Jesuit high school in New Orleans recently reached an out-of-court settlement to resolve a lawsuit claiming child molestation decades earlier by a janitor at the institution. This marks the second time in as many months that the school has agreed to such a payout.
The agreement was made ahead of a late September trial date in the city’s civil district courthouse, according to legal filings from 27 July. The lawsuit was pursued by a plaintiff identified by the pseudonym Jayson Doe, who alleged that janitor Pete Modica began molesting him in 1978 when he was 13 years old and had just been admitted to the school.
The earlier settlement, agreed on 4 June, also involved allegations of child molestation by the same janitor, Modica, and one of his custodian colleagues, Gary Sanchez. Modica had previously pleaded guilty to molesting boys at a playground where he was a supervisor. Sanchez pleaded guilty in 2002 to attempted rape of a five-year-old boy and received a 30-year prison sentence.
Court filings indicate that Jesuit has paid at least nine settlements related to abuse by Modica at the school. Six of these settlements were reached after another man, Richard Windmann, publicly spoke out in September 2018 about his abuse at Jesuit in the late 1970s by Modica and a priest.
The lawsuits are separate from the New Orleans archdiocese's bankruptcy filing in 2020, which was driven by a longstanding clergy molestation scandal. The archdiocese and its insurers moved in December to resolve that bankruptcy by agreeing to pay $305m to hundreds of abuse survivors, who were still awaiting payments as of Sunday.