James Clemente was 15 years old the first summer he spent away from home at a Catholic youth camp, nestled in New York’s Shawangunk Mountains.
Throughout his months at Camp Hayes, Clemente got to know director Michael O’Hara, who during the school year taught and coached basketball at a Catholic elementary school in Westchester. As the summer’s session reached its close, O’Hara invited him to stay and help close up camp for winter, leaving just “me and him on 600 acres of woods and a lake,” said Clemente. “We moved to a cabin that didn’t have a telephone.”
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That first night, O’Hara took the teenage boy out to eat and to a local bar. After, he bought them a couple of six packs of beer and had Clemente drive them back to the cabin where the camp director began talking to him about sex. He handed the camper a stack of porn magazines and told him to go to his room and “do what guys do.”
A little while later, according to Clemente, O’Hara entered the room. “Then he touched me and he did a lot more,” he said. “I was stuck there for 10 days. He came back and did it again and again.”
Clemente returned back home to his family deeply shaken and traumatized. In the fall, he went to the priest at his Catholic high school, Father Francis Stinner, who had initially sent him to the camp. He told Stinner what O’Hara had done to him.
“He literally cut me off and said, ‘Say 10 “Our Fathers,” 10 “Hail Marys” and never speak of this again,’” Clemente said. “I wanted to help protect the other boys at the camp and he made it seem like it was my fault. I’m the sinner.”
Both O’Hara and Stinner, along with their longtime employer, the Archdiocese of New York, would be named in lawsuits filed under the state’s 2019 Child Victims Act, which allowed adult survivors of childhood sex abuse to sue their alleged abusers and the institutions that protected them. This week, the sprawling archdiocese, which includes Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven counties north of New York City, announced it had reached an $800 million settlement with 1,300 of the CVA plaintiffs.
Clemente, who would go on to become a prosecutor — and in an extraordinary turn of events would wear a wire for the FBI in the 1980s to criminally capture and convict O’Hara, his abuser — is among those archdiocese victims who will now receive long-awaited compensation for his pain and trauma.
“It’s (been) seven years since we were able to file the lawsuit,” Clemente told The 74, “but it’s been 52 years since I was molested, and that’s half a century for the Catholic Church to finally take responsibility for what they did.”
A two-year investigation by The 74 published last month revealed that close to 2,000 of the nearly 11,000 claims filed under the Child Victims Act involved schools, or almost 1 in 5. The 74’s database shows that of the 792 school-based cases filed in the 10 counties that make up the New York archdiocese, 337 named Catholic schools, or roughly 43%. Statewide, Catholic schools accounted for nearly 37% of all the school-based cases, or 724 of 1,973.
The New York archdiocese agreement, which followed nearly a year of mediation, represents one of the largest Catholic church settlements related to sexual abuse claims. Last December, facing potential bankruptcy, the archdiocese said it laid off staff and planned to sell even more of its Manhattan real estate — it already sold its longtime office headquarters on First Avenue for more than $100 million in 2024 — to raise money for survivors.
Jeff Herman, a lawyer whose firm represents 260 of the archdiocese cases, including Clemente’s, said he commends “the survivors for sticking through it. It’s been very difficult. Finally they have vindication, and hopefully they feel validated,” he added. “It’s a measure of justice. It’s not justice. No one could ever take away what happened. But it’s an important measure.”
Of the archdiocese cases Herman’s firm litigated, he said a significant chunk of them included schools and educators. One Catholic school, Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the Bronx, was named in more than 60 cases — though about half of those settled before this latest agreement.
The archdiocese has also agreed to maintain a public list of priests and lay workers credibly accused of abusing children.
Herman said the Child Victims Act lawsuits and settlements are about far more than the survivors’ own suffering: “It’s about kids in the future. These kinds of settlements and these required disclosures protect kids in the future.”
The two men who harmed Clemente — O’Hara and Stinner — were both alleged child predators. Court records describe O’Hara as a serial pedophile who amassed as many as 200 victims over some 25 years. At least six male CVA victims say he sexually assaulted them when they were students at the former St. Matthew School in Hastings-on-Hudson between 1978 and 1984.
