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Napolitano, who was fired from Fox last August amid accusations of sexually harassing employees, had already made headlines this week for selling his condo at Trump International Hotel & Tower on Central Park West.
Then came reports, first published in the New Jersey Law Journal, that Charles Corbishley and James Kruzelnick had withdrawn their suits accusing Napolitano of sexual abuse three decades apart.
Napolitano also dropped a libel suit, suggesting some type of undisclosed settlement or agreement.
Corbishley claimed in his $10 million federal suit that a crooked defense lawyer sent him to the longtime Fox News analyst’s home in Newton, ostensibly to shovel snow, while a case against him was still pending in the late 1980s.
Corbishely, who’d only just turned 20, had been charged in 1987 with starting an arson fire with another man behind a Hackensack apartment building. The blaze destroyed a 1968 Volvo and a Dumpster.
Newark-born Napolitano had just become a state Superior Court judge in Bergen County when the case came before him in Hackensack.
Corbishely alleged in his lawsuit that Napolitano was wearing a trench coat when he called him to the side of the house, put his hand on his shoulder and forced him to his knees.
“You know, you could be going away for a long time,” Corbishley claims Napolitano told him.
The judge told him to “be a good boy,” then “pulled his erect penis out” and “forced [Corbishley] to perform fellatio on the Honorable Andrew Napolitano,” the suit alleged.
Corbishley -- who recently owned and operated a cleaning services company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina -- was “paralyzed with fear” and "terrified about what Judge Napolitano would do to him if he resisted or fought back,” it said.
Napolitano later sentenced Corbishley to probation and community service after he pleaded guilty to reduced charges. His co-defendant was sentenced to several years in prison.
Corbishley's sentence was "exceptionally light, given the serious nature of the underlying criminal charges: arson, burglary of a motor vehicle, and aggravated arson as well as [Corbishley’s] prior juvenile arson charge,” the suit said.
He later violated probation. But Napolitano – instead of imposing another sentence – erased the probation, it alleged.
Corbishley filed the action in the Southern District of New York in Manhattan. The case was later transferred to federal court in Newark.
“These accusations are completely false. Full stop," Napolitano said in a statement at the time. “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes, at any time, to anyone, for any reason. I have never had any personal relationship or inappropriate contact or communication of any kind with the man making this accusation.
“Each and every one of his claims against me are pure fiction. Period."
Kruzelnick, who also accused Napolitano of sexual assault, filed his suit locally in Superior Court in Sussex County.
He claimed that he was waiting tables at the Mohawk House in Sparta when Napolitano – who was a regular there – following him into a restroom, grabbed his ass and told him he was “just so hot.”
Invited to Napolitano’s Sussex County home, the suit claimed, Kruzelnick was forced into bondage, discipline and sado-masochistic activities.
Kruzelnick claimed he and the judge swung a deal to help his brother address criminal charges in exchange for sex – and that Napolitano sexually assaulted him after inviting him for a swim at his home.
Napolitano called Kruzelnick’s suit a “blatant act of extortion.”
His attorneys accused Kruzelnick of believing that “by publishing his lies” he “extract a payday to remedy his longstanding financial problems, which include a foreclosure, personal bankruptcy and at least one unsatisfied court judgment.”
Napolitano who was the youngest life-tenured judge in New Jersey history before he retired in 1995. He went into private practice and began working in television. He also taught for 11 years at Seton Hall University Law School.
News of the dropped suits came close on the heels of reports that he'd sold his apartment at Trump International Hotel & Tower on Central Park West for $6.05 million. The buyer reportedly was a shell company represented by attorney Daniel Akselrod.
Napolitano reportedly bought the condo in 2007 for $4.5 million.
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