A Free Press investigation reveals how dozens of Catholic dioceses are subverting the Child Victim Act, stopping lawsuits in their tracks and pressuring victims to accept pennies on the dollar.
The first person to sue the Rockville Centre Catholic Diocese after the passage of New York’s Child Victims Act was a man named Richard Tollner. It was August 2019, and New York was one of seven states that had created a law giving sex abuse victims a limited window to bring lawsuits no matter how far in the past the abuse had taken place.
Tollner, who is now 66, said that he had been raped—and molested multiple times—by a priest, beginning when he was 15 at St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary, in Uniondale, New York. The priest, Monsignor Alan J. Placa, was the “dean of discipline” at the school on Long Island, where Tollner grew up. In 1977, when he was 17, he reported the alleged rape to several authority figures at the school, including the rector. But nothing happened.
A quarter-century later, a Suffolk County grand jury investigated Placa as part of an extensive inquiry into clergy sexual abuse; he was said to have abused at least two others besides Tollner. Again, nothing happened; although the grand jury concluded that the diocese had protected at least 58 abusive priests, neither the diocese nor any individual priests were indicted. Placa, who has always denied the charges, was placed on administrative leave by the church, but was eventually cleared of the charges against him by the Vatican.
“I couldn’t wait to sue,” said Tollner, who had lobbied to get the new law passed—and whose lawsuit took aim at the diocese, the eighth largest in the country, overseeing 1.5 million Catholics as well as Placa.
Juries have proven highly sympathetic to sexual abuse victims, and Tollner’s lawsuit had the potential to bring him millions in compensation for what he had suffered. In a 2007 trial against the Rockville Centre diocese, a jury awarded $11.45 million in damages to a man and woman who were repeatedly raped by a youth minister as teenagers. In June 2025, a jury in New Orleans awarded close to $2.4 million to a man who was sexually abused when he was around 11 years old.
But Tollner never got the chance to argue his case before a jury. On October 1, 2020, with sexual abuse lawsuits piling up, the Rockville Centre diocese filed a “voluntary petition for reorganization” under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
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