It’s been four decades since Robert Holmes, now 56, played basketball for the Riverside Hawks in Harlem. The famed youth basketball program was closely affiliated with the Riverside Church—an institution founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. that became famous in the 1960s for its support of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War—and produced such NBA players as Metta World Peace (formerly Ron Artest), Elton Brand, Mark Jackson, Kenny Smith, Chris Mullin and Ed Pinckney.
But a lawsuit filed by Holmes and working its way through a New York court is seeking restitution from the church for allegedly harboring a multimillionaire sex criminal, one who preyed on children in the vaunted basketball program that he founded.
Holmes contends Ernest “Ernie” Lorch—the former CEO of a private equity firm and corporate attorney who ran the Riverside Hawks hoops program for nearly 40 years—repeatedly abused him in several locations, including on church property. Lorch died in 2012 at the age of 80.
Holmes is among the more than two dozen former Hawks players who have sued Riverside Church under New York’s Child Victims Act, a statute that expands the ability of survivors of child sexual assault to bring claims as adults. While claims regarding conduct from decades ago are ordinarily barred by statutes of limitation, the Act gave survivors one year in 2019 (later extended to 2021) to file a claim.
Holmes did just that. He sued Riverside in 2019, bringing a handful of negligence claims. Holmes’ lawsuit argues that Riverside knew, or should have known, about the abuse of children and teenagers who played basketball for the church program, and should have taken steps to stop the abuse. Riverside, Holmes argues, unreasonably failed to act.
On Monday, attorneys for Riverside filed a motion for summary judgment, a court decision rendered without a full trial, based on existing evidence and legal arguments. Riverside insists it is not negligent because church officials allegedly neither knew nor had reason to know of abuse occurring. The church cites testimonies “of multiple former coaches, ministers, and staff” who claimed they weren’t aware.
Riverside also asserts it didn’t owe a duty in loco parentis, in which a person or organization assumes some of the responsibilities and duties of a parent, since the coach-player dynamic was “outside of a school setting.” Riverside underscores the alleged abuse inflicted on Holmes “occurred while he was a basketball player at Riverside” and “did not take place in any situation remotely resembling an educational or school setting.” Alleged abuse at Lorch’s residence, Riverside adds, was “away from Riverside’s premises.”
Abuse, Crime and Punishment
This week’s developments are the latest in a more than 40-year journey for Holmes, who transformed from an elementary school honors student to a recidivist criminal after meeting Lorch. Later, as an adult, Holmes went on to obtain more than $2 million from the wealthy executive, and then triggered Lorch’s forced resignation from the program in 2002 by going public, telling his story of abuse from a federal prison.
“The most important thing that made me file this case was not being a survivor,” Holmes said in an interview. “I was still living my life as a victim. And part of becoming a survivor was to try to see if I could get some closure through bringing it to light and bringing out other possible victims, both at Riverside and other institutions.”
As told in Holmes’ complaint, Lorch used the “power and authority” Riverside “invested in him” to commence a “pattern of grooming” Holmes. The grooming allegedly started shortly after Holmes, at the time approximately 12 years old, joined the Riverside Hawks in 1980. In subsequent years, Holmes not only played on his age-group teams, but he also served as a manager for older teams, meaning he was often around Lorch and allegedly subjected to abuse.
Over a three-year period, Lorch, allegedly had Holmes sleep overnight at his home. He is also described as giving Holmes cash, sneakers, gifts and praise to facilitate the sexual abuse. Lorch allegedly abused Holmes by fondling his genitals. Other alleged acts of abuse included Lorch demanding that Holmes masturbate on himself while in Lorch’s presence and forcing Holmes to “orally copulate Lorch until Lorch ejaculated on [Holmes’] face, neck or clothes.”
During this period, Lorch not only directed the basketball program but was a deacon at the church and on its board of directors. But in its motion for summary judgment, Riverside repeatedly mentions that Lorch was a “volunteer” at the church.
That classification has legal significance, Riverside contends. The church cites a 1998 case, Koran I. v NYC Board of Education, for the proposition that “a school principal’s failure to perform a background check on a person recommended as a volunteer teacher could not serve as basis for cause of action for negligent hiring” when there is an “absence of any evidence that the volunteer had a criminal history and where routine background check would not have revealed his propensity to molest minors.”
Riverside underscores that “there were no known allegations” against Lorch when he joined as a volunteer.
A Basketball and Financial Pioneer
Lorch and Riverside’s impact on the modern game is hard to overstate. He was a catalyst for the explosion of youth travel-team basketball, attracting top teen players throughout the greater New York City region and flying them across the country to play in the burgeoning AAU summer basketball scene. Under Lorch, the team even flew around the world to play exhibitions against teams from France and the USSR.
Those players’ opportunities stemmed in part from Lorch’s personal fortune. The Middlebury-educated graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law was a successful corporate attorney who later rose to become CEO of Dysson-Kissner-Moran, a New York private equity firm that pioneered the leveraged buyout.
The players who passed through the program include some of the best the city produced in the latter decades of the 20th century, including NBA Hall of Famers Nate “Tiny” Archibald and Mullin, as well as some of the most highly touted high-school players of their respective eras: names like Albert King, Gary Springer, Rodney and Scooter McCray, Malik Sealy, Kenny Anderson, Brian Reese and Adrian Autry. Brand, Artest and Lamar Odom played together on the 1996 Riverside squad, regarded as one of the best AAU teams ever assembled.
