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B
yron Walker knew he was in trouble. He’d been late for the Riverside Church Hawks team van departing Upper Manhattan for a tournament in Massachusetts one spring morning in 1977. When the Riverside squad — part of the top teenage-basketball travel program in the country — arrived for its opening game in Springfield, Walker sat on the bench the entire first half. At halftime, Ernest “Ernie” Lorch, the Hawks’ founder and coach, confronted the teenage point guard. Lorch had sent the rest of the players back to the court to warm up for the second half and kept Walker behind.
A bespectacled, slightly paunchy corporate attorney and financier, Lorch nonetheless had a commanding presence, with a sonorous, authoritative voice that sounded like the old Hollywood star Robert Mitchum, and millions of dollars thanks to his professional success. He rarely showed anger, but he was furious at Walker for being late. Walker expected Lorch might spank him, something he frequently did to players on the church grounds. But that was almost always with a wooden paddle in the coach’s office in the church basement or other rooms. Lorch didn’t have the paddle this time. He told Walker to pull his shorts down anyway.
Walker was, in many ways, a model for what Riverside could do for a struggling kid in 1970s New York City. One of four children raised by a single mother in East Harlem, his middling grades and a self-described “arrogant” attitude prevented him from playing for his high school teams. And yet he wound up a star at the University of Texas-El Paso, playing for legendary coach Don Haskins. The five-foot-11-inch Walker helped the 1982-83 Miners to a tie atop the Western Athletic Conference, led the league in assists, and was an honorable mention AP All-American — “a little sparkplug, a fireball from New York … [who] made it all work,” according to the El Paso Times. Walker owed his playing career to Riverside and Lorch, whose money and contacts led him to a major college scholarship. He was among the more than 1,000 Riverside alumni who went on to play college ball; several dozen more made it to the NBA — including two Hall of Famers.
While most travel teams at the time were either side gigs for high school coaches or run by neighborhood guys bootstrapping small community programs, Riverside “was the prototype of what was about to come” in youth sports, says Sonny Vaccaro, a former Nike and Adidas executive who pioneered bringing sneaker-company money into college and grassroots basketball. “Ernie Lorch was a singular guy,” Vaccaro tells Rolling Stone, “because he was a lawyer. He had money. He was the intimidator.”
But Lorch wasn’t just intimidating to coaches and scouts on the travel-team circuit. As alleged in multiple ongoing lawsuits against Riverside Church, Lorch terrorized and abused many of his players, using his money, power, and stature to satisfy his raging pedophilia. In that Massachusetts locker room, Lorch didn’t spank Walker after he pulled down his shorts; according to Walker’s sworn testimony, the then-47-year-old tried to rape the 16-year-old from behind. “This motherfucker, he fucking ejaculates on me,” Walker said in a court deposition. He felt he could do nothing to retaliate. “I was scared,” he testified. When asked what he feared, Walker, now 65, echoed what others interviewed for this article say: “The true nature of power and control. This man had power over my career as an athlete.”
Youth Basketball’s Version of the Epstein Files
The power Lorch and the Riverside program exerted over kids like Walker — and over the sport of basketball writ large — is only now coming into full view, thanks to more than two dozen lawsuits against Riverside Church under New York’s Child Victims Act of 2019. The cases — some going back six years — have been painfully slow in working their way through the courts. But the Riverside litigation is suddenly coming to a head, with the first trial date set for Jan. 5.
For this article, Rolling Stone and Sportico reviewed more than 7,000 pages of court filings and deposition testimony and interviewed more than a dozen former coaches and players who competed for or against Riverside. This includes plaintiffs Walker and Robert Holmes, who in 2002 was the first to publicly allege that Lorch abused him as a child and paid for his silence as an adult. Some plaintiffs were reluctant to discuss their experiences and declined interview requests through their attorneys. This article also draws on years of prior reporting on Riverside and New York’s youth-basketball scene going back to the 1990s, including Holmes’ first public revelations about Lorch’s alleged abuses in 2002.
In sworn testimony, 26 plaintiffs ranging in age from mid-forties to late-sixties say Riverside’s institutional neglect led to four decades of child sexual abuse by Lorch. The allegations, with their confluence of money, exploitation, and vaunted institutions, are youth basketball’s version of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Like Epstein, Lorch can no longer pay any price. He died in 2012 at the age of 79, a decade after the first public allegations of abuse.
The Riverside Church, however, may be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars. Many of the plaintiffs testified that as a result of the abuse, they’ve led troubled lives since their playing days — falling into addiction, unemployment, crime, and stunted or shattered relationships.
