A Boston-area Catholic priest who pushed for the ouster of the powerful Bernard Cardinal Law in a church abuse scandal now faces his own allegations of sexual misconduct, a new lawsuit claims.
Father Walter Cuenin is accused of forcing a 20-year-old male Brandeis University student to have oral sex with him in a Manhattan hotel room a decade ago on a trip to the Big Apple, the Manhattan legal filing said.
The priest rose to prominence more than two decades ago when he helped lead a group of nearly 60 Catholic pastors calling for Law’s resignation after a bombshell investigation exposed systemic coverup of widespread sexual abuse within the church.
“Father Cuenin apparently forgot to look in the mirror when he called upon disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law to resign amid the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Boston,” said Mitchell Garabedian, the lawyer for the male victim, who asked that his client’s name be withheld.
Cuenin told The Post that, while he recalled the trip to New York and the victim’s name, he denied that any sexual contact occurred in the hotel room.
“I did not engage in any sexual misconduct with him,” Cuenin said from his Virginia nursing home, where he is now confined to a wheelchair. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“They can see it however they want to see it,” Cuenin said in response to the seeming disparity between the new accusations and his past advocacy.
The new lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court, claims that Cuenin invited the 20-year-old victim to join him on a train jaunt from the Boston school to New York City in December 2014 to attend a New York Philharmonic concert.
Before returning to the university the next day, the student and the clergyman shared a single-bed room at the Millennium Hilton hotel, where Cuenin drank alcohol and told the 20-year-old about “using Viagra to watch pornography,” the suit claims.
That night, “Cuenin sexually abused, sexually assaulted, and made sexual contact” with the victim, including “forcing his own erect penis into Plaintiff’s mouth, without Plaintiff’s consent,” according to the legal complaint.
Cuenin confirmed most of the details of the trip to The Post — but denied drinking booze and claims of sexual talk or contact.
Since then, the suit claims, the former student suffers from “severe and permanent emotional distress, and physical manifestations of emotional distress,” and that he is unable “to fully describe all of the details of that violence and the extent of the harm he suffered as a result.”
Garabedian also waged a noted campaign against church abuse in Boston, sending shockwaves still reverberating within the religious community today.
His work, alongside The Boston Globe, was chronicled in the hit film “Spotlight,” where Garabedian was famously portrayed by actor Stanley Tucci.
Law was forced to resign in 2002, after allegations he moved abuser priests around as part of a pedophile scandal coverup. Rather than being further punished, Law was given a cushy position in Rome and eventually died in 2017.
“My client has come forward not only to empower himself and other sexual abuse survivors but also to make the world safer for children,” said Garabedian.
In addition to his own crusade, Cuenin was known for his outspoken support for gay marriage and women priests while serving as a pastor at the Boston Archdiocese, according to the National Catholic Reporter.
He served as a “popular” Catholic chaplain at Brandeis for just under a decade, and suddenly departed his post there a month after the alleged sexual abuse for medical reasons, according to the school’s community newspaper.
Cuenin was ordained in 1970 and assigned at six other Boston-area churches, including over a decade at Our Lady Help of Christians in posh Newton, MA, according to his assignment history, before being forced out from the Archdiocese in 2005 in retaliation for his speaking out against Law, he told The Globe in 2014.
Shortly after, he joined the Jewish-sponsored Brandies University.
“The church got rid of me but the Jews took me in,” he told The Globe.
Brandies and the Boston Archdiocese declined to comment.
