Sharon Otterman

Numerous Catholic bishops across the United States have become involved in controversies over their handling of clergy sexual abuse. But perhaps none has become as embroiled in scandal over the past year as Malone of Buffalo, New York, one of the largest dioceses in the Northeast.

In an extraordinary turn of events in the hierarchical church, Malone is approaching persona non grata status in his own diocese. Some organizations are canceling events that he was set to attend, and he is declining other invitations, local Catholics said.

“Collections are drying up in parishes,” said John J. Hurley, president of Canisius College in Buffalo and a leader of a lay group that had been working with Malone but is now calling for his resignation. “People are walking out of the parishes saying ‘I’ve had enough.’”

But despite revelations from whistleblowers and calls from lay leaders and priests for him to step down, Malone has declined to do so.

Before 2018, the Buffalo diocese, which has 600,000 Catholics, had largely avoided the kind of turmoil over clergy sexual abuse that has occurred elsewhere in the country.

But then an accuser went public, saying that a priest, who has since retired, had molested him as teenager. That led dozens of other accusers to come forward, saying that they had also been abused by current or former priests.

As the number of accused priests grew, Malone’s handling of the crisis was quickly called into question because he had promised transparency but, in case after case, appeared to be shielding priests who were accused of abuse, local Catholics said.

Hundreds of people have now filed sexual abuse claims against clergy with the Buffalo diocese or lawsuits under New York’s new Child Victims Act. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the state attorney general’s office have opened investigations.

Malone’s standing is being closely watched as a test of a new, tougher policy on bishop accountability that was adopted by Pope Francis in May in an effort to contain clergy sexual abuse scandals worldwide. It comes as at least 18 state attorneys general in the United States have begun investigations into clergy sexual abuse and its cover-up by church leaders.

Last week, after one such inquiry, the Missouri attorney general referred a dozen former priests for potential criminal prosecution.

Malone, who has been Buffalo’s bishop since 2012, declined to be interviewed.

Asked how he viewed the calls for him to resign, he said in a statement: “I am respectfully attentive to them. I am committed to my obligations as bishop of Buffalo and to fulfilling the mission of the church.

“Our church is hurting, especially victims and their loved ones, as are all Catholics,” but the mission of the church continues, he said.

Does he feel the diocese can heal with him in the pulpit?

“Yes,” he replied. “We can begin the road to healing with close collaboration with others in the diocese.”

Only Pope Francis can force Malone to step down. But Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, can begin an investigation of Malone and pressure him to leave under the new papal process that is supposed to usher in an era of increased bishop accountability.

“The amount of opposition that he is facing in his diocese right now is without match in the United States,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks abuse scandals. “It is just a matter of time until Pope Francis removes him.”

Dolan “has been following the situation very closely and has been consulting extensively,” Joseph Zwilling, his spokesman, said. “I would anticipate that we will hear something within the near future regarding this matter.”

Over the years, the leadership of the Buffalo diocese had assured local Catholics that the scandals involving pedophile priests elsewhere would never happen there.

So it came as a shock when Michael F. Whalen, 52, gave a news conference in February 2018 and accused the Rev. Norbert Orsolits of molesting him on a ski trip in the 1980s, when Whalen was a teenager.

Orsolits then admitted to a reporter for The Buffalo News that he had sexually abused “probably dozens” of teenage boys in the late 1970s and early ’80s before entering treatment. He retired in 2004 and could not be reached for comment.

A flood of other accusations of abuse by priests began to pour into the diocese and the local news media, some involving priests still in the pulpit. In March 2018, under pressure, Malone published a list of 42 Buffalo priests who had been credibly accused of child sexual abuse over decades.

But Siobhan O’Connor, his administrative assistant who would become the diocese’s most prominent whistleblower, had seen the draft list.

It had 117 priest names on it, she said. Among those omitted from the final list were active priests, she said, and priests whom the bishop had shielded in the past.

“It was curated to deceive the public,” she said in an interview last week.

O’Connor began photocopying and photographing documents, some of which were taken from a secret black binder of accusations kept in the bishop’s closet.

She leaked them in August 2018 to a local television reporter and went public on “60 Minutes” in October, after leaving her job.

One of the omissions involved the Rev. Fabian J. Maryanski. He was still in the pulpit, even though news reports, quoting the secret documents, said the diocese had known since 1995 that he had been accused of sexual contact with a teenage girl in a church rectory.

One lawyer had written to Malone: “We did not remove him from ministry despite full knowledge of the case, and so including him on list might require explanation.”

