The first plaintiff in the Riverside Church basketball scandal is poised to be heard in court, after years of delay and a half century living with memories of alleged childhood sexual abuse.
Jury selection began on Monday in New York State Supreme Court in the case of Daryl “D.D.” Powell, a former Marist College basketball star who played for Riverside as a teenager during the 1970s and eighties. Powell is one of 27 men suing Riverside, the iconic upper Manhattan church that was home to a pioneering travel-team sports program, producing dozens of NBA stars and serving as a model for today’s $40 billion youth sports industry.
As documented in a joint investigation by Rolling Stone and Sportico, Powell and other former players allege the Riverside Hawks’ coach, multimillionaire attorney, and corporate executive Ernest Lorch regularly molested them as children, using his money and clout in the basketball and business worlds to keep them quiet.
Lorch died in 2012, but his actions, and how much, if any, responsibility the venerable institution should take for them, will be at issue in the case. Powell’s suit is being heard under New York’s 2019 Child Victims Act, which allowed accusers to sue people and organizations, such as the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, for harm done to them as children — in some cases decades later.
Riverside Church, whose rosters have included Basketball Hall of Fame inductees Nate Archibald and Chris Mullin, more recent NBA stars such as Metta World Peace and Lamar Odom, and the rappers Cam’ron and Ma$e, has in legal filings repeatedly contested the accusations against the institution and its officials. In a statement to Rolling Stone last October, Riverside’s attorney, Phil Semprevivo, said Riverside “denies the allegations made by the Plaintiffs as against the Church and is prepared to continue to defend itself in the pending litigations.”
The Powell trial could serve as a literal test case to see how a jury reacts to testimony about allegations that date back some 50 years and arguments about what level of scrutiny Riverside should have given Lorch and the basketball program.
In deposition testimony, Powell described Lorch’s repeated groping of his genitals, “jockstrap checks” that would often end with Lorch hitting him on the bare buttocks with a wooden paddle, and the coach smelling the player’s chest to see if he had taken a shower. He also testified that Lorch would force the player to sit on his lap while driving, ostensibly to teach Powell how to operate a vehicle. The abuse “was a consistent thing,” Powell said.
When Powell, now 64, was coming up in the 1970s, the Riverside program was growing into a basketball powerhouse — and power broker. Riverside players were showcasing their skills across the country and around the world, including exhibitions in the former Yugoslavia and the USSR. The program offered players access to gear, cash, summer jobs, private-school tuition and the promise of a university scholarship, and college coaches beat a path to the little gym in the church basement to have an audience with Lorch.
Powell was one of hundreds of Riverside alumni who went on to play college ball; Lorch used his connections to get Powell into a prominent junior-college basketball program in Arizona and later into Division I Marist, where he scored 20 points a game in his junior year.
According to deposition testimony, the opportunity had a price. While at Riverside, Powell and a couple of his friends on the team — Mitchell Shuler and Bill Sadler — would try to avoid Lorch. When the coach did something inappropriate or abusive — ogling them in the showers, leaving his hand on their backsides a count or two too long, rubbing their thigh on a car ride to their homes — they’d simply grin and bear it.
This sets Powell’s case apart from most of the other plaintiffs: There are not only accusations of abuse, but testimony about fellow Riverside players contemporaneously discussing it. Shuler is a plaintiff against the church, and like Powell, he testified to having talked about Lorch’s abuse with friends on the team. “They were sharing — we were sharing the experience,” Powell said in his deposition.
Both Powell and Shuler said in depositions they would try to write off the incidents by joking about them as they walked home from practice. Yet Powell testified he and his friends couldn’t avoid Lorch’s predations. Sadler, a former college star at Pepperdine who died last year, did not sue Riverside under the Child Victims Act, but Powell testified, “It happened to him what happened to me.”
According to Powell, entire uptown communities knew of Lorch’s reputation. “When Mr. Lorch used to come to my neighborhood and pick me up,” Powell said in his deposition, “the people in the neighborhood, they say, ‘Here come this pedophile … come looking for you.”
That’s a central element of all the plaintiffs’ cases: that Riverside should have known of Lorch’s alleged abuse in the church basement, in part because it was common knowledge on the street.
Powell says flashbacks of the abuse caused him to quit school at Marist with a year remaining on his scholarship. He knew he owed his college career to Riverside, and he wanted nothing more to do with Lorch. “I haven’t touched a basketball since 1984,” he testified.
In later years, Powell said in his deposition, he suffered panic attacks and was diagnosed with PTSD, and at times questioned his sexuality as he went through two failed marriages.
As a deputy sheriff in Virginia, he also said the Riverside experience affected his job, making him defensive and aggressive at times. If not for the alleged abuse, he testified: “I wouldn’t have that trauma, that mistrust. I wouldn’t see people the way I’m seeing people now.”
