A state judge awarded a $10 million verdict on Thursday to a man who said he was molested in the 1980s by Paul D. Gaeta, a former Lovejoy youth leader with political ties who later became a federal agent.
The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in 2020 under the Child Victims Act, stated that Gaeta sexually abused the victim twice when the boy was 11 years old in 1987. Gaeta was suspected of abusing other children throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when he was the executive director of the Advisory Board for Lovejoy Elderly and Youth, according to documents filed in court.
A judge allowed the plaintiff to file the suit using a pseudonym, which is common in Child Victims Act lawsuits. Attorney William J. Hallett of the J. Michael Hayes law firm acknowledged that the Buffalo man may not recover $10 million from the civil judgment because Gaeta, who now lives in Arizona, is not believed to be wealthy.
The victim “expressed to me that he fully understood that this doesn’t mean he’s going to be a millionaire or anything like that,” Hallett said. “But he said that he felt that it was a duty to his other friends and the other boys of the Lovejoy neighborhood to go through with this.”
Gaeta was the subject of a 2019 investigative series by WKBW-TV titled, “Protecting a Predator: How the system failed Buffalo’s kids and let an accused abuser go free,” which chronicled how two neighborhood activists, Linda Hastreiter and Marge Hastreiter, had tried for decades to warn city and state officials about Gaeta to no avail.
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