• by Ray Schultz , September 8, 2022

Gannett has asked a court to move sex abuse cases filed against it out of the state court system and turn them over to the New York Workers’ Compensation Board. 

This move would nullify the cases filed by former Gannett paper carriers who charge they were sexually abused as children, according to the Rochester Beacon.  

The first former newspaper carrier to sue Gannett under the Child Victims Act (CVA) is Rick Bates. 

Bates has spent years trying to get Gannett to “acknowledge and apologize for the repeated sexual abuse he suffered as an 11-year-old at the hands of his adult route supervisor, Jack Lazeroff,” who died in 2003, the Beacon reported on Thursday. 

Court complaints allege that Lazeroff was fired from the job he held prior to going to work for Gannett for engaging in sexual encounters with teenage boys at work.

The court cases against Gannett have been dragging on for three years. 

Bates says he was shocked by Gannett's tactic and that they waited three years into the process to try it. He argues that he “never missed a day of delivering Gannett's papers. So I can't simply claim a week or month's lost wages. It's not a broken ankle, I didn't just fall off my bike. It was a crime committed against me many, many times, by a Gannett employee -- and when I was an 11 and 12 year old child -- who used his position of authority to gain access to me alone in my house and elsewhere."

Gannett asserts that the carriers should apply for workman’s comp, which their attorney claims is  “a simple online process,” the Beacon reports.