Christian Fuscarino, left, stepped down as director of Garden State Equality this week after news surfaced of his November arrest on child abuse allegations. (Photo by Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)
What did they know and when did they know it?
That’s the question I and many others have about Garden State Equality’s board members in the aftermath of news that the LGBTQ rights group’s executive director, Christian Fuscarino, was arrested last month and charged with abusing his foster child.
Fuscarino managed to keep the charges under wraps for nearly a month, and then resigned from Garden State Equality on Tuesday within eight hours of the first news report on them. It’s still a mystery whether any board members knew of the arrest and did not force Fuscarino out or convince him to resign before it became a public scandal.
This isn’t just any private organization. Garden State Equality received at least $2.5 million in state funding in the current budget, and millions more before. And Fuscarino is a major player in Trenton. Scroll through his Facebook photos and you’ll see a collection of selfies he took with Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill, Gov. Phil Murphy, Attorney General Matt Platkin, state senators and assembly people — if you’re a Democrat with any importance in the state, Fuscarino probably has a photo posing with you.
Hiding behind that selfie smile lurked something much darker, police allege.
They say video from inside his Neptune City home shows he pulled a small child in his care from a bed and slapped them multiple times across the face, and pushed either them or someone else against the bedroom wall, according to court documents in the case.
Fuscarino told a resource worker that “there was an episode of physical contact” between him and the child, according to the court records. He was charged with endangering the welfare of a child and assault.
Police say the crime happened on Nov. 9. Fuscarino was arrested on Nov. 21.
But it wasn’t until Dec. 16 that NJ Advance Media first reported on the charges. Garden State Equality issued a statement at about 4:30 p.m. that day saying, “When we learned about the charge against Mr. Fuscarino, we immediately placed him on leave.” About three hours later, after some of Fuscarino’s predecessors at Garden State Equality issued a statement saying he should be fired, Fuscarino said he had resigned.
Fuscarino will have his day in court to respond to the police’s charges. In the meantime, the Garden State Equality board must be more transparent about when it learned of the claims against him and why it decided a vacation instead of termination was the wisest route. I emailed a few to ask them to chat about this, but they did not respond.
At a time when President Trump is targeting trans people, New Jersey’s queer community needs a robust organization fighting for their rights, not one that’s busy trying to protect its boss.
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