New York City has agreed to pay $100,000 in attorney’s fees and damages to end a legal battle with a Jewish practitioner of sexual orientation “conversion therapy.”
Last October, the city officially repealed an ordinance that banned the practice following legal action taken by an Orthodox Jewish psychotherapist named Dr. David Schwartz.
In a recent settlement, the city agreed to pay $100,000 in attorney’s fees and other expenses to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Schwartz.
“Defendants do hereby release and discharge Plaintiff from all manner of actions or causes of action, suit, debts, damages, sums of money or claims of any kind which they had, now have, or may in the future claim to have, arising out of the subject matter of the Litigation,” explained the settlement.
ADF Senior Counsel Roger Brooks said in a statement Tuesday that he and his organization were “grateful that New York City is no longer threatening to censor Dr. Schwartz’s conversations and impose government-approved orthodoxy on him or his patients.”
“New York City directly violated our client’s freedom of speech by trying to regulate and censor private sessions between an adult and his therapist,” stated Brooks.
“While the city eventually saw the writing on the wall and reversed course, it needlessly cost the taxpayers of New York tens of thousands of dollars for enacting its unconstitutional policy in the first place, because Dr. Schwartz was forced to go to court to protect his rights. Other cities should not repeat the same error.”
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