Seton Hall President Cleared of Mishandling Sex Abuse Report

Seton Hall University President Monsignor Joseph Reilly “acted promptly and substantively” after hearing allegations of sexual abuse in 2012 when he was a seminary leader on campus, according to an investigation released last week. While the report from the law firm Ropes & Gray also found that Reilly “failed to report” the 2012 incident to the university, it was “an unintentional error attributable in significant part to his lack of training on Seton Hall’s reporting requirements before 2013.”

The report concludes more than two years of controversy surrounding allegations over how Reilly handled the sexual abuse reports.

Shortly after Reilly—who has never been accused of sexual abuse—became president of Seton Hall in 2024, Politico reported that he was implicated in a confidential 2019 third-party investigation conducted by Latham & Watkins LLP into sexual abuse allegations against the defrocked cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who died last year. According to Politico’s reporting at the time, the Latham investigation found that Reilly failed to report sexual abuse allegations and that the university recommended that he be removed from boards and his then post as seminary leader. Instead, he took a yearlong sabbatical before returning to Seton Hall as vice provost and, later, president.

But that information had not been previously known to the plaintiffs who brought some 450 sexual abuse complaints against the university, which were consolidated into one case in 2020. The revelation about the Latham report, which Seton Hall has not made public, prompted the plaintiffs’ legal team to pursue obtaining it. While a judge last year ordered the university to turn over the entirety of the report, last month a panel of appellate court judges reversed much of the ruling and said the university only had to release a portion of the report.

Meanwhile, in February 2025, the archbishop of Newark, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, hired Ropes & Gray to conduct a separate investigation into the Latham report itself. The resulting 32-page report found that the Latham investigation contained “no adverse factual findings regarding Monsignor Reilly” and only referenced Reilly in passing.

The report recounted how, in September 2012, a seminarian told Reilly that another seminarian “had made unwanted sexual advances toward him, including unwanted touching,” leading Reilly and another seminary leader to confront the accused, who had also been the subject of other, unrelated conduct concerns. Reilly immediately dismissed the accused seminarian but failed to report the sexual abuse allegations to the university’s Title IX coordinator.

“At the time, I believed I had handled this in the right way. In the years after the incident, Seton Hall instituted updated and consistent communication, training and guidance specific to the seminaries and the university in responding to complaints and allegations,” Reilly said in a letter to the university community after the report was released. “While I addressed the matter appropriately in promptly dismissing the seminarian and reporting the incident to the archdiocese, I should have also communicated that incident to the university’s Title IX office.”

The report also notes that in 2020, Reilly formally acknowledged his reporting obligations.

“No compliance concerns have arisen since,” Tobin, who is also president of the Seton Hall Board of Regents, said in a statement about the Ropes report, which he said he had no editorial input in producing. “Nothing in this thorough report changes my firm view that Monsignor Reilly is a good priest with formidable experience and a deep commitment to a Catholic institution serving the Church and the world.”