The incident in question happened in 2012, when Reilly was a seminary leader.
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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.
