Simpson Thacher & Bartlett partner Philip Culhane finds a measure of peace in a federal judge’s ruling Tuesday that a prominent Brooklyn prep school can’t argue that New York State’s statute of limitations should automatically nullify a lawsuit in which Culhane and 11 other men claim they were sexually molested by a revered football coachand that school officials covered up the serial sexual abuse.
“No matter what happens from this point on, Ive achieved one of my most important goals,” Culhane says, “which is for the truth to be told.”
Culhane, a private investment funds lawyer based in Simpson Thacher’s Hong Kong office, first told his story to The Am Law Daily in 2010. At the time, Culhane had decided to join a lawsuit filed by several former Poly Prep Country Day School students who claimed that longtime Poly Prep football coach and physical education teacher Philip Foglietta, who left the school in 1991 and died in 1998, had sexually abused them from the 1960s through the 1980s.
The original plaintiffs in the case launched the suit in 2009 against the school, as well as its past and present administrators and board of trustees, using a creative take on the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to assert that the school had engaged in a years-long cover-up of the abuse by, among the things, committing mail fraud and witness tampering.