Maryanski was placed on administrative leave after news broke of his omission from the list.

“I deny that I had sex with a teenage girl,” he said Monday. “I never have.”

As the scandals snowballed, the diocese’s seminary, Christ the King, was ensnared, too.

Last month, a former dean of seminarians resigned over concerns about the moral climate in the seminary, and another seminarian, Matthew Bojanowski, also quit.

Bojanowski told reporters he left because Malone had taken no action for nine months regarding a complaint he had made against a parish priest, the Rev. Jeffrey Nowak, whom he had accused of making sexual passes at him.

Bojanowski also accused Nowak of using information the priest had learned in confession against him and photographing a personal letter of his in an effort to blackmail him.

Nowak’s lawyer, James Granville, said his client “denies everything.”

The stolen letter was promptly leaked to the news media.

It had been sent to Bojanowski by the bishop’s trusted secretary and vice chancellor, the Rev. Ryszard Biernat, and it read like a love letter between Bojanowski and Biernat.

The two men bought a small house together in 2018, according to a real estate listing in The Buffalo News, but have said their relationship is platonic.

As the months went on with no action by Malone to suspend Nowak, Biernat began secretly recording conversations he had with Malone about the case.

In the recordings, the bishop is heard calling Nowak a “sick puppy” for his obsession with Bojanowski and worrying that the scandal would be portrayed as a love triangle among the three men.

“We are in a true crisis situation,” Malone said in one recording in August, leaked to TV station WKBW. “True crisis. And everyone in the office is convinced this could be the end for me as bishop.”

He also hints at why he had not yet informed the parishioners of Nowak’s parish, Our Lady Help of Christians Church, about the accusations.

“Between you and me, Jeff Nowak is dangerous,” Malone tells Biernat in the recording. “I think if we bring Jeff in, who knows what he’s going to do.”

In late August, Nowak was placed on administrative leave.

Biernat is on a leave of absence and has a lawyer. He has separately said that he was also a victim of abuse by a priest while in the seminary but that he had been instructed by an assistant bishop to keep quiet about it.

At a Sept. 4 news conference, Malone defended his handling of the Nowak case and again refused to resign.

“I don’t feel its time for me to move on,” he said. “I believe the ones who would like to see me move on are a minority.”

That seemed to be the last straw for some. On Sept. 5, a council of prominent lay people that had formed to help the diocese through the crisis, the Movement to Restore Trust, called for him to step down so the diocese could move forward.

Some Buffalo priests began circulating a letter of no-confidence, based on a similar letter circulated in Boston during its clergy abuse crisis in 2002.

An online petition calling for Malone’s resignation gathered about 12,500 signatures. On Tuesday, The Buffalo News published a poll that said 86% of local Catholics wanted him to leave.

The Rev. Robert Zilliox, a canon lawyer, drafted the no-confidence letter. Zilliox, who said he was a victim of abuse by a priest when he was 13, said he had firsthand knowledge of at least “two or three cases” in which Malone had returned priests to ministry despite accusations against them, against church protocol.

“He has been picking and choosing” when to send cases to Rome as required, he said.

The diocese, he said, is now racked by division, with some parishes trying to isolate themselves from the bishop.

Even so, he said, he was having trouble getting most of the 270 or so active and retired priests in Buffalo to sign their names to the letter.

As of Wednesday, he said, only 18 priests had signed. He fretted that it would not be enough.

“We can’t put up with this for another year and a half,” he said, referring to when Malone would turn 75 and automatically be required to submit his resignation to the pope. “I am challenging my brother priests to step up.”

This article originally appeared in

Bishop's Secret List of Accused Priests Leaves Him Besieged

Bishop Richard J. Malone kept a secret black binder in a closet with a list of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse. He was recorded in a conversation expressing more concern about his own reputation than about removing a priest whom he called dangerous and a “sick puppy.” And some of the bishop’s own clergy are circulating a letter of no-confidence in him.

A Secret Binder of Accused Priests and a Bishop Under Siege

But if it were up to town officials, the houses would never be built. They openly fret about the size and density of the 431-unit development, the Greens at Chester, and even confess wariness about the likely intended homebuyers: Hasidic Jews.

“There’s nobody on the board, there’s nobody that works in the town, there’s nobody that wants this development to go through,” Alexander Jamieson, the former town supervisor of Chester, said at a public meeting in May 2018. “There’s nobody.”

Town officials have repeatedly placed obstacles in the developers’ path since they bought the land in 2017: restrictions on the size of the houses they can build, delays on issuing building permits and a request to relocate the main road by 10 feet.