Former players say that Riverside officials did nothing to stop the predator who ran the little gymnasium in the church basement, looking the other way for 40 years — if they bothered to look at all. “Given how open and obvious this conduct was, as well as the length of time it persisted, it is difficult to fathom how anyone from the upper Church could have missed it had they looked,” attorney Michael Angelini wrote in a plaintiffs’ brief. “But they never did.”
At least some of the plaintiffs have been in settlement talks already. But many are seeking more than money. “Riverside needs to acknowledge what happened [and] what it did to the community,” says Holmes.
Walker agrees. “Honestly,” he tells Rolling Stone, “no financial award, none of that, can bring back what was taken from you.”
One of the attorneys for Holmes and Walker, Lawrence Luttrell, has been involved in litigation against Riverside for more than 20 years. He sees this case as a chance for a once-venerated institution to finally do right by this group of survivors. “For decades, Riverside Church preached justice from the pulpit while enabling abuse in its basement,” Luttrell says in a statement. “It’s time for the church to live up to the gospel and make amends.”
The church contests the allegations, claiming in legal filings it had no knowledge of Lorch’s activities and bears no responsibility for the alleged abuse. In response to a detailed list of questions about the case, Riverside’s attorney, Phil Semprevivo, says that Riverside “denies the allegations made by the Plaintiffs against the Church and is prepared to continue to defend itself in the pending litigations.”
Citing deposition testimony from current and former Riverside coaches, pastors, and staff, the church claims it never had indications that Lorch abused anyone and that no player complained to anyone in authority. (However, two former coaches called by the plaintiffs, James “Turtle” Williams and Deron “Sheeb” Johnson, testified in depositions that they had suspected Lorch’s abuse.)
Throughout their testimony, players repeatedly said the only person of authority they had any contact with was Lorch, who served Riverside as a church deacon and president of the board of trustees. And for some of the players, the risk of abuse, which they thought they could avoid, was seen as the price of admission to a program that offered almost unimaginable opportunities for cash, gear, scholarships, street credibility, and national celebrity.
In its legal arguments, Riverside denies it had any duty in loco parentis, that is, to oversee children’s safety as if it were their guardian, in the same way schools do. “It is undisputed that Riverside is a church and not a school,” a Riverside brief states, and that alleged abuse “did not take place in any situation remotely resembling an educational or school setting.”
That flies in the face of testimony about how the basketball program promoted itself: as an athletic and educational service that helped kids gain entry to Catholic and private prep academies. More than that, the program’s big carrot for players was a potential college scholarship.
While the case is about alleged abuse of impoverished children by a multimillionaire and fostered, the plaintiffs argue, by a powerful institution, the depositions also tell a business story, as Riverside undergirded a golden age of New York City hoops and laid the foundation for today’s $40 billion, private-equity-backed youth-sports industry. Lorch essentially invented elite travel-team basketball, and the hordes of unregulated programs he inspired eventually wrested control of the game from traditional high schools.
After Lorch was forced out of Riverside in 2002 — felled when Holmes went to the press with his allegations — it marked the end of New York City as the preeminent talent pipeline. “It stopped being the go-to place,” says Jim Fox, a basketball-program director on Long Island and governor of the New York Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union. “Everything splintered.”
Vaccaro says the revelations about Lorch came as a shock to much of the basketball world, because from the outside, Lorch seemed beyond reproach. “I’ll tell you what saved him,” Vaccaro says. “Riverside Church. It camouflaged him. It was a perfect co-conspirator.”
A Progressive Beacon
Riverside Church was built for great things. A massive neo-Gothic structure with a steel skeleton and white stone skin, modeled after the cathedral in Chartres, France, it engulfs two entire Manhattan blocks. Its 392-foot tower, said to be the tallest church edifice in the United States, offers spectacular views from its perch on a hill at 122nd Street, overlooking the Hudson River to the west, skyscrapers to the south, and the sprawling expanse of Harlem and the South Bronx to the north and east.
Founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the 1920s, Riverside was fueled by gilded-age fortunes and a missionary zeal to use that wealth for good, which its well-heeled flock often defined as support for progressive causes. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a half dozen speeches from the Riverside pulpit, including a seminal addressopposing the war in Vietnam. The nondenominational church’s firebrand minister, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, not only spoke out against the war in the 1960s, but also advocated forcefully for nuclear disarmament in the 1970s. All the while, the church supported overlooked and sometimes controversial art and music, which it broadcast nationwide from its popular radio station.
