The first trial in the Riverside Church youth basketball sex-abuse scandal is winding to a close, with final witness testimony to be heard Tuesday in lower Manhattan before the case is handed to the six-person jury for deliberations.
Rollling Stone reports that Riverside is scheduled to call Dr. Steven Fayer as an expert psychiatric witness in its defense against 64-year-old former player Daryl Powell’s lawsuit, the first of 27 suits against the church to go to trial under New York’s 2019 Child Victims Act. As detailed in a joint investigation by Rolling Stone and Sportico, all 27 men have claimed they were sexually abused as children by Ernest Lorch, the multimillionaire corporate attorney and finance executive who directed and coached the powerhouse Riverside Hawks youth program for 41 years until his ouster in 2002. Lorch died in 2012.
The plaintiffs accuse the church of negligence in allowing the coach free rein to abuse children. Powell, a former Marist College star, specifically alleges Lorch regularly groped his genitals as a teen during “jockstrap inspections” and routinely paddled and fondled his bare buttocks, ostensibly to discipline the player.
Fayer examined Powell last October and will provide expert testimony, likely about his exam and the conclusions of Powell’s expert witness, Dr. Anthony Charuvastra, who also examined the former player and testified last week.
Last week’ proceedings in State Supreme Court Judge Alexander Tisch’s courtroom saw Powell’s final witness, a deceased former player whose video deposition excerpts were played for the jury, and three witnesses called by Riverside.
Michael McDuffen, who filed his own lawsuit against Riverside in 2021 but died of cancer in 2024 at age 65, told of how Lorch allegedly abused him. “It started the first time I came out of the shower,” said McDuffen, who was in hospice and at times during the deposition would nod off due to his medications. He said Lorch asked to look at the player’s arms “to see if I’m a drug addict” and then began smelling him “all over.” That echoed testimony from Powell, who alleges Lorch would smell his body to check if he’d showered.
Another time, McDuffen said on the video, Lorch took him to his Upper East Side apartment, had him shower, and then beckoned him to his bedroom, where the coach was on his bed “butt naked” and told the player, “You know what to do.”
In his lawsuit, McDuffen alleges Lorch frequently abused him, forcing him to perform oral sex at his apartment and molesting him in a swimming pool at Lorch’s house in rural Vermont. That testimony was not heard by the Powell jury.
In addition to Powell and McDuffen, four other players suing Riverside gave testimony about experiencing Lorch’s abuse. One of them, Ellis Williams, died last year, so portions of his deposition were read to the jury.
Throughout the trial, Riverside has put forth the case that the church had no notice of Lorch’s behavior and should bear no responsibility. On Thursday, the defense called Ramon Ruiz, who worked as a custodian at the church from 1973 until his retirement last year. He said he never saw any inappropriate behavior by Lorch in the church basement, which harbored the basketball court, locker room, office space, and equipment rooms where Powell and others allege abuse took place.
Ruiz testified he cleaned the basketball facilities every day and sometimes observed the Hawks teams practicing. Riverside defense attorney Phil Semprevivo asked him whether he ever saw players paddled, touched inappropriately, or ever heard any complaints from players about Lorch. He answered no to all three questions, saying he rarely spoke to players.
The jury heard similar testimony from the current Riverside Hawks program director, Anthony Hargraves, who played for the church in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He said Riverside offered him “a way out” of his gang-infested South Bronx neighborhood, helping him land a Division I basketball scholarship to Iona College, where he rose to captain of the team and earned a degree that helped him launch a career in finance at Bear Stearns and J.P. Morgan.
Hargraves said he earns a $40,000 annual salary as Riverside’s program director but that it didn’t affect his testimony. He testified that he never saw Lorch inappropriately touch anyone while he was playing for the program, nor did he see anyone getting paddled by Lorch.
Powell’s side tried to downplay the importance of Hargraves’ and Ruiz’ lack of knowledge of misconduct, attempting to show that they may simply not have been around at the right times to witness wrongdoing. Hargraves testified that while he “knew of” the paddle from players having conversations about it, he never actually saw it and didn’t know it belonged to Lorch.
Under cross-examination from Powell attorney Paul Mones, Hargraves said he was a “Dudley Do-Right” with a “limited amount of friends” who went straight from Hawks practices to his home, under strict orders from his mother.
He said he never took a shower at the church, and that while he never experienced “a jockstrap” inspection, he had heard about them. Several witnesses, including Powell, have said Lorch required players to wear jockstraps, would frequently check by looking and feeling if they were wearing them, and would punish them, often with a paddle, if they didn’t.
Under further questioning from Mones, Hargraves seemed to soften his blanket assertion about the inspections, saying: “I don’t recall whether I got in trouble for wearing ‘tighty whiteys.’ … I don’t recall a jockstrap inspection.”
Under cross-examination from Powell attorney Lawrence Luttrell, Ruiz said that while he never saw anything in the gym or locker rooms, he cleaned those facilities from approximately 7 to 7:30 a.m., when neither Lorch nor the Hawks players were around.
When players were showering, Ruiz said, he was working elsewhere in the massive church. Semprevivo then elicited testimony that the custodial offices were in the basement not far from the facilities the Hawks used, so maintenance people would have had opportunity to witness wrongdoing, had there been any, at other times of day.
Riverside also recalled to the stand the church’s chief operating officer Natalie Fein, who described for the jury the progressive, Rockefeller-funded institution’s community programs. Under questioning from Luttrell earlier in the week, Fein testified she could find no records of supervisory guidelines or rules for the basketball program during Lorch’s tenure in the church’s two floors of archives.
(This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Anthony Hargraves’ name.)