“We’re doing what we can to alleviate 432 Hasidic houses in the town of Chester,” Jamieson said at that heated town meeting.

“Every day,” chimed in Robert Valentine, the current town supervisor, who at that point was on the town board.

Angry residents at the meeting talked of how school taxes could rise and public resources could be stretched in the town, about 60 miles north of New York City. They spoke of fears that the development would one day resemble Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic village about 9 miles away that is overcrowded and has ranked among the poorest communities in the nation.

The developers, Greens at Chester, LLC, cite these statements and others in a federal lawsuit that accuses the town, Orange County and individual local officials of discrimination, contending that they assume that the homebuyers will be Hasidic because some of the developers are.

The Orange County executive, Steven M. Neuhaus, a Chester resident and its former town supervisor, suggested delay tactics, including retesting the water and denying sewer permitting, at a meeting, the lawsuit recounts.

“We can pressure the developer to either go commercial, which I think we should do, or we can buy it,” he said at an April 25 meeting, a video of which was posted online. “If you want to pay a little bit more to save the town, that might be an option.”

“I’m trying to slow things down because I don’t think the school district can handle it,” Neuhaus added. “I don’t think my town can handle it.”

The lawsuit, filed in July, asks $100 million in damages for breach of contract and purported violations of fair housing and other anti-discrimination laws.

“If you show up to a public hearing, you can hear what the voters are saying, which is ‘keep the Hasidic out,’” said John Petroccione, the civil engineer who designed the project 25 years ago, and is working with the developers to complete it. He said the town had fought the proposed development since 1985, when the former farm was purchased by Wilbur Fried, a non-Hasidic developer. Fried also wanted to build hundreds of homes at the site.

Fried, 91, recalled how for 28 years, he fought off “not in my backyard” concerns about overdevelopment from Chester residents. He eventually sued the town in federal court. In 2010, he and the town settled, and the town granted him the right to build 431 homes there.

“I probably have the record for having the longest subdivision approval process in the state of New York,” Fried said.

But as the town slow-walked the approvals, the demographics in Orange County changed. A small community of Satmar Hasidim, who speak Yiddish and practice a form of charismatic Judaism that tries to limit modern influences, arrived in the area in the 1970s, seeking a peaceful place to raise their children away from increasingly crowded Brooklyn.

Their numbers grew steadily, in part because of their typically large families. Kiryas Joel, a section of the Town of Monroe where they settled, now has 24,000 people and became its own town, Palm Tree, in January. Offshoot communities have been formed nearby.

In 2017, Fried sold the lot in Chester with its court-won approvals for $12 million to the current developers. The city then granted permits to clear the land and build roads. But once town residents learned in 2018 that the new owners were Hasidic, town meetings were called and things came to a grinding halt, the lawsuit charges.

School costs are one major concern, residents said at town meetings. While Hasidic Jews typically attend their own religious schools, local districts in New York have to pay for a percentage of their busing costs and special education services. The Chester school district projected the development could raise school taxes in the town by from $92 to $524 per household, using an estimate that 1,720 to 2,580 students would live at the Greens at Chester.

Last year, the Chester school district had a total of 993 students, according to state data.

There are also political concerns. Hasidic Jews tend to vote in blocs, increasing their political leverage. The arrival of hundreds of new voters in a town of 12,000 has the possibility to remake the political balance in Chester, as it has in other towns, Jamieson said. The town recently voted to switch to a ward system of representation in preparation for a major demographic shift.

“There’s a lack of trust,” said Mary Laiks, who lived in Chester for many years and now lives in nearby Warwick.

The developers maintain that the entire conversation about having a Hasidic enclave in the town is discriminatory.

The Greens at Chester, they said, is not being built for Hasidic Jews. That, they say, is a biased inference based on their religious identity, and the fact that at least some of them live in Kiryas Joel and Brooklyn.

“We will sell to anybody who wants to buy,” said Livy Schwartz, one of the developers, as he stood with one of his business partners, Joseph Landau, at the development site in late July. Both are Hasidic Jews.

They underscored how the development will not consist of dense, multistory apartment buildings of the kind common in Kiryas Joel, but large attached and stand-alone houses they estimate will sell for around $500,000 each.

“They are worried about the big families,” said Chana, 40, a mother of nine children in Kiryas Joel on a recent Wednesday afternoon, explaining why she feels there is concern. “But there’s no invasion. We have bigger families, so we need more space for the children to play outside and have breathing space.”