In July 1961, 20-year-old Bob Dylan performed at a folk concert at the church. That night in the church (as depicted in last year’s A Complete Unknown), Dylan met Suze Rotolo, a young artist and activist who became his lover and an inspiration for his first forays into protest songs.
That same year, the church beefed up its youth recreation program as a way to welcome the influx of mostly Black and Latino children moving into the recently opened hulking housing projects a few blocks away. Riverside hired Lorch, then 29, to run it.
Court filings from the former players allege how Lorch methodically groomed and abused children from some of the nation’s poorest communities, cunningly and cruelly preying on their desperation and love of the city game, on an almost industrial scale. He allegedly fondled and digitally raped some; ejaculated on others; and ritually, repeatedly, and sadistically beat the exposed buttocks of nearly all of them.
According to testimony, Lorch’s abuse knew no boundaries: He abused them in the gym. He abused them in the locker room. He abused them in the showers. He abused them in his office. He abused them in secluded rooms deep in the church that only he had keys to. He abused them on road trips to Florida, Massachusetts, and the former Yugoslavia. He abused them in his Upper East Side apartment, and in a six-bedroom home he owned on 139 acres in rural Vermont.
“Every time that Mr. Lorch took me home from Riverside Church, [he] performed some type of sexual act on me,” Holmes testified. “It was almost like a basketball drill.”
The Penn State of Youth Basketball
After taking the helm of the Riverside program as a volunteer — he was never paid by the church during his 40 years there, but regularly contributed vast sums to it — Lorch steadily built the Hawks into far more than just a place for kids from the neighborhood to blow off steam.
Riverside put around 60 alumni into the NBA, among them Hall of Famers Nate “Tiny” Archibald and Chris Mullin; two-time NBA champion and longtime TNT commentator Kenny Smith; former Number One overall NBA draft pick and current Philadelphia 76ers general manager Elton Brand; and hoops-culture touchstones like Metta World Peace and Lamar Odom. Many of the former Hawks who played college basketball became part of March Madness lore — including Ed Pinckney, who outdueled Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing in Villanova’s “perfect game” to win the 1985 NCAA title. Two notable rappers who never made the pros, Cam’ron and Ma$e, also played for the church. (In a 2017 diss track aimed at Ma$e, Cam’ron raps, “How you mad at me, though, you let Mr. Lorch touch you.” Reps for Cam’ron and Ma$e did not reply to requests for comment.)
The country’s best-known college coaches paid homage to Lorch, because he supplied them with players they needed to win. “We should want an Ernie Lorch in every city in America,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, the NCAA’s all-time winningest men’s basketball coach, once said. Nike supplied Lorch with gear coveted by players. The tiny gym in the bowels of the great church was, for a time, the most important reservoir of talent in the game. Lorch’s success spawned thousands of imitators: nonschool-affiliated travel teams looking to cash in on sneaker and gear sponsorships while selling kids and their parents on the dream of earning a college scholarship and a shot at the pros.
The key to Riverside’s dominance was Lorch’s vast financial resources. He had emigrated from Germany to France and then to the U.S. with his family in the 1930s, and was fluent in three languages, according to deposition testimony from a former Riverside clergyman, the Rev. Robert Polk. With an undergraduate diploma from Middlebury and a law degree from the University of Virginia, Lorch worked on international deals in Europe and was of counsel at the white-shoe Manhattan law firm Whitman Breed Abbott & Morgan. He represented and eventually became CEO of Dyson-Kissner-Moran, a boutique finance firm that pioneered the leveraged buyout, and sat on several corporate boards.
And he was a ruthless competitor. He often engaged in bidding wars for top players with the city’s other powerful travel team, the Bronx Gauchos. If a smaller, local community team beat Riverside, Lorch was known to just hire the program’s coaches — who brought their talented players with them to the church.
Lorch’s on-court success provided a spotlight for the program, though he largely avoided the media. One exception was a glowing profile in Sports Illustrated’s 1986 Sportsman of the Year issue. The cover featured a beaming Penn State coach Joe Paterno — who resigned in disgrace a quarter century later amid a child sex-abuse scandal involving his assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky — selected for the magazine’s highest honor.
In the city’s parks and gyms, everyone knew “Mr. Lorch.” “This was a very powerful man,” Patrick Hernandez, a former player, said in a deposition. “I witnessed with my own two eyes he can walk into any neighborhood … in New York City, and the crowd would part when they see him. He had the ability to change someone’s future with just a phone call.”
Or through his abuse.
‘They Get the Paddle, Too’
Early on a winter Saturday morning in 1981, Louis Garcia stood awestruck by the power and glory of Riverside Church.
