For decades, complaints about Rabbi Baruch Lanner reached the leadership of NCSY, the Orthodox Union's national movement for Orthodox teenagers, and went nowhere. Lanner rose through NCSY's ranks from the 1970s to become a regional director, and separately served as principal of Hillel Yeshiva High School in Ocean Township, New Jersey. A 1989 rabbinical court inquiry heard some complaints against him without ending his conduct.
Investigative reporting by The Jewish Week in June 2000 broke the pattern. The Orthodox Union responded by commissioning an independent panel, chaired by Richard Joel, then president of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. The panel interviewed more than 140 people; its report, released that December, found OU and NCSY leadership had been on direct notice of Lanner's misconduct for years and had failed to act. The OU's executive vice president resigned soon after.
Criminal charges followed. A Monmouth County jury convicted Lanner on 27 June 2002 of endangering two teenage girls' welfare and of criminal sexual contact against one of them, acquitting him of parallel counts involving a second girl; he denied the allegations at trial. At sentencing that October, Lanner told the court he was "not a monster" and acknowledged errors in judgment, without apologizing to the girls. Judge Paul Chaiet sentenced him to seven years; an appellate court later reversed one of his two endangerment convictions while affirming the rest.
Under a new executive vice president, Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, NCSY introduced mandatory sensitivity training, complaint ombudsmen and formal misconduct-reporting procedures across the roughly 1,000 congregations the OU serves, changes its leadership described at the time as ongoing rather than finished.