Valentine, in an interview in his office at Town Hall in July, was unapologetic about his public comments, which included statements like: “If there was any way we could choose who could live there, we would do it. But we can’t.”

He said the main issue holding up the building permits is that the town believes that the 2010 settlement limits the “typical” house in the subdivision to 1,750 to 2,500 square feet, including the garage.

“They want to get more than what they are entitled to,” Valentine said.

The developers said that limiting the size of homes has been used as a tactic elsewhere to reduce the appeal of developments to Hasidic buyers, and disagree that the settlement imposed a limit.

Jamieson, who resigned as town supervisor last September after pleading guilty to collecting unemployment while working in that role, also stood by his comments.

“It’s not anti-Semitic to say it’s going to be a Hasidic development,” he said near the site. “I’m just telling the truth.”

Justin Rodriguez, a spokesman for Neuhaus, the county executive, said that it appeared that the developers “are using litigation in an attempt to silence public officials from expressing the concerns of their constituents.” He added that the lawsuit against the county had no merit, “and we will vigorously oppose it.”

As the developers wait for the court to rule, they are continuing to build the infrastructure, costing them millions. The roads, curbs and water and sewer lines for the first 82 houses are nearly ready, spiraling up a hillside that has been denuded of trees.

Schwartz said he doesn’t want to send the bulldozers home, because according to another town ruling, the infrastructure must be ready before final building permits will be granted.

“This isn’t the American way,” Schwartz said. “It doesn’t matter if you are black, Hispanic or Jewish. How you look shouldn’t be allowed to determine how you build and what you can build.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/nyregion/jews-discrimination-lawsuit.html" id="ece4d151-ede5-3081-a54d-aef28dd9db8e">The New York Times</a>.

'Keep the Hasidic Out': A Small-Town Housing Showdown

CHESTER, N.Y. — In a peaceful corner of the Hudson Valley, a broad expanse of land sits at the ready for hundreds of homes ranging between 2,500 and 3,400 square feet, with views of the surrounding hills. There will be a recreation center and tennis courts, and nearly half the development’s 117 acres will be kept as open space.

It was a private audience, Grein recalled as he became one of hundreds of people to begin filing lawsuits on Wednesday under the Child Victims Act. The new state law says that for one year, sexual abuse victims of any age in New York — including, crucially, those whose cases had expired under the old statute of limitations — can take legal action.

After McCarrick, then the archbishop of the Diocese of Newark, left the room, Grein said he knelt before the pope and revealed, in the presence of several Vatican officials, that McCarrick had been sexually abusing him since childhood.

“I told him I had been abused as a child by this man, and I need you to stop it,” said an emotional Grein, who is now 61. “He put both hands on my head, and told me he would pray for me.”

No other action was taken, his lawsuit states.

Grein’s lawsuit was made possible by the Child Victims Act, which was approved in January and greatly expanded the ability of child sex abuse victims to hold institutions and individuals accountable for abuse.

Victims of sexual abuse in New York were previously required to file civil lawsuits by their 23rd birthdays. Under the new law, they now have until age 55, and for one year, starting on Wednesday, they can be even older than that.

The window may become a powerful lever for clergy abuse victims to find out how extensive the cover-up of sexual abuse was in the Catholic Church and whether top Vatican officials knew about it.

Hundreds of lawsuits across the state were filed on Wednesday, with hundreds more, if not thousands, expected.

They involve defendants that include the Catholic Church to Rockefeller University in Manhattan to the Boy Scouts, as well as public and private schools and foster care organizations. Each suit will attempt to show that individuals and institutions are liable because they failed to protect children from sexual abuse.

Like dozens of other victims, Grein is suing the Archdiocese of New York, where McCarrick was serving as a priest when he began abusing Grein at the age of 11. Grein, the son of a family friend of McCarrick’s, was the first baby that the young priest baptized. The sexual relationship the priest began with the boy lasted for about two decades, Grein said.

Because his lawsuit claims that Grein told Pope John Paul II about the abuse, his legal team will seek to depose Vatican officials and gain access to secret Vatican documents.

The strategy underscores perhaps the most powerful aspect of the thousands of lawsuits that are expected to be filed this year: By giving plaintiffs the power to subpoena private institutional records, the lawsuits could open a window into how institutions handled abusers in their midst.

“The cover-up has ended and now we are going right to the top,” Mitchell Garabedian, Grein’s lawyer, said at a news conference on Wednesday in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. “We are attempting to show that the Vatican knew that McCarrick was abusing James Grein.”