He’d felt it before, just riding around the city on the subway with his newly acquired Riverside swag: a dashing blue and gold jacket, and a string bag with the Hawks logo to lug his team-issued expensive sneakers in. The gear signified you were a made man in New York City basketball — even if you were only 12.
“You get on the train, people would admire you,” Garcia testified in his deposition. “You say, ‘I play for the Hawks, I play for the church,’” he testified, “and people would honor you, like … ‘This kid’s going to be a star.’”
But Garcia’s most revelatory moment came on that long-ago Saturday morning. He arrived at practice early, before 8 a.m., and could see a pair of older players working out in the tiny gym through a window onto the court: Chris Mullin and Walter Berry. They were still in high school at the time, but every young player in New York knew Mullin and Berry were destined for the NBA.
Garcia remembers seeing the two shooting around so vividly, in part, because it was the same day Ernie Lorch sexually abused him. He had missed a Hawks practice earlier in the week to play in a game with his neighborhood team, Ascension School. Lorch summoned him to his office. The coach promptly ordered the 12-year-old to take off all his clothes. “I kind of questioned him,” Garcia testified. “I had that little courage in me.”
Lorch answered with a question of his own. “Do you want to continue playing for this team? If you want to continue playing, you got to obey the rule, and these are part of my rules. Even the big guys, you see the big guys out there, Chris Mullin and Walter Berry, they get the paddle, too, when they act up.”
Garcia complied, taking off all his clothes. He testified that Lorch bent him over his lap, whereupon the coach fondled his buttocks and genitals, paddled him, and probed his anus with his finger. And then, Garcia testified, the coach started masturbating.
He paddled the boy again. “Now you understand the importance of playing for this organization,” Lorch said, according to Garcia’s testimony. “You going to be good, right?”
With his head down, Garcia recalled saying, “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” He got dressed and went back out to practice. But practice was over. He’d missed it.
He saw some teammates in the locker room. “Just to the look they gave me,” he said in his deposition. “I think a lot of people there knew what was going on. But it was an unsaid thing, that you just keep it private.”
Garcia did just that for much of his life. He quit Riverside after his first year, and though he was a talented high school player, he never made it to college. He battled drug addiction and did a year and a half in prison for armed robbery after a botched stick-up in 1991.
He got married, had kids, and worked a job as a porter at Broadway theaters. But for more than 20 years, he never told anyone what Lorch had done. Then in April 2002, he saw the front page of the New York Daily News. Holmes was claiming Lorch sexually abused him, and Lorch was stepping down, at least temporarily, pending an investigation.
A floodgate opened. Garcia told his wife. He called Riverside Church; Garcia tells Rolling Stone a church representative whose name he can’t remember listened to him for about a half an hour, then said, “Basically, do what you have to.” He called a lawyer. He called the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He called the Daily News and agreed to do an interview. Ahead of his story’s publication, Garcia reached out to a former teammate, Sean McCray, whom he suspected might have been molested by Lorch. (McCray, who is Robert Holmes’ cousin, is now one of the plaintiffs suing Riverside.)
McCray had an expensive new SUV in front of his residence, Garcia testified, and a proposition for his old backcourt mate. Lorch, McCray said, “will give you $10,000 right now if … your story doesn’t come out.”
After that, he could go to Lorch every month for money, “and he’ll take care of you,” Garcia said McCray told him. “Just don’t let the story come out, OK, Lou?” (McCray’s deposition in his lawsuit does not address this incident, but in a 2011 interview with New York Daily News reporter Michael O’Keeffe, McCray told a similar version of Garcia’s story, saying Lorch directed him to offer $10,000 to Garcia to recant the 2002 article.) Garcia could have enriched himself by keeping his mouth shut, and the Riverside scandal may have stalled out there. Lorch was only suspended at the time, and was seemingly desperate to bottle up a second accuser’s story.
Moreover, Lorch had millions of dollars in potential hush money, and more than a decade after his death, still has a hold over players he both mentored and allegedly molested. “I still call him Mr. Lorch,” Garcia testified, “and I don’t get that.”
But Garcia was haunted by what he said Lorch had done to him. He testified that his grades plummeted after the encounter in Lorch’s office. “I couldn’t focus,” he says. He would have nightmares. He tried to prove his manhood by being promiscuous with women. As his own children grew, he wouldn’t allow them to play sports, or even leave home without supervision.
Yet, until he saw that first account in the Daily News, he never considered telling anyone. “Like, what was I fucking thinking?” he testified. “Why didn’t I just let this out back then?”
He wasn’t wasting his opportunity this time. “I wanted my story to come out, even though I already knew about the statute of limitations,” he testified. “I’m going to stop this man in his freaking tracks.”
