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Charles Corbishley claims in a $10 million federal suit that a crooked defense lawyer sent him to the longtime Fox News analyst’s house, 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.
Napolitano, 70, who now lives in Sussex County, had just become a Superior Court judge in Bergen County when the case came before him in Hackensack.
The lawsuit alleges that the judge was wearing a trench coat when he called Corbishely to the side of the house, put his hand on the young man's 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.”
Corbishley was “paralyzed with fear” and “wanted desperately to stop Defendant Napolitano’s sexual assault,” the lawsuit contends.
However, it says, he “was terrified about what Judge Napolitano would do to him if he resisted or fought back.”
After the act was completed, Corbishley “took off crying and ran away,” the lawsuit alleges.
Napolitano later sentenced Corbishley to probation and community service after he pleaded guilty to reduced charges.
“This 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 says.
His co-defendant was sentenced to several years in prison.
Corbishley later violated his probation. But Napolitano – instead of imposing another sentence – completely violated the probation, according to the federal suit, filed under the New Jersey Child Victims Act in the Southern District of New York.
More recently, Napolitano “reached out to law enforcement authorities and made completely false criminal accusations” that Corbishley “made threats of violence against him…in a brazen attempt to intimidate [him] and stop him from filing this lawsuit,” the complaint alleges.
“These claims were outright fabrications,” the suits says, adding that Corbishley -- who currently owns and operates a cleaning services company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina -- “never made any threats whatsoever of any kind.”
Fox News issued a statement that said: “Judge Napolitano has assured us in the strongest possible terms that these allegations are false and he will fight them aggressively in court.”
“These accusations are completely false. Full stop," Napolitano said in a statement. “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,” said Napolitano, who was the youngest life-tenured judge in New Jersey history before he retired in 1995, went into private practice and began working in television. He also taught for 11 years at Seton Hall University Law School.
Napolitano’s attorney, Thomas Clare, slammed Corbishley’s credibility, calling him “a career criminal” with a record of assaults, weapons counts and drug charges.
“It should be of grave concern to all judges and the other dedicated public officials who administer our criminal justice system that, decades after a routine criminal case, a former criminal defendant can, with no evidence, threaten to damage reputations and careers with these kinds of false and incendiary allegations,” Clare said in a statement.
“Judge Napolitano has had a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, jurist, television commentator and author,” Clare said.
Corbishley’s attorney, Jon Norinsberg, in turn said: “For over 30 years, our client has suffered tremendous physical and emotional distress because of Judge Napolitano’s abhorrent actions....No person is above the law, no matter how powerful they are or what their station in life is."
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