$41 million award in abuse case
Jury action followed a default judgment against a Del. priest. His accuser is now a Navy officer.
WILMINGTON - A Delaware jury awarded $41 million Friday to a Navy officer who said a Roman Catholic priest sexually abused him hundreds of times when he was a teen.
Jurors awarded Cmdr. Kenneth Whitwell $6 million in compensatory damages and $35 million in punitive damages.
Whitwell, 39, said that the Rev. Edward J. Smith raped and sodomized him more than 230 times in the 1980s while Whitwell attended Archmere Academy in Claymont, and that church officials did nothing to stop it.
The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Bishop Michael Saltarelli, and the high school were dismissed from the lawsuit last year. Thomas Neuberger, a lawyer for Whitwell, said he planned to appeal that ruling.
It was unclear how much Whitwell may be able to collect. Neuberger said Smith had inherited money from his family and was independently wealthy.
"We expect that we will collect every penny that he has hidden away," Neuberger said.
Whitwell won a default judgment against Smith in January after Smith failed to respond to the lawsuit. Smith, who cannot be prosecuted criminally because the statute of limitations has expired, did not attend the hearing or return a telephone message left for him at the priory where he lives.
Whitwell has taken a public stance in support of state legislation that would repeal the statute of limitations for lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse.
Whitwell, an optometrist at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., said he had repressed any memory of the sexual abuse until 2000, when it surfaced unexpectedly during a heated argument with his wife.
"Father Smith's abuse of Kenneth Whitwell while he was a student at Archmere is despicable," the school said Friday in a news release iterating its apology but noting that the school did not learn of the allegations until 2004.