A few weeks later, in June 2002, Garcia’s story was published — the second former player to publicly describe Lorch preying on children.
The first to tell the story was no longer alone.
The $2 Million Tell
Robert Holmes had receipts.
I was a sports writer at the Daily News in early 2002 and had reported on scandals in New York youth sports over the previous decade. Holmes wrote me a letter from federal prison, and over the next several months, he recounted how Lorch sexually abused him hundreds of times between the ages of 11 and 15, after Holmes had joined the Hawks in 1980. (Several years ago, I worked with him on a never-published book project about his experiences.) At the time he tried out for Riverside, Holmes was exceptional in the classroom, chosen as “the best all-around student” in sixth grade at PS 28 in Harlem. But Lorch’s abuse had derailed his life, and when he approached the Daily News, he was not an ideal witness.
Holmes wasn’t a star player. He was a high school dropout with a criminal record, mostly for small-time drug dealing. Other than a short stint in the Army National Guard and performing odd jobs for Lorch at Riverside in the mid-1990s, he’d never been employed. He’d been shot in the face by an unknown assailant on New Year’s Eve 1998 and somehow survived. When we spoke at the Brooklyn federal correctional facility, he was serving an eight-year federal sentence on a gun-possession charge, a case in which the judge said he believed Holmes had perjured himself.
Holmes’ main claim that he had received millions of dollars in hush money from Lorch after he and his mother confronted the coach in late-1996 or early-1997 initially beggared belief. But he had well over 50 signed checks from Lorch, some for six figures. He had purchase records, listing Lorch in the transactions, for expensive cars from Zakar Motors in New Jersey, well-known as a dealership for drug kingpins. Most important, he had Lorch’s own sworn testimony.
Lorch was called as a witness in Holmes’ gun case — where he was charged with felony possession of a single pistol — to prove where his cars and cash were coming from. On the stand, Lorch admitted to giving Holmes $2 million, which the coach called “an investment,” one with “no strings” and no repayment plan.
The assistant U.S. attorney in Holmes’ gun case sounded incredulous in his cross-examination of Lorch. “Sir,” prosecutor Jed Davis said in the court transcripts, “are you telling us that you simply gave a man $2 million who had absolutely no work experience?”
He gave his ex-player the money, Lorch said, so Holmes could look the part as he launched an ultimately unsuccessful hip-hop record label and nightclub. “It was important to show — I think the word ‘glitzy’ might be appropriate — image for the company, to show the community that this was a viable venture,” Lorch told the court.
Holmes indeed lived large in the late nineties, promoting some legitimate rappers, including Black Rob, Sadat X, and Jimmy “Puerto Rock” Perez — the latter earning ephemeral fame as one of the “Whassup” guys from the Budweiser ads. Lorch’s motivation for his “investment” wasn’t to get into the music business; it was to guarantee his ex-player’s silence — up to $10,000 a month by 1998. In early 1999, after Holmes was shot, Lorch gave him $1 million over a couple of months. With police investigating the shooting, Holmes testified, “He was scared that it would come back to him and bite him, because he was the guy giving up money.”
The plan was to get Holmes out of town to set up a new life in Hawaii, according to deposition testimony and interviews with Holmes. But Holmes blew through his cash, spending much of it on expensive cars. As he recovered from his wounds in a Queens hotel, he got into an argument with the manager over a bill. Holmes insulted the man, throwing hundred-dollar bills at him. The hotel manager called police and said he suspected a big-time drug dealer was on the premises. The DEA raided Holmes’ hotel room, and in one of his cars found an unregistered handgun. He got a 97-month sentence. Lorch paid for Holmes’ attorneys.
In the wake of Holmes’ revelations in the Daily News article, Lorch was immediately suspended from Riverside and never coached there again.
Holmes’ fight, however, was just beginning. After his conviction, he finally told prosecutors of Lorch’s abuse, and the Manhattan DA’s office opened an investigation. When the Daily News article came out, the DA established a phone-in hotline for victims, and said at the time that it had received multiple calls. As in Garcia’s case, though, none of the tips led to criminal charges.
Holmes later brought suit against Lorch and the Riverside Church in 2003. While the church was dropped from the case for statute-of-limitations reasons, Holmes, with the help of Luttrell, convinced the court that Lorch’s long history of payments for Holmes’ silence “tolled” the statute — in effect suspending the statute to allow litigation to continue.
Lorch and Holmes settled the case two years later for $325,000, with Lorch admitting to no wrongdoing other than paddling the player. But Lorch’s abuse of Holmes allegedly went way further than just the paddle, as Holmes has revealed to me over the years and in his testimony in the current case.
