Basketball Hall of Fame inductees Nate Archibald and Chris Mullin, two-time NBA champion and current ESPN personality Kenny Smith, and more recent stars including Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest) and Lamar Odom all played for Lorch’s Hawks. The rappers Cam’ron and Ma$e, who were notable New York high school basketball players in the 1990s, also played for Riverside as teens before getting into the music business.

Some prominent Riverside alumni — including Kenny Smith and Mark Jackson — spoke out in support of Lorch in 2002, after current plaintiff Robert Holmes first told the New York Daily News how he was sexually abused and then paid by Lorch for his silence. Recently, though, none of Riverside’s most famous players have weighed in on the Child Victims Act litigation.

In what has been a slow-moving series of cases, J.M.’s is now one of the few to have been resolved and just the second to be heard by a jury. Hope arose that the Daryl Powell settlement in January would lead to a quick resolution of the remaining lawsuits filed against the iconic Manhattan church. That hasn’t happened, and three former players have died while awaiting their day in court.

During J.M.’s trial, the plaintiff’s attorneys lined up witness testimony from nine other alleged victims. Much of that testimony was also heard in the Powell trial, to show a pattern of abuse — including paddling, jockstrap checks, and escalating sexual assaults on often impoverished Black and Latino children — that the church either knew of or should have known about.

They said Riverside refused to supervise Lorch and ignored multiple warning signs because of Lorch’s money, his influence within Riverside thanks to his positions as a deacon and board member, and the prestige his program brought. 

“There was no supervision,” Franken said in his closing argument. “There was no oversight. And there is no record that these kids ever existed other than the accolades.”

Like most of the other Riverside plaintiffs, J.M. wasn’t well-known as an athlete and never played college or pro basketball. But unlike many of his fellow plaintiffs who have struggled with substance abuse and racked up criminal records, he has had a successful career. He worked his way through community college in New York, earned an accounting degree from a West Coast university, and rose to hold several executive positions, mostly in the Bay Area nonprofit sector.

J.M. testified to some of the lasting impacts the abuse had on his life, including his mistrust of religion. “I wanted to give Catholicism a shot,” he said on the stand. “So I’m going to mass and then communion and then that’s when the Catholic priests sexual abuse scandal broke in ’85. And I’m like, shit. Here we go again. … I’m not going to become Catholic.”

He also said Lorch’s abuse later affected his marriage and family life. “I knew I couldn’t father any children and believe I could keep them safe given what happened to me,” he said. “Adults that were designed to help you, sometimes harm you.” His attorneys also tried to make the case that J.M.’s career path was in fact proof of lasting effects of the abuse; he rarely lasted more than two years in any workplace, indicating lingering trust issues.

Riverside’s attorneys argued the church didn’t have any knowledge of Lorch’s abuse, and if abuse happened, the church wasn’t to blame. “If the abuse happened as it’s going to be described by [J.M.] here,” argued Riverside counsel Philip Semprevivo in his opening statement, “yes, 100 percent, it’s Ernest Lorch’s fault, not 90 percent, not 80 percent. It’s an intentional act. If he did it, he did it, not Riverside.”

The church’s lawyers also introduced expert testimony saying the norms of the 1960s and 1970s were different, and didn’t call for education or instruction or mandated reporting of sexual abuse. Moreover, Riverside maintained that even if J.M. had been abused, his successful career was proof he overcame it and didn’t incur massive damages. “What’s alleged is PTSD,” Semprevivo said in his closing statement Tuesday, and he argued that the plaintiffs didn’t prove J.M. suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. “No nightmares, no flashbacks,” he said.

Further, Semprevivo argued in his closing, J.M is “highly functional. He is successful in every aspect of his life. Whether it’s friends. Whether it’s work. Whether it’s marriage. Whether it’s health. He checks all the boxes.”

Franken tried to rebut that in his closing statement, saying expert testimony showed there could be “two sides” to J.M.  “One side that he presents to the public is strong, functioning, and the other side that’s been silently suffering for years, 48 years. … And then Riverside tries to use the plaintiff’s resilience against him … Because he’s resilient, we don’t owe him anything.”

Near the end of J.M’s trial testimony, Franken framed the issue by saying Riverside “spent a lot of time talking to you about your resume and the nice things people said. Are you proud of what you have accomplished despite what Mr. Lorch did to you?”

“Yes,” J.M. answered.

“And,” Franken continued, “do all the nice things that people say and all the achievements that you’ve had  erase the memories of a 46-year-old man putting his penis in your mouth when you were 14 years old?” 

“No,” answered J.M.