Michelle Simpson Tuegel, a lawyer whose firm was filing cases against Catholic dioceses across New York, said the start of the look-back window was a crucial moment for sexual abuse survivors who previously had no recourse. The discovery process, she said, is crucial.

“It’s about so much more than compensation,” Simpson Tuegel said. “It’s healing to know that you’re not alone, that they did make mistakes, that you were a child and adults failed to protect you, and that they’re going to have to pay for that.”

The lawsuits will also mark the first time that some alleged abusers will be publicly named, leading to a possible domino effect if long-silent victims see others step forward, and decide to do the same.

“This act is having such an impact in ways that aren’t even legal ways,” Simpson Tuegel said. “But in human ways: in opening something up that needed to be opened, as far as the discourse within families, within communities and the larger public.”

For Auset Love, 45, it took more than three decades, she said, to feel that her abuser could be held accountable. She was about 9 when the abuse began, she said Wednesday. A recent immigrant from Haiti, she spoke little English when her homeroom teacher at a Brooklyn public school began molesting her, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

Love said the teacher would call her up to his desk to review a class assignment, then slip his hand under her skirt to rub her vagina. “I’m proud of you,” she recalled him saying. Love began to perform poorly on assignments and was sent for additional tutoring to the teacher’s house, where she said she was repeatedly fondled.

Over the years, as the statute of limitations for recourse ran out, she said she began cutting herself and contemplated suicide. On Wednesday, Love filed a lawsuit against the teacher and the New York City Department of Education.

“It gives myself a voice, and everyone else who is ready to come, to let the world know what happened to them,” said Love, a nursing assistant in Westchester County.

The teacher named in the lawsuit retired in 2004, according to a spokeswoman for the city Education Department. “Every survivor deserves to be heard, and we have clear policies to ensure any allegation is immediately reported, investigated and addressed,” said the spokeswoman, Danielle Filson.

Darrell Jackson, 57, who grew up in Brooklyn, joined the Boy Scouts of America in the 1970s when he was about 10.

At the time, Jackson said on Wednesday, he viewed his scoutmaster as a kind of father figure. Jackson’s father was not around, he said, and he was raised by his grandmother.

“And, you know, it was great in the beginning,” he said. “And then, like I said, it just turned into something else.”

He said he has been attempting to bring a case against the Boy Scouts of America since his late 20s, but could not until the law was changed.

Grein said Wednesday felt like a moment of redemption. His account of abuse by McCarrick, publicly disclosed for the first time last summer in The New York Times, was a crucial aspect of the evidence considered by a Vatican court as it convicted and then defrocked McCarrick.

In February, the Vatican stripped McCarrick, 89, of his titles and clerical status. He is living in a friary in Kansas, his former spokeswoman, Susan Gibbs, said. Grein also plans to sue McCarrick personally, once a look-back window for abuse claims opens in New Jersey, where he has said some of the abuse occurred, his lawyer said.

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, said Wednesday that the archdiocese would “carefully review the claims made in these suits.” In the meantime, he asked that “people pray for peace and healing for all those who have suffered from the sin and crime of the sexual abuse of minors, wherever it occurred.”

Grein said at the news conference, “It is our chance, our historical gift from God, that we are able to go forward today and get this done.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/nyregion/child-sex-abuse-lawsuits.html" id="fed62bce-a32a-38bb-ad29-55177cc24e2b">The New York Times</a>.

Hundreds of Child Sexual Abuse Lawsuits Flood NY Courts

NEW YORK — Theodore E. McCarrick, the high-ranking Roman Catholic cardinal who was defrocked earlier this year for sexual abuse, brought one of his victims, James Grein, then 30, to meet Pope John Paul II in 1988.

Two years later, a similar death occurred in another upstate town when a baby boy sweltered to death in his car seat while his father, a police officer, did chores.

Then last week, a social worker from Rockland County, a suburb northwest of New York City, delivered his 4-year-old to day care and went to work at a Bronx hospital, leaving his year-old twins to die in his car in the heat.

Though the tragic incidents were jarringly similar, the decisions by prosecutors who handled each of the cases were not. Prosecutors charged the social worker with manslaughter in the deaths of his twins, while the other two fathers upstate never faced charges.

The wide variation in charges highlight the complex and fraught nature of the decisions confronting prosecutors — in New York and nationally — who must decide whether to indict grieving parents who said they simply had forgotten that they had left a young child in a hot car, a nightmarish phenomenon that claims about three dozen lives a year across the country.