Holmes’ mother frequently voiced suspicions about Lorch. “She would wonder why I was coming home with pockets full of money, and wonder how I was getting new sneakers,” he testified. “She blatantly asked me, ‘Is that man doing anything to you? Is he touching on you?’”
After Holmes’ mother caught her son trying to conceal a failing report card, “Mr. Lorch cleverly sat and spoke to my mom and told her that he would be the father figure that I didn’t have, and that he’d like to start letting me work on the weekends” with other Riverside teams, Holmes says. “I became the towel boy. He was able to have my mom say, on the weekends, ‘I’m gonna let you go over to his house.’”
On more than one occasion, according to his deposition, Holmes says a naked Lorch would watch him and his cousin McCray shower and then dry them off. He’d then usher them into his bedroom one at a time and, according to Holmes, abuse them. In addition to the sleepovers, Holmes says Lorch molested him hundreds of times, in the church itself and on car rides home. When Riverside attorneys asked why he kept going back, Holmes testified to believing in “the farce” that he could be an NBA player and “that all of the other players go through this, this is what it takes.”
In one instance, Holmes alleged, Lorch goaded Holmes into a storage room and told him to climb a ladder to a lofted space to retrieve some uniforms. As the 12-year-old came back down the ladder, according to testimony, Lorch fondled him through his shorts, then forced him down on the floor, turned the lights off and further sexually abused him, ejaculating on the boy’s face.
During depositions, Riverside attorneys seemed to try to cast doubt on the very existence of the storage room. But in a discovery session this past winter, a group of attorneys for both sides accompanied Riverside staffers to the church basement, where they documented on video all the locations of alleged abuse, including Lorch’s old office, the locker room and shower area, and the gym. Holmes led the group toward a remote door where he said the storage room was. Riverside staffers seemed unaware and couldn’t find a key to the room for a good half hour.
When a custodian finally opened the door, it was precisely as Holmes described it, according to Holmes and his attorneys. “There were old uniforms still in that room that I think I had probably washed and folded at some point,” Holmes says now. “It was all there, just like I’d told them.”
‘The Mess You Made, Son’
Patrick Hernandez had done everything right to overcome the dice loaded against him. His slashing playing style caught Lorch’s eye at a tournament in the summer of 1991, and the 13-year-old was soon on a plane with future pros Erick Barkley and Stephon Marbury to an event in Arizona. He became a mainstay on the Hawks’ elite travel teams. As outstanding a student as he was a player, he drew recruiting interest from Stanford, but wanted to fulfill his dream of attending an Ivy League school. At Columbia, he rose to co-captain and earned a political science degree, with his eyes on bigger goals. “My basketball was my tool to get me to become a lawyer,” he testified in his 2023 deposition.
These achievements were all the more remarkable given his circumstances. He was living in a Bronx homeless shelter during part of his time with Riverside, commuting three hours round trip to Msgr. McClancy High School in Queens. Earlier that year, both of his parents had been arrested during a drug raid at the family’s apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; his father had been selling cocaine and heroin out of their home, Hernandez testified. The family was out on the street.
During his stay at the homeless shelter, “I went many days not eating,” he recalled in his deposition. Yet he maintained a 97 average, and his playing career remained on course. “I had a phenomenal year.”
Lorch offered to help Hernandez, giving him a choice of boarding schools to attend outside the city. “Something to provide a little more stability,” Hernandez testified.
Hernandez chose the tony Solebury School in eastern Pennsylvania. Thesix-foot-four-inch guard-forward graduated second in his class while notching 25 points and 11 rebounds a game. Lorch paid for his room, board, and tuition, bought clothes for him, and often gave him spending money.
Like so many other plaintiffs, Hernandez learned Lorch’s largesse came with a price. “I had respect for this man, and I believed that he was a good man that wanted to help children that were in similar situations as myself growing up. That trust was broken,” he testified. “I began to see the monster that he really was.”
During his first year at Solebury in 1992, the high school sophomore was coming home for a short break from school. Lorch contacted Hernandez’s mother, who now had a permanent residence in the Bronx. “Mr. Lorch wants you to come over for a sleepover,” Hernandez recalled his mother saying in his deposition.
When he arrived at Lorch’s Upper East Side doorman building, they made some small talk about school. But soon, according to Hernandez’s testimony, Lorch said: “Let’s have you take off your clothes. I want to see where the money [is] that I’m putting in the school, if they’re putting any meat on your bones.”
