New York Archdiocese agrees to pay $800m to 1,300 sexual abuse survivors

Key points

• The Archdiocese of New York will pay over $800m to settle claims from about 1,300 sexual abuse survivors.
• Archbishop Ronald Hicks said the settlement will be formally signed on November 6.
• Each survivor will receive at least $250,000, according to The New York Times.

The Archdiocese of New York has agreed to pay more than $800m to settle legal claims from about 1,300 survivors of sexual abuse by clergy. New York Archbishop Ronald Hicks said on Saturday that the settlement will be formally signed on November 6 after an agreement with the plaintiffs and their lawyers.

According to The New York Times, which first reported the story, each of the approximately 1,300 survivors will receive at least $250,000 from the archdiocese, with potentially more depending on the severity of the abuse suffered. The settlement is the second-largest of its kind, following an $880m deal reached by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 2024.

What officials said

In an email to his priests shared by the archdiocese's news outlet, Hicks wrote that the agreement would help bring "some measure of healing and reconciliation to all victim-survivors." He added that it would allow the archdiocese to turn its full attention back to its mission.

Jeff Anderson, a lawyer representing people who filed more than 1,000 claims against the Catholic Church in New York state, said in a statement that the unanimous agreement "marks a powerful moment in the pursuit of justice." He said survivors had helped bring about a reckoning and a meaningful step toward accountability.

We are on the verge of being able to, please God, bring some measure of healing and reconciliation to all victim-survivors.

— New York Archbishop Ronald Hicks

Background and other settlements

The agreement ends years of negotiations with lawyers for the plaintiffs. The Catholic Church in the United States has been involved in sexual abuse scandals since the early 2000s, when media investigations revealed that priests had abused thousands of children over decades and that church leaders often covered up cases or transferred offending priests instead of reporting them to authorities.

Dioceses across the country have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and programmes have been created to compensate survivors without going to trial. In June, the Archdiocese of San Francisco announced an agreement to pay $395m to about 530 survivors of sexual abuse by its clergy to settle their lawsuits.