Those decisions are influenced by many factors: a desire among some prosecutors to extend mercy to parents they believe made a tragic mistake, scientific questions about faulty memory and legal considerations about whether the state can prove the parent is guilty of a crime. Decisions are often made in the face of inflamed public opinion on both sides of the debate.

As a result, some parents who forget their children in cars face no charges, others are charged with felonies like involuntary manslaughter and still others are charged with misdemeanors, like child endangerment.

“All in all, there is no rhyme or reason to how these cases are treated,” said Amber Rollins, the director of KidsandCars.org, an organization that has analyzed 833 pediatric deaths caused by heatstroke in hot cars since the mid-1990s.

In the Bronx case, the social worker, Juan Rodriguez, told the police he was convinced he had dropped the twins off safely at their day care after he had dropped his older son off at another child-care provider.

But he had not. While the babies slept, he drove his usual route to the Bronx, parked outside a veterans’ hospital where he worked and put in a full day, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., the police said. He had started to drive home before he realized the babies, having died of heatstroke, were still in the back seat. “I blanked out,” he told the police. “I killed my babies.”

His wife, Marissa A. Rodriguez, has stood by him, calling the deaths a horrific accident.

The Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, immediately charged Rodriguez with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, based on a sworn complaint from the police. Clark has not commented on her reasons for moving so quickly in Rodriguez’s case, which is one of the first of its kind in her borough.

It remains unclear if Clark will bring Rodriguez’s case to a grand jury and seek an indictment. Her office is continuing to investigate the case with the police, a spokeswoman, Patrice O’Shaughnessy, said. Rodriguez is due back in court Thursday.

Rollins said her organization had identified 494 deaths involving caregivers who, like Rodriguez, said they were not aware they had left their babies in hot cars. In 43% of those cases, no charges were filed. In 32% of the cases, the caregiver was charged and convicted. And in 11% of the cases, the person was charged with a crime, but the judge or jury did not convict. The other 14% accounts for cases that are still open or the status is unknown.

The deaths are typically caused by a glitch in how the human memory operates, said David Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida who studies these cases. When people drive familiar routes, they can go on autopilot, an habitual state of mind that suppresses their ability to remember they had made a plan, he said.

For prosecutors, the critical questions are whether evidence exists that the parent meant to harm their children or knew they were placing their children in danger, legal experts said. There has to be some degree of intent to make conduct criminal.

“There always has to be some mens rea, some knowledge, intent, awareness,” said James Cohen, a professor at Fordham University School of Law in the Bronx, using the Latin legal term.

In Ohio, the Warren County prosecutor, David Fornshell, said he decided not to charge a woman in 2017 who had left her 15-month old baby inside her car with fatal results. He was ultimately convinced it was an accident in part because a security video showed how horrified the mother was when she learned she had not dropped her baby off at day care as she had thought.

“There’s nothing as a prosecutor that you are ever going to be able to do to that parent that is going to come close to what that parent is going to have to live with for the rest of their life,” Fornshell said.

In Oneida County in upstate New York, the district attorney, Scott McNamara, said he spent two months investigating whether there was any hint of malfeasance that could explain why Officer Mark Fanfarillo would leave his infant, Michael, in a hot car after dropping his older brother off at a different day care. He said he could not find any.

“Just because you do something wrong doesn’t make it a crime,” McNamara said, explaining why he brought no charges. “After everything was done, and everyone was interviewed, we came to the conclusion that he just forgot, and I don’t think the law punishes forgetting.”

The Herkimer County district attorney, Jeffrey S. Carpenter, came to a similar conclusion about Alan Lyon, who left 15-month old Sophia alone in a sweltering car after dropping off her siblings.

“I looked at everything I could regarding the father, his prior history, his conduct, whether there was obsessive alcohol use, anything,” Carpenter said. “And everything in this case came back to he simply forgot she was in the car.”

In the New York cases that resulted in charges, there were early hints that something else besides mere forgetting was at play.

In April 2004, for instance, a Long Island mother, Yesenia Brito, was charged with criminally negligent homicide after she left her infant daughter, Jada, in a parking lot while she worked a shift at a pediatrician’s office in West Hempstead, New York. The police said she initially lied about the child’s whereabouts. Later, at sentencing, she apologized for leaving the child in the car, saying she did not think the baby would be harmed. She was sentenced to a year in jail.

Murder cases, where prosecutors argue that a parent left a child in a hot car with the intent to kill, are almost unheard-of. But a jury determined that this happened in at least one-high profile case.