By the 1980s, Lorch was garnering praise for helping disadvantaged youth pursue their basketball dreams, building a platform for players to land college scholarships and launch professional careers. In a flattering article in Sports Illustrated published in 1986, Lorch is hailed as a “patron saint … a 54-year-old bachelor who has run the basketball program for the past 26 years.”
Riverside was among the first youth travel teams with a sneaker deal from Nike, and Lorch made himself a New York City hoops power broker by paying tuition for Hawks players to go to preferred New York City and New Jersey Catholic schools, or prep schools in the Northeast.
That practice put Lorch and the church under scrutiny in 2000. Former Riverside player Erick Barkley, then a college star at St. John’s who later played two years with the Portland Trail Blazers, was suspended briefly after an NCAA investigation found the player received $3,150 from Riverside for tuition at Maine Central Institute as a prep.
Prominent basketball leaders rallied to Lorch’s defense. “We should want an Ernie Lorch in every city in America,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski told the New York Post in 2000. “Are you kidding me? What he and Riverside Church have been doing for 40 years is helping people, not just basketball players, but people.”
Two years later, Lorch was forced to step down from Riverside when Holmes told his story of being abused—and of later taking more than $2 million from Lorch to build a nightclub and start a hip-hop recording label in the 1990s—in the New York Daily News. Holmes had been an elementary school honor student when he joined the Riverside program. By 2002, he had done prison time for drug-related crimes and was serving an eight-year sentence for gun possession. In the wake of Holmes’ allegations, other players came out publicly to say they, too, were victims. Lorch never coached at Riverside again.
Holmes later sued Lorch personally and received a settlement in 2006, but the courts at the time said Riverside was not liable because of the statute of limitations. (Holmes and Sportico editor Luke Cyphers, who worked on the original Daily News stories, once collaborated on a potential book project that was never completed.)
When Lorch died, many still spoke highly of him. But he was facing an indictment in Massachusetts for sexual abuse of a minor that allegedly occurred during a basketball tournament in the late 1970s.
Lorch’s death meant that criminal charges and potential civil claims against him were eliminated. However, the New York child-victim statute made it possible for Holmes and other players to sue Riverside in 2019 for allegedly enabling Lorch to inflict abuse after the original statute of limitations had run out. Through Lawrence W. Luttrell and his other attorneys, Holmes contends that Riverside held duties to provide a safe and secure environment for the players and protect them from sexual acts. Holmes argues the church failed to supervise Lorch and, worse yet, retained him, thus enabling Lorch to allegedly inflict even more harms.
In court documents, Holmes says he sustained numerous physical and psychological injuries including physical pain, severe emotional distress, mental anguish, humiliation, anxiety and other harms that are long-lasting if not permanent. He has incurred costs for medical expenses to treat those injuries.
“Until we have some resolution with the case and my ongoing litigation, that’s the last step that I feel is my attempt to becoming a survivor and finally being able to move on with my life,” Holmes said in an interview. “And in doing that, I know that in my heart that I’m helping hundreds of other kids maybe have the courage to become a survivor and put the victim stigma behind them.”
One of Holmes’ co-plaintiffs is his cousin, Sean McCray, who had previously come out publicly with allegations against Lorch. The current round of litigations includes 25 other plaintiffs, a group whose claims date as far back as the 1960s, most of whom Holmes had never met.
The Church’s ‘Good Faith’
In court filings, Riverside denies wrongdoing and insists Holmes’ case is legally deficient. Riverside argues the “alleged injuries” sustained by Holmes were not a result of Riverside’s negligence but instead “an unforeseeable, unanticipated, independent, intervening and/or superseding event that could not have been prevented by” Riverside. In addition, Riverside maintains it acted “in good faith” and “without malice” and says that Holmes’ allegations “were in no way the result of any acts or omissions on the part” of Riverside.
New York Judge Sabrina Kraus will weigh the competing arguments on the motion for summary judgment and issue a ruling, most likely this summer.
For his part, Holmes said that while he’s suing for financial restitution, his primary goal is a full reckoning for what he says the church did not only to him, but to his Black and Latino community, which he hopes can learn from his case. “In our culture, we are almost programmed to not talk about abuse,” he said. “We don’t talk about it because right then and there, you’re now gay. It goes out the window that you were taken advantage of as a kid, that you didn’t know better. … You become ostracized.”
He believes that prominent players for the church knew or heard of the abuse, even if they weren’t abused themselves. One main reason Holmes says Riverside players knew or should have known: Lorch frequently disciplined players for various violations during practice, from missing free throws to not running hard during sprints. He would call them into his office, and behind closed doors have them pull down their pants and expose their buttocks to be paddled. At times he would also fondle their genitals, as he did with Holmes, according to plaintiffs. Among players, Holmes said, Lorch’s paddle was treated almost as a joke. Holmes’ attorneys say it was a tool for grooming players and finding out which ones he could prey on.
Holmes said he understands why some former players, especially successful ones, wouldn’t want to discuss Riverside. “If you were in the NBA, or making money after your career, it would almost be career suicide, because now you run into legalities in regard to, ‘Did they know about it and not report it to anyone?’”
He said his revelations 20 years ago put him in danger while he was still in prison, because he was violating a street-level code of machismo. And he says that after his release from prison in 2006, he was often confronted by people who accused him of trying to use his story for the sole purpose of getting more money out of Lorch and Riverside.
“I wanted to let people know,” Holmes said. “And I think coming out and exposing myself out there with this lawsuit and the original article was my way to show that, ‘Hey, it wasn’t about the money.’”
