A jury in Newark on Tuesday awarded a $30 million judgment to a 44-year-old man who said an after-school teacher repeatedly raped him when he was a child at a public school in the 1990s.
The verdict, handed down in Essex County Superior Court, found both the Newark Board of Education and the City of Newark liable for the abuse.
The victim’s lawyers said the abuse started in 1990 when the boy was about 9 years old and attending third grade at the Ann Street School, in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood. The director of the after-school program, John Cantalupo, began by kissing and touching him, and eventually escalated to raping him, the lawyers say.
At one point, the boy told another teacher that Mr. Cantalupo had been touching and kissing him, but the teacher did not take any action to report or stop the abuse, the lawyers said. That teacher, Gene Foti, said in a deposition in 2022, “At the time, I thought it was maybe a misunderstanding, it was maybe horseplay in the playground. I just didn’t think that this man would do that.” The jury found the school board negligent for Mr. Foti’s failure to report the boy’s allegation. Mr. Foti himself was not found liable.
The jury held the Board of Education 70 percent liable for the abuse, the City of Newark 20 percent liable, and the estate of Mr. Cantalupo, who died by suicide in 1995, liable for the other 10 percent. Mr. Cantalupo had been a respected figure who at one point recruited players for the Ironbound Little League. The name of the victim has not been disclosed.
Paul Brubaker, the communications director for Newark’s Board of Education, said in a statement on Wednesday, “We want our students and their families to know that this administration is fully committed to making sure students are safe.” He added that the board “will not tolerate inappropriate conduct toward any child, and will pursue appropriate consequences for any such misconduct to the full extent of the law.” He declined to say whether the board intended to appeal the verdict.
The city’s chief lawyer, Kenyatta Stewart, said in a statement that while the city wanted to “voice our condemnation of sexual abuse in the strongest possible terms,” it “upholds its right to disagree with the verdict and intends to file an appeal.”
Mr. Cantalupo would attack the victim several times a week, usually in a tiny windowless office behind the gym where he would ply the boy with Oreos and milk and sometimes pay him $3, the victim’s lawyers said.
Mr. Cantalupo abused the boy hundreds of times, the lawyers said.
In seventh grade, the abuse stopped, the lawyers said. Several months after that, Mr. Cantalupo died at age 73, the day after a boy reported to the police that Mr. Cantalupo abused him, the lawyers said.
Vincent Nappo, a lawyer for the victim, said that the city and its school district failed the child “when they allowed one of the sickest pedophiles we have seen in our casework run an after-school program for years with no oversight or supervision.”
Matthew Bonnano, another lawyer for the victim who handles many sex abuse cases, said the judgment was the largest he knew of in New Jersey in any such case since a 2019 state law extended the statute of limitations to let any survivor under age 55 bring suit.
Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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