In June 2014, Justin Ross Harris, a father in Marietta, Georgia, stopped at a Chick-fil-A for breakfast with his 22-month-old son, Cooper. He then drove to work and left Cooper strapped in a rear-facing car seat in a sweltering parking lot for seven hours. Cooper died.

Harris claimed his son’s death was an accident. But prosecutors moved ahead with murder charges. They found that Harris had exchanged lewd text messages and pictures with at least six women, including a minor, on the day of his son’s death. A jury agreed with prosecutors that Harris wanted his son out of his life. Harris was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He is now attempting to appeal.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/nyregion/children-left-to-die-in-hot-cars-accident-or-murder.html" id="b01d80ac-8b09-31f1-af6b-9af93c6d6ae1">The New York Times</a>.

Children Left to Die in Hot Cars: Accident or Murder?

A father in upstate New York dropped off his two older children at school in 2014, then parked his car outside his house and went to work. He forgot that his 15-month old daughter was still in her car seat, and she died of heatstroke.

The office of the New York state attorney general filed a request in late May to block a $70,000 payment from Netflix that Sorokin was supposed to receive in June, citing the “Son of Sam” law that prevents felons from profiting from their crimes, legal papers show.

The attorney general, Letitia James, is also seeking to bar Sorokin from getting the $15,000 per episode consultant fee and the $7,500 per episode royalty that Netflix agreed to pay her once Shonda Rhimes, the award-winning producer, creates a show for the streaming service based on the convicted grifter’s exploits.

Justice Roger D. McDonough in Albany temporarily ordered Netflix not to disburse money to Sorokin until the matter is resolved through litigation, except for $30,000 for her attorney’s unpaid legal fees, court papers showed.

Filed in state Supreme Court in Albany and first reported by The New York Post on Monday, the attorney general’s request provided new details about how Sorokin, better known as Anna Delvey, intended to profit from the story of how she convinced New York socialities and businesspeople that she was a wealthy German heiress, rather than a Russian-born daughter of a working-class family.

Sorokin inked the deal with Netflix in June 2018, months after her arrest on multiple counts of grand larceny. It was part of a larger deal to buy the rights to the information in the detailed article written in May 2018 by Jessica Pressler in New York magazine.

In her filing, Adele Durand, an assistant New York attorney general, argued that the proceeds of Sorokin’s Netflix contract amounted to “profits of a crime,” and should therefore be turned over to the New York state Office of Victim Services for redistribution.

“It has always been Sorokin’s intention to pay back her victims,” Todd Spodek, her lawyer, said in a text message. “I anticipate resolving the issue without further litigation.”

Sorokin, 28, turned up in New York in 2013 and began posing as an heiress worth over $60 million, spending lavishly on clothes, parties and hotel rooms, even as she walked out on bills and faked bank statements. After a colorful trial during which she showed no remorse, Sorokin was convicted of several counts of grand larceny and sentenced in May to serve four to 12 years in prison.

Sorokin, the court papers detailed, owes $198,956.19 to the victims of her crimes. City National Bank, which was duped into giving her a $100,000 loan, had announced its intention to sue her for the Netflix proceeds. She also owes money to luxury New York hotels — like The Beekman and the W New York — and to Blade, a private jet and helicopter service.

In a jailhouse interview in May, Sorokin told The Times she was not sorry for bilking hotels, restaurants and others.

“I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything,” she said. “I regret the way I went about certain things.”

She said she always intended to pay back her creditors, and had been trying to raise millions for a social club she believed would be lucrative.

New York lawmakers passed the “Son of Sam” law in 1977 to prevent David Berkowitz, a serial killer, from profiting from the publicity that surrounded his crimes. But it does not prevent other people besides the criminal from making money off true crime stories.

In addition to the Netflix series still in development, Rachel DeLoache Williams, a former friend of Sorokin, has written a soon-to-be-published book about her experiences with the fake heiress.

Williams, a former photo editor at Vanity Fair who testified at the trial, said Sorokin had duped her out of $60,000 during a luxury vacation in Morocco. Sorokin, however, was acquitted of charges stemming from Williams’ accusations.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/nyregion/anna-delvey-sorokin-netflix.html" id="b78e86ca-baeb-3d30-ac77-038f516304d1">The New York Times</a>.

'Anna Delvey' Might Not Profit From Netflix Series on Her Life as a Fake Heiress

Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress who bamboozled New York’s elite and is serving time in state prison, may not see any of the proceeds from a deal she signed with Netflix to transform her life story into a television series.