Hernandez was stunned but complied. Lorch told him to turn around, and then said, “You want to come sleep in bed with Dad?”
Hernandez refused and slept in Lorch’s guest room that night, without any further incident. In the morning, Lorch gave him $350. The following year, Hernandez went through the same routine: a call from Lorch to his mother during spring break, a visit to the East Side apartment, some casual conversation, and Lorch telling Hernandez to take a shower. Lorch called him into the bedroom and asked the player to give him a kiss good night. When he leaned over to do so, Lorch had moved the covers over, grabbed the teenager’s hand and placed it on top of the coach’s naked penis and “ejaculated immediately.”
Lorch looked at him and said, “Look at the mess you made, son.”
Hernandez avoided any more incidents with Lorch after that, but he never thought about telling anyone, saying he was “crippled in my fear” of Lorch revoking his school tuition and blackballing him in the college-basketball community. “I was afraid that he was going to take everything away from me that I had worked so hard for.… My family would become homeless again.”
Indeed, Lorch had helped his parents with rent money, but Hernandez said his anxiety went deeper than that. “My fear was more wrapped in the powerful person that he was and what he had put me through,” Hernandez testified. “He had physically hit me with a paddle, and now he had sexually started to abuse me. I was powerless.”
Still, Hernandez took control of his own future. He skipped going on a West Coast trip with Riverside after his junior year, attending an SAT prep camp in Massachusetts instead. Lorch found out and called him. “Get your ass to the airport right now and fly out to California.”
Hernandez refused, and the two never spoke again. He got into Columbia, and he would on occasion see Lorch bring a team of older players from Riverside to the Ivy League gym to play against the Columbia junior varsity. While other Riverside coaches greeted Hernandez, Lorch ignored him.
Hernandez said his Riverside experience hindered him the rest of his life. He manages clerical staff at a large international law firm in California. But he never did go to law school. “I felt completely hopeless with Lorch, felt voiceless,” he testified. “My trajectory was so deeply impacted.”
It’s been 20 years since he’s played the game that helped him through homelessness. His daughter likes the sport. He wishes she didn’t. “It’s hard for me to step on a basketball court these days,” he testified. “It’s no longer the sanctuary it used to be for me.”
‘I Want Them to Atone’
As graphic as the former players’ testimony is, Lorch’s behavior is not the main legal issue in the case. It is essentially undisputed that Lorch abused children for decades. He personally paid out millions in hush money, and several hundred thousand dollars in civil settlements, to Holmes and other former players who claimed he victimized them.
Perhaps even more important was a criminal indictment a grand jury handed down in the case of Byron Walker. As an adult, Walker was treated for depression, and finally told therapists of his abuse. One of them encouraged him to write a letter to his abuser. In 2005, he handed the letter to Lorch. As he did with Holmes, Lorch tried to assuage Walker by saying he’d help him start a business — a restaurant — then said he’d write him a check for $350,000 to “make me go away.” But the restaurant efforts stalled, and Lorch ghosted his former player on the payoff.
Walker felt betrayed yet again. He filed a lawsuit against Lorch in New York, which was thrown out over the statute of limitations. But he successfully pressed criminal charges against Lorch for the incident in Massachusetts, which had an expanded criminal statute of limitations. A grand jury indicted Lorch in 2010, but his health was failing, and the court found him incompetent to stand trial.
Still, Walker says now, “I felt vindicated.”
But the glacial pace of the Child Victims Act cases has forced Walker, Holmes, and the other plaintiffs to wait years for possible justice. Passed in 2019, the act waived the statute of limitations for people alleging they were victims of sexual assault as minors, providing a two-year window to sue individuals and institutions for monetary damages. With a backlog of more than 10,000 cases involving over 14,000 survivors (and only about 20 percent of them being resolved as of May), the sluggish judicial pace in the wake of the law’s passage has drawn criticism.
“This is a systemic problem, not entirely one that is related to the Child Victims Act, but a larger problem of case backlogs and a judiciary that’s on the verge of being overwhelmed,” says New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, one of the sponsors of the CVA. He’s working on legislation to lift the cap on the number of judges the state can hire. “It is disappointing, because we’ve heard examples where the plaintiff dies before justice can be meted out. That’s heartbreaking.” (One of the Riverside plaintiffs, Michael McDuffen, died before a resolution of the case. His estate is keeping the suit alive.)
What’s certain is the ongoing damage the scandal has wrought, and not just to the players whose lives were forever affected by abuse. Lorch’s downfall in 2002 was an earthquake in the city’s youth-basketball circles. The brittle cornerstone of a decades-old player-development system suddenly crumbled, bringing the rest of the city game down with it. Simply put, New York City hoops hasn’t been the same since, producing markedly fewer elite college and pro players.
