Former Yeshiva Student Wins $21.7 Million Judgment Against the Rabbi Who Abused Him as a Teenager and the School That Employed Him

E.M. enrolled at the Yeshiva of New Haven, an Orthodox Jewish boarding high school on Elm Street in New Haven, Connecticut, in the fall of 2001 and stayed through the spring of 2005. The school's dean, director and the president of its board was Rabbi Daniel Greer, a prominent figure in the city who also ran a cluster of nonprofit housing corporations in the surrounding Edgewood neighborhood. From the time E.M. was 14 until he was 17, Greer sexually abused him frequently, at points weekly and sometimes for hours at a time, supplying him with alcohol and taking him to motels, to Greer's home, to rooms at the school and on a trip to Philadelphia. Another former student, who had himself been abused by Greer decades earlier, was an adult employee of the school at the time and knew what was happening.

E.M. filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut on May 3, 2016, against Greer and Yeshiva of New Haven, Inc. He alleged the abuse itself and that the school's administrators knew of it and never reported Greer. Greer invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege and refused to answer questions at his deposition and at trial. The case was tried before Judge Michael P. Shea in May 2017. E.M.'s wife testified to his emotional detachment and inability to trust; his psychologist, a specialist in childhood sexual trauma, testified that he had post-traumatic stress disorder that he would carry for the rest of his life. Antonio Ponvert III of Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder tried the case for E.M.

The jury found for E.M. on every claim and awarded $15 million in compensatory damages. It also found that punitive damages should be assessed against both Greer and the school. On June 6, 2017, the court entered judgment for $21,749,041.10: the $15 million verdict, $5 million in punitive damages measured under Connecticut common law by the plaintiff's attorney's fees, and $1,749,041.10 in interest under Connecticut's offer-of-compromise statute, section 52-192a, because E.M. had offered to settle for less than the jury gave him. Greer and the school moved for a new trial or remittitur, arguing the verdict was dramatically out of step with other sexual-abuse awards, and later moved to reopen the judgment on the strength of a former teacher's newly offered testimony. Judge Shea denied both motions from the bench on December 8, 2017.

On March 3, 2020, the Second Circuit affirmed. It held that the jury instruction on Greer's refusal to testify was proper, that the district court had handled his Fifth Amendment invocation within its discretion, and that a $15 million award for years of sexual abuse of a minor was not excessive under Connecticut law. Ponvert argued the appeal for E.M.

The civil verdict preceded Greer's criminal case. In September 2019 a New Haven jury convicted him of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, and in December 2019 Judge Jon Alander sentenced him to 20 years in prison, suspended after 12, and ordered him taken into custody immediately. Collecting the judgment proved harder than winning it. E.M. sued in 2017 to foreclose on the yeshiva building and in 2019 brought a federal reverse-veil-piercing action against five Greer-controlled housing nonprofits that held roughly $8 million in real estate; a federal judge froze their property in September 2020. By late 2021 E.M. had collected less than $240,000 of what was by then more than $22 million with interest. In March 2024, while Greer was still incarcerated, his nonprofits borrowed $12.25 million against 35 rental properties from an unnamed lender, and within weeks E.M. and the Greer entities stipulated to dismiss the federal case and jointly moved to vacate the foreclosure judgment. The terms of that resolution were not disclosed.