Seton Hall University doubled down Thursday on its yearslong battle to keep secret a 2019 report on how the school handled a priest’s sex abuse of seminarians, asking a state appellate panel to reverse a lower court’s order to disclose the report and related records.

Patrick Papalia, an attorney for the private Catholic university in South Orange, insisted the documents in question — including the report, emails between Seton Hall and various lawyers, and witness interviews — should not be released to victims’ lawyers because they’re protected by attorney-client privilege, despite Judge Avion Benjamin’s November finding that they are not.

“This would send a chilling message not only to entities and businesses in the state of New Jersey, but to lawyers, that they cannot freely speak with their clients and give them advice, give them guidance on what they may have done correct, what they may have done wrong and how to correct it,” Papalia said.

But attorney Gabriel Magee, who represents abuse survivors, countered the report was the result of an independent fact-finding probe and wasn’t done in anticipation of litigation nor for the purposes of legal advice — two things that would confirm its confidentiality. The report was produced by an outside law firm, Latham & Watkins, that Seton Hall hired to investigate claims that defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick abused seminarians between 1986 and 2000 and that Monsignor Joseph Reilly, the school’s current president and a former seminary dean, botched the school’s response.

“Essentially, what appellant suggests is that anytime you can just hire a lawyer, you could keep all of the investigation that you do from discovery, just by saying it’s privileged,” Magee said.

Seton Hall shared the report with the Vatican, a move that waived any privilege, Magee added. Benjamin also cited in her ruling that the report disavows any attorney-client relationship between Latham and Seton Hall, he said.

After an hour of argument Thursday, Judge Thomas W. Sumners Jr. said the panel would issue a decision “as soon as possible.”

A judge in 2020 ordered the Archdiocese of Newark to disclose thousands documents in the consolidated case of about 450 people who have sued the archdiocese over alleged sex abuse by clergy. But the Seton Hall report was never handed over, with plaintiffs’ attorneys saying they were unaware of it until Politico New Jersey revealed its existence last year.

Seton Hall attorneys have argued that the 2020 order doesn’t apply to the university, which was named in six cases. But the plaintiffs’ attorneys say Seton Hall, as part of the archdiocese, was required to comply.

Mark Crawford is state director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. He told the New Jersey Monitor Thursday that Seton Hall’s appellate arguments are “the same old nonsense” and show the university is trying to “run out the clock.” McCarrick died last year, and others implicated have retired or moved on, Crawford added.

“Maybe they’re waiting for some of the victims not to be around. They’re going to delay, delay, delay, as long as they can. If they could drag this on for decades, they would,” he said. “That can only happen if the courts allow it.”

He pointed to a similar legal fight in Morris County, where the Order of St. Benedict of New Jersey has been accused of withholding investigative reports through nine years of litigation in a sex abuse case against the Catholic order’s Delbarton School and St. Mary’s Abbey.

A trial in that case ended last fall with a $5 million compensatory verdict — but no punitive damages — against the order. Now the victim’s attorneys in that case are seeking sanctions against the order for withholding the newly surfaced reports, with arguments scheduled for later this month.

The church’s secrecy in both the Seton Hall and Delbarton cases suggests a pattern and deliberate strategy to evade accountability, Crawford said.

“They want to continue to hide what they don’t want the public to see,” he said. “People deserve the whole truth, which they have so far have just been unwilling to do.”

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