Stinner is named in at least six CVA cases from his time in the 1970s as a teacher and soccer coach at John S. Burke Catholic High School in Orange County, where Clemente was a student and the priest urged him to attend O’Hara’s camp. Stinner, who died in 2017, had a long history of being moved from school to school and parish and parish amid child sex abuse allegations. He was defrocked in 2005 and included in a 2019 list of 120 New York archdiocese employees credibly accused of sexually abusing children.
Herman said under the current settlement each survivor has the option to select a “quick pay” of $250,000 or participate in an allocation process, in which a third party would review individual cases and assign a point value based on a number of factors, including impact of the abuse. Remaining funds would then be distributed to survivors based on the number of points assigned to their case.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs anticipate the agreement will be officially signed and executed by Nov. 6, with the “quick pay” sums to begin before the end of the year, though that is not a guaranteed deadline.
Clemente, now 66, said when he heard on Friday that the agreement had been reached, “I was finally able to exhale.” Years after being sexually assaulted, the former prosecutor was drawn back into his abuser’s orbit when he agreed to wear a wire for the FBI and meet with O’Hara multiple times. He was finally able to get the evidence they needed to convict him on a child pornography charge in 1987. O’Hara served time in jail and died in 2000.
Clemente’s career did not end there. He himself became an FBI special agent and profiler with an expertise in child sex abuse, among other law enforcement topics. He later became a writer and co-producer on the TV show “Criminal Minds,” where, he told The 74, his own past childhood abuse and other elements of his adult life became part of the show.
Clemente’s lawsuit was not included in The 74’s original database because O’Hara did not have access to him directly through his school. Still, his abuse, he said, was “intertwined with my high school experience.”
‘He missed it by seven weeks, five days’
As this chapter of the lengthy legal process comes to a close, Herman says he can’t help but think of all the survivors who filed cases and died before they could see them through. The school-based cases identified by The 74 spanned some 70 years — from the mid-1950s to 2018 — with many of those plaintiffs now in their 60s and 70s.
They were so brave and they were part of bringing justice to everybody. Their cases were important.
Jeff Herman, whose firm represents some 2,000 Child Victims Act cases, including 260 which accuse the New York archdiocese
One such survivor spoke with The 74 for its “Decades of Harm” investigation. He asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of his story and because his two adult sons did not know of the abuse he said he experienced at the hands of his Catholic high school basketball coach, also a serial predator, in the 1960s.
The grandfather of five, who became a successful attorney but also spent years blaming himself for his abuse, passed away in late August. His wife of 55 years told The 74 this week that when she learned of the settlement agreement on Friday, “I said, ‘Oh my God. (He) missed it (by) seven weeks, five days.”
“Even when he was in the hospital, right before he passed, he thought it was coming then,” she said, “but it just kept getting pushed back.”
Still, she said, “He wanted to see something done. Now, it’s done.”
In his final months, he did share his abuse with his children, which was immensely challenging but brought him a sense of peace, she said. And he asked his wife — who he met during the time of his abuse at Our Lady of Lourdes High School in Dutchess County nearly 66 years ago — to continue the fight. Before his death he set up a trust, which will allow her to be the beneficiary of settlement funds, and to see the case through on his behalf.
“They think it was tough dealing with (him)? Wait til they have to deal with me,” she said. “I’m going to be his greatest advocate.”
She plans to pursue the settlement option which involves a third party reviewing the strength of the case and then assigning it a point value that will then correlate to a payout sum. His attorney said he was confident this avenue was the right one based on the strengths of the case, emphasizing that the accused abuser, Vincent Dutkowski, was hired by Our Lady of Lourdes despite having been charged and convicted of molesting two students at a public school three years before.
Dutkowski, a convicted sex offender who died in 2012 at age 83, was named in at least five CVA cases filed by his former players and students.
Such an avenue will likely take longer but could lead to a larger payout, though the plaintiff’s wife said the money was never the point.
My husband “was never interested in any money or anything like that,” she said. “He just wanted the school to know and to acknowledge they’re wrong. They’re wrong with what they did.”