Built along a steep embankment on the western edge of Manhattan, the 330-acre Riverside Park has long posed a flooding challenge when it rains. But this is no ordinary flooding, because Riverside Park is not an ordinary park. Underneath and alongside the pooling water, there is a man-made structure — the Freedom Tunnel — that covers train tracks where Amtrak trains travel back and forth from Albany, Niagara Falls and points beyond.

In recent years, the park’s flooding and erosion has reached a critical point, park advocates said, because of failures in the park’s aging drainage system, which dates from the 1930s or earlier.

When it rains, the stone staircase at 103rd Street turns into a waterfall. Lawns and paths are covered with mud. Unintended stream systems have developed, cutting furrows into the hillside and becoming feeders for impromptu ponds, including the largest one at 115th Street, where the pair of mallards was coasting.

The tunnel, which became famous in the 1980s for its elaborate graffiti and large population of homeless people, forms Riverside Park’s secret infrastructure, a sleight of hand creation of master city planner Robert Moses. Almost a century old, the 3-mile-long tunnel is a steel-reinforced, concrete box through which Amtrak runs its trains 26 times daily.

The worst of the standing water sits directly above and around the top of the tunnel, alongside an esplanade designed to highlight the river view. Large metal grates near the puddles provide glimpses to the tracks below.

The city, which owns the tunnel, says that the flooding does not pose an immediate risk to the tunnel infrastructure, but park advocates are concerned. In the winter, water seeps around the tunnel walls, freezing and expanding.

The weight of the water, they warn, adds to the weight of the dirt and trees above and around the aging concrete structure. Plus, rainstorms seem to be growing more frequent and intense, a probable result of climate change.

“Water is the most powerful and inexorable force there is, and it also weighs a lot,” said Adrian Benepe, a former city parks department commissioner who has lived near Riverside Park for 60 years. “What would be very bad is a catastrophic failure of a section of those old walls that hold up the park that are on top of the railroad tracks.”

Anessa Hodgson, a parks spokeswoman, said inspections had shown there were “no major issues or immediate hazards associated with the flooding and the tunnel structure.” However, she added, the city was “exploring strategies for long-term maintenance and eventual upgrades to the 1930s-era drainage systems in this area.”

In the meantime, she said, a new storm-sewer truck would help clean the drains.

For Dan Garodnick, head of the nonprofit Riverside Park Conservancy, that approach is not urgent enough. The conservancy and its supporters asked for $10.5 million to be included in this year’s city budget to study the drainage issue and begin to mitigate it. They did not receive it.

“They have advised us there is no evidence of harm to the tunnel,” Garodnick said of the flooding. “But in the meantime, it is destroying the park.”

Riverside Park, one of the city’s most innovative parks and a designated scenic landmark. The uppermost level, the main part of which runs along Riverside Drive from 72nd to 155th streets, was largely designed in the 1880s by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park, to provide a green respite for the residents of the stately boulevard.

The lower two levels of the park — the esplanade that runs about 30 feet above the Hudson River’s water line, and playing fields along the West Side Highway at the water’s edge — were created as part of an audacious city planning project in the 1930s, which covered the tracks of New York’s Central Line and filled in the land to the east to make the park resemble a natural slope. In all, the project added some 130 acres to the western edge of Manhattan.

One issue is that the sloped Manhattan streets around 115th Street form a natural basin, funneling large amounts of rainwater into the park to create the worst of the flooding, according a master planning document for the park written in 2017.

Water also seeps through the Olmsted-era wall, or sinkholes from the upper level of the park. The water ends up pooling on the flat plain around the train tunnel, where it has trouble draining.

There has been talk of working with the changing landscape. Heather Liljengren, a supervising seed collector at the city’s native plant nursery in Staten Island, said she was impressed by how water plants were colonizing the makeshift pond at 115th Street. With the hillside constantly being eroded by water and mud, she suggested scrapping the original lawns and instead planting native “rain gardens” filled with plants that “like to get their feet wet.”

“Adapting the park to use and work with the water is a good short-term approach,” she said, taking a break on a May afternoon from collecting violet seeds.

Hannah Mond, a recent Teachers College graduate, was walking through the park Thursday. There had been a heavy rainstorm the night before, and many paths were impassible with puddles and mud.

NEW YORK — Visitors to Manhattan’s Riverside Park sunned themselves on a bench after a recent rainstorm, admiring the sweeping view of the Hudson River. Behind them, two ducks were also enjoying the sunshine, coasting along the surface of an enormous puddle that never seems to recede.

Sharon Otterman

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