Former Middletown Teacher Named In $50M Sex Abuse Lawsuit

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — For the second time this year, a lawsuit has been filed against the Middletown school district alleging underage sex abuse by one of its teachers decades ago.

This most recent lawsuit was filed Nov. 15 by an adult man, now 40, who says a female teacher initiated an improper sexual relationship with him when he was 13 years old.

The man, who will be unnamed by Patch, now lives in Holmdel.

The man says that between the years of 1995 -1997, Sherry Diodato, a former Language Arts teacher at Thompson Middle School, befriended him, groomed him and began a sexual relationship with him. Diodato is currently 59.

This started when he was 13 and lasted until he was 16, per the lawsuit. The teacher was in her early 30s at the time. Like local news? Subscribe to Patch: https://patch.com/subscribe

Diodato retired from the Middletown school district in 2018, but she still lives locally in the area, in Atlantic Highlands. Diodato declined to comment to an Asbury Park Press reporter who contacted her at her home.

The plaintiff said the inappropriate relationship with his teacher began in the winter of 1995 when he was a middle school student at Thompson Middle School. Diodato was his eighth grade Language Arts teacher; at the time, she went by her maiden name of Farwell.

He was 13; she was 32.

In class, he said she would touch different areas of his body, such as his knees and made gestures and/or comments to the student, expressing the sentiment that she viewed him as “special.”

When he was in the eighth grade, the teacher suggested to the pupil that he come to her Atlantic Highlands home after school to go over class material. These private, after-school interactions initially began under the guise of “tutoring," and were encouraged by the teen boy's parents, who viewed her interest in him as "a positive academic mentoring relationship," read the suit.

However, at her home the two would sit "side-by-side on her couch in the upstairs multi-purpose room, talking, smoking cigarettes that she provided, and listening to music," read the lawsuit.

The plaintiff said as a result of the "extensive grooming," he developed romantic feelings for his teacher and the two kissed and groped each other. This continued for a month, he said, at her home or in parks and all when his teacher's then-fiancé, Dr. Diodato, was not at home.

He said near the end of his eighth-grade year, it progressed to sexual intercourse and the two would have sex approximately twice a week. Diodato said she wanted to adopt the teen and have him join her family as an adopted or surrogate child, all while their sexual relationship was ongoing, according to the lawsuit. She would even take him to her fiancé's softball games or to dinner with her fiancé and his biological daughter, and encourage him to talk to her fiancé and develop a friendship with him.

Diodato also told him early in the relationship that if anyone ever found out what they were doing, "she would get in trouble."

"In high school, [plaintiff] met girls his age and eventually started dating them. [Plaintiff] stopped calling Sherry after that and the sexual abuse stopped," read the lawsuit.

For years, he said he never told anyone about the sexual abuse "because he felt complicit and responsible for the sexual abuse, and because he feared Sherry would get in trouble. When [plaintiff] ultimately told his parents when he was in high school, [plaintiff] threatened to harm himself if his parents reported her. At the time, [he] felt that he loved Sherry Farwell and believed he would rather harm himself than have Ms. Farwell (by then Ms. Diodato) get in trouble."

The plaintiff is seeking $50 million in damages from the Middletown school district. Diodato has never been criminally charged, according to the Asbury Park Press.

Second sex abuse lawsuit against the Middletown school district

This is the second time this year the Middletown school district has been hit with such a lawsuit: In July, an adult man in his 50s who now lives on Long Island similarly sued the district. He alleged a history teacher at Thorne Middle School sexually abused him "hundreds, if not thousands of times" from 1978 to 1983.

The teacher he accused is Floyd Guillandeu, who would currently be 82 and no longer works in the district. Several Middletown residents said that Guillandeu has since died; however, he lived on Harmony Road for years.

The man said the abuse started in 1978 when he was 13-14 years old and a middle school student at Thorne. Guillandeu was his 8th/9th grade history teacher. He said his teacher would first ask him to do small favors, such as wash his car, and then it progressed to private meetings at Guillandeu's Harmony Road home, where the alleged sexual encounters took place "hundreds" of times. He said Guillandeu paid him $10-$20 for oral and anal sex, and that Guillandeu showed him heterosexual pornographic movies.

Read that story: Man Sues Middletown School District, Alleging Sex Abuse (Aug. 9, 2021)

In 2019, there was a change in New Jersey law to allow sex abuse lawsuits to be brought decades after the alleged abuse occurred. Victims of alleged childhood sex abuse now have until they are 55 years old to file these types of civil lawsuits; previously, the maximum age to file was 20.

Contact the Middletown Patch reporter: Carly.baldwin@patch.com Subscribe to Patch: https://patch.com/subscribe