Asked if there had been any communication from the diocese at the time of the filing, Mallard said: “Diocesan lawyers responded to my lawsuit. But there was nothing concerning taking Riley out of his job.”
Mallard confirmed that the suit is still pending. “Riley won’t sit for a deposition because his lawyers demand that I tell them every victim that I’ve found,” he said, “and I said no.”
Several courts have ruled in Mallard’s favor on the matter of detailing the identities of the alleged victims, he told CNA.
The lawsuit is seeking “damages for my client for what he’s been through,” Mallard told CNA.
“His life has been destroyed,” the lawyer said. The amount of the damages is “up to a jury to decide,” he added.
Priest arrested this week on sex abuse charges
Bishop Dewane wrote the letter this week partly in response to Riley’s arrest by Florida law enforcement earlier in the week.
In their press release, the Charlotte County sheriff’s office said Florida law enforcement officers had worked with the Dubuque, Iowa Police Department in making the arrest. The Dubuque police “had developed probable cause for five counts of capital sexual battery within their jurisdiction,” the sheriff’s office said.
Riley, who previously served in the Archdiocese of Dubuque, has been on administrative leave in the Venice diocese since May of 2023 when several abuse allegations from his time in the Iowa archdiocese were made against him.
Riley’s arrest this week comes after at least a decade of abuse allegations made against the priest.
In a letter released on Friday, Dubuque Archbishop Thomas Zinkula said the “first notice of any allegation of abuse by Father Riley was made in December of 2014.”
(Story continues below)
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“The claim related to the time-period of 1985, when Father Riley would have been in Dubuque,” the archbishop wrote. “Particulars of the allegation were received in February of 2015.”
The archbishop noted that Riley was incardinated into the Diocese of Venice by this time, having been granted that request in 2005 to be near his parents.
The Dubuque archdiocese “notified the Diocese of Venice, Florida, and Father Riley was placed on administrative leave pending the results of the investigation,” the archbishop said.
“The investigation concluded that the best information available at the time did not support a reasonable belief that the allegation was true,” Zinkula wrote. Law enforcement, meanwhile, “chose not to conduct an investigation into the allegation because the applicable statute of limitations at that time had expired.”
Two new allegations were subsequently made against Riley in May of last year, both of them once again stemming from alleged misconduct in Dubuque in the mid-1980s. Upon receiving the allegations, the archdiocese “began an internal investigation into the new allegations, which remains open pending the outcome of the criminal charges.”
It is unclear whether these two allegations against Riley formed the basis of this week’s arrest. The Dubuque police department was unable to provide a copy of the warrant on Friday as it was still listed as active in that jurisdiction.
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