Mark Jerome, who took over the program as executive director three years after the Lorch scandal broke, slowly built Riverside back to respectability between 2005 and 2015. “I wanted to make sure it was a healthy, sustainable product,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It was no longer going to be transactional.” He was helped by the fact that his son Ty, who led Virginia to an NCAA title in 2018 and now plays for the Memphis Grizzlies, and Ty’s friend Donovan Mitchell, the Cleveland Cavaliers superstar, both had NBA talent. Jerome says the loss of trust in Riverside, and the loss of Lorch’s money to pay tuitions for top players, likely contributed to the demise of the greater New York high school system, too. “The name was tarnished in a lot of people’s minds,” Jerome says.
It leaves one to wonder how stewards at the game’s highest levels in the nation’s biggest city allowed such a fragile, corrupt system to continue, year after year, decade after decade, with no supervision.
There’s a saying among youth-athlete advocates: Not every coach is a pedophile, but every pedophile wants to be a coach. And yet nobody in the sport looked at Lorch’s program through that lens, even as court records show that parents, players, coaches, and entire New York City neighborhoods had their suspicions.
But it’s clear why the players at the time soldiered on, silently. Lorch could snap his fingers and make — or break — careers. Beyond that, the plaintiffs felt that everyone, even superstars, went through Lorch’s paddling and jockstrap checks and “touchy” behavior. And given the rampant homophobia in athletics and in the broader community, few were brave enough as adults to admit to being abused by a man, even though they were children. “It’s ego and pride,” Walker says. “Pride is a demon.”
As for the program’s former stars, Holmes says, “it would almost be career suicide” to speak out. “Because now you run into legalities in regard to ‘Did they know about it and not report it to anyone?’”
Jerome says he knows some former players — he won’t name them — who to this day defend Lorch’s memory. “For people to be loyal to Ernie Lorch is really problematic to me,” he says. “He raped kids. He screwed up so many kids’ lives.”
Several prominent former Riverside players, including Mark Jackson, Kenny Smith, Elton Brand, Walter Berry, Syracuse coach Adrian Autry, and former North Carolina coach Matt Doherty, declined interview requests. A representative for Lamar Odom said he would do an interview for a fee. (Rolling Stone and Sportico do not pay for interviews.) Metta World Peace and Chris Mullin did not respond to multiple messages.
One of the only stars from the program who agreed to speak was Ernie Myers, who, like Mark Jackson and Kenny Smith, publicly defended Lorch after Holmes’ initial allegations. Myers was part of the fabled North Carolina State 1983 “Survive and Advance” NCAA championship team coached by Jim Valvano. Now a successful businessman and broadcaster based in North Carolina, he was adamant about not disparaging the former players suing the church, and says that he could only speak for himself. “I never had an experience where I felt I was molested or anything like that,” he says.
He was well aware of Lorch’s paddling, though he says he never experienced it. “But there was a fear of getting paddled, like if your grades weren’t great,” says Myers. “I didn’t think it was a sexual thing.” As for Lorch himself, Myers says, “He helped me a lot in life. He taught me how to be a man … how to carry yourself in a certain way.”
Some of the current plaintiffs were players Myers looked up to in high school, and that’s made him reflect. “If [Lorch] became nefarious … it’s just a shame,” he says. “It really makes you look back, and feel like, did he?”
He pauses for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“I’m just giving you my experience,” he adds. “I didn’t see the monster side.”
To players who did confront Lorch long after his abuse, there was a calculation to be made: Should you go to authorities who may not believe you and probably couldn’t make a case because of a lack of physical evidence and the statute of limitations? Or go directly to Lorch and see what he might offer to keep you quiet?
A sad irony of the current litigation is that Riverside’s congregation has turned over markedly, with the majority now people of color. If the plaintiffs win at trial or via large settlements, it will be this more diverse, less-wealthy church that will pay for the sins of an earlier generation of rich, white leadership. Robert Holmes knows this all too well. Yes, he admits, money is part of why he’s suing. But his quest to show the dark side of the vaunted Riverside Church basketball program — a quest that’s now nearly a quarter century old — is about more than that. He feels he’s been given a platform to help people in his community understand child sexual abuse and hear survivors. That community includes the Riverside Church itself. “One of the things the church has always preached is atonement,” he says. “I want them to atone.”
This article was updated on Oct. 17 at 12:45 p.m. ET to clarify that James Williams and Deron Johnson were called by the plaintiffs, not the defense.
