Archdiocese of New York Nears $800 Million Clergy-Abuse Settlement, Parties Differ on Finalization

The Archdiocese of New York and lawyers for about 1,300 people who say they were sexually abused by clergy members and lay workers appeared to be nearing an approximately $800 million settlement Saturday, though the two sides publicly differed on whether the deal was fully finalized.

Plaintiffs’ counsel told clients in an email sent Friday into Saturday that the revised agreement had been completed and unanimously accepted by survivors. “Tonight, we were able to finalize the settlement with the Archdiocese. All of the survivors agreed to the revised deal,” Trusha Goffe wrote in the email quoted in reporting. But Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, cautioned that final details were still being worked out. “We are not quite there yet,” he said.

The reported October agreement follows a framework that plaintiffs’ lawyers said in May they would recommend to resolve the cases through a survivors’ trust. Current reporting indicated that same framework remained the basis of the revised deal now being completed.

Under that publicly described structure, claimants would have two options. They could take a “quick-pay” lump sum of at least $250,000, or they could submit a claim statement and go through an allocation process that could lead to a larger payment. Plaintiffs’ lawyers had said the global settlement required full survivor agreement in order to move forward.

The May framework called for roughly $615 million to be paid into the trust in an initial installment, followed by another $185 million within about 15 months. It also said survivors could continue to pursue recovery from the archdiocese’s insurers, with any insurance proceeds added to the trust.

The cases are part of the wave of clergy-abuse litigation filed under New York’s Child Victims Act, the state law that revived or extended the time limit for many people to bring childhood sexual-abuse civil claims that otherwise would have been too old to pursue. That legal opening produced a large number of lawsuits against Catholic dioceses and other institutions across the state.

The financial scale of the proposed New York settlement had been building into public view for months. In December 2025, the archdiocese said it planned to raise about $300 million for survivor compensation through budget cuts and asset sales, a sign that church officials were already preparing for a substantial payout as the litigation moved toward resolution.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer Paul Mones told The Guardian that a settlement of this size would matter in part because many of the claimants are older. “It gives closure to people, many of whom are in their 60s, 70s and even into their 80s. That is a significant matter in terms of closing the emotional door – or trying to – because it’s never going to be closed, but [it] at least gives some measure of justice to people who were terribly wronged,” he said.

The proposed resolution also includes nonmonetary terms, according to the plaintiffs’ May statement. Those provisions include maintaining and publishing a list of credibly accused clergy and providing certain documents, with Iona University identified as a repository.

If completed, the New York agreement would rank among the larger Catholic Church abuse settlements in the United States in recent years, alongside the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ roughly $880 million settlement in 2024. But as of Saturday, the central point remained unresolved in public: Plaintiffs’ lawyers said all survivors had agreed to a revised $800 million deal, while the archdiocese said the parties were still finalizing the last details.