Most of the New York Child Victims Act lawsuits remain in limbo five years later

NBC News

09-05-2025

Back in 2019, James Manfredonia and some of his former Little League teammates thought they would finally be able to confront the coach who they allege abused them decades ago when they sued him under New York's Child Victims Act.
Five years later, they have yet to get a trial date, and their lawsuit against Tony Sagona remains in limbo.
The Sagona case is no outlier. For two years, from 2019 to 2021, 10,783 lawsuits were filed under the Child Victims Act in New York on behalf of 14,588 men and women who say teachers, coaches, priests and other authority figures sexually abused them as children decades ago, according to figures provided by the state's Unified Court System.
Of those cases, 7,632 were assigned to judges, and 2,052 of those were either settled or disposed of. The rest are classified as "pending."
'When the lawsuits started being filed, there was a lot of attention and talk about how the victims would get justice,' said Manfredonia, 63. 'But no one seems to care. Here we are, all these years later, and we just have to wait and wait and wait and wait. How can these cases not be a priority, especially given the supposed effort to pass the law?'
The Child Victims Act, which the New York Legislature passed in January 2019, lifted the statute of limitations and allowed victims of childhood abuse to sue predators regardless of when the abuse took place.
While there does not appear to be a single reason the lawsuits are caught up in a legal logjam, there is plenty of finger-pointing about who is to blame.
Advocates say part of the reason for the bottleneck is that just a handful of judges are handling all those cases and that the state has not done enough to speed the cases along. Ongoing legal battles between the major institutions, like the Archdiocese of New York — accused of covering up systematic sex abuse — and their insurers over who is responsible for paying millions of dollars in settlements have also stalled the cases.
'It's a typical story,' said Heather Cucolo, a professor at the New York School of Law. 'The Legislature passes something to right a wrong. We'll open this window, they say. We're supporting the victims. But the system in place to expedite these cases is just not working, and no one seems to be stepping up to effectuate and implement necessary changes.'
David Catalfamo, who heads a victims' advocacy group called the Coalition for Just & Compassionate Compensation, said the state has done little to intervene in the legal battles. He said the state Department of Financial Services has released guidance saying it expects insurance companies to 'cooperate fully with the intent of the Child Victims Act.'
But in practice, Catalfamo said, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Department of Financial Services have 'shamelessly sided with big insurance, abandoning the very survivors they once promised to protect.'
Hochul's office did not respond to emails and calls for comment.
Manfredonia's lawyer, Bradley Rice, said things are moving so slowly, in part, because of a lack of judges assigned to handle all the cases. He said that to expedite things, some of the lawsuits are being grouped together.
'This is something that you do in the first year or two after the suit is filed,' Rice said. 'The state just wasn't prepared to deal with all these lawsuits.'
One of the state senators who led the drive to pass the Child Victims Act, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose district includes much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, introduced a bill that would boost the number of state Supreme Court judges. But it is a long way from becoming law.
'New York has a constitutional cap on the number of State Supreme Court justices,' Hoylman-Sigal's office said in a written response to questions. 'We have passed legislation to remove that cap, but doing so requires passing it again through both houses and then it being approved by popular vote by the people of New York.'
While Cucolo, the law professor, agreed that the scarcity of judges is a factor, she said there are other issues at play slowing down the process.
'There is the discovery process, which takes time. There are the confidentiality rules when you're dealing with cases like these,' she said.
Under the Child Victims Act, there is a process by which victims must meet a 'threshold of specificity about incidents,' Cucolo said, adding that the process can take some time.
Also delaying settlements are the ongoing battles between institutions being sued and their insurance companies to determine who is responsible for the payouts, Cucolo and victims' advocates say.
The Archdiocese of New York has been in a battle with its insurer, Chubb, over who should pay out claims. The archdiocese has been the target of more than a thousand Child Victims Act lawsuits accusing it of having turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of children by priests for decades.
In September, after he sued Chubb alleging it flouted New York's General Business Law, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, charged in a letter to his flock that their longtime insurance company was 'attempting to evade their legal and moral contractual obligation to settle covered claims which would bring peace and healing to victim-survivors.'
Dolan, who has opposed to the Child Victims Act in the past, argued that paying out the roughly 1,400 open claims would bankrupt the church.
In the meantime, the archdiocese set up its own Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program to help victims who opted not to sue. As of April, the archdiocese had settled more than 430 of those cases, spokesperson Joseph Zwilling said.
An archdiocesan lawyer said in a statement Friday: 'The Archdiocese and Associated Policyholders looked to their longtime insurer for help when abuse survivors brought CVA claims alleging they negligently hired, supervised, and retained certain individuals accused of committing such abuse. Chubb reneged on its promises and turned on its policyholders in their time of gravest need.'
Chubb, which insured the archdiocese from 1956 to 2003, said Friday in a statement in response to questions from NBC News that 'compensating victims who suffered rampant church sexual abuse for decades should be the top priority of the Archdiocese, especially since they are sitting on a vast amount of wealth.'
'Nothing is stopping the Archdiocese from paying its victims today,' the statement continued. 'We have tried for years to get information on individual claims, but the Archdiocese refuses to cooperate or provide any information. They continue to conceal what they knew and when, which is why, in an attempt to force the release of information about claims we sued them in June of 2023.'
In closing, Chubb added: 'You can't get insurance coverage for what the church has admitted — hiding and facilitating the criminal sexual abuse of children.'
But even cases against smaller organizations — like Manfredonia's case against his former coach Sagona, the Great Kills Babe Ruth League and others who the plaintiffs allege knew the coach was preying on boys but did nothing to stop him — are being held up.
Sagona, who is 74 and lives in Boca Raton, Florida, has not been charged with a crime. His lawyer, Steve Kirk, said Sagona 'continues to deny the allegations full-heartedly.'
'He never coached Little League and doesn't even know some of the people who are suing him,' Kirk said.
Calls to a number for the Great Kills Babe Ruth League were unanswered.
But there may be some good news: Rice has been told they will soon be getting a court date, but it is not clear when. However, he said, the process is taking way too long.
Manfredonia said that despite the delay, he has no regrets about having filed the lawsuit. Just being able to talk openly about something that he kept bottled up inside for decades is its own reward, he said.
'The biggest benefit to coming out and telling our story is that it has helped our families begin to understand why we are the way we are,' he said. 'They can't really know what it's like, know what we've been feeling and hiding all this time. But they can begin to understand our behavior and reactions, and that's a big benefit, a very big benefit.'