The principal thought he had done enough to fire John Denuto.
James Brown sat in a Sayreville board of education meeting in June 2009, listing a series of troubling allegations involving his high school’s wrestling coach. Text messages to his athletes about his sex life. Physically assaulting wrestlers. Pressuring injured athletes to compete.
And Brown was unequivocal when a board member asked if Denuto was a danger to anyone.
“Yes,” the War Memorial principal said.
But the nine-member board opted to keep Denuto a year after leading his alma mater to its first Middlesex County championship.
Three weeks later, new allegations emerged of strip searches under the guise of safety checks for skin conditions. The board reversed itself and fired Denuto as wrestling coach, yet preserved his employment as a teacher without public explanation. It transferred him from his high school position to a special education math role in the middle school.
But Denuto found another coaching job with a district 12 miles away. And then another. And then another, rising to the apex of the New Jersey scholastic wrestling ranks in the following decade. All the while, he remained teaching at Sayreville Middle School after the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and the state Division of Youth and Family Services investigated the allegations but took no action.
“It was unbelievable,” Brown said. “The only thing I can look at it and say is nobody checked with (me).”
Eight high school coaching jobs later, Denuto pleaded guilty April 14 to two counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one count of invasion of privacy as part of a plea agreement. A 29-count indictment in 2021 accused the then-46-year-old Spotswood resident of criminal sexual contact involving five other alleged victims from 2016 to 2019, but those charges were dropped as part of his deal.
Denuto faces up to seven years in prison after admitting he fondled a 16-year-old boy’s genitals inside a townhouse owned by a Sayreville board of education member, according to authorities. He had taught the boy at Sayreville Middle School, and they exchanged phone numbers after the victim’s eighth grade graduation to discuss private coaching, according to the affidavit of probable cause.
Denuto “exploited his position as both a teacher and a wrestling coach to meet and abuse his victims,” Middlesex County Prosecutor Yolanda Ciccone and Sayreville police chief Daniel Plumacker said in a joint statement after the plea.
Denuto was already serving a four-year prison term for sexual offenses committed in the early 1990s when he was 15, a two-month NJ Advance Media investigation uncovered. A Middlesex County juvenile court judge found in late 2022 that his crimes against another then-15-year-old — who came forward after Denuto’s February 2020 arrest — would have constituted two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault if committed as an adult, authorities said.
How Denuto was able to bounce from school to school — often staying only a year at each stop — raises serious questions about the vetting of coaches and whether the administrators who hired him properly scrutinized the previous allegations, education experts and child advocates say.
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In total, Denuto worked at 21 high schools as a special education teacher, wrestling coach or assistant football coach over a 21-year period before his arrest involving the 16-year-old. In addition, he was affiliated with five youth wrestling organizations, serving as an instructor for middle school-age athletes in East Brunswick, Marlboro, Old Bridge, Sayreville and Woodbridge, our investigation revealed.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever read about or heard about a case with so many schools,” said Charol Shakeshaft, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who studies educator sexual misconduct. “It’s just stunning.”
The administrations of those schools — encompassing North and South Jersey and public and parochial schools — failed to heed accusations from athletes, a 2010 civil lawsuit by parents and other concerns involving Denuto, experts say. The lawsuit, filed by the parents of four Sayreville wrestlers, alleged he discussed his sex life with the teens and told athletes to inflict physical harm upon teammates. It was eventually dismissed.
A pervasive culture of silence has long existed in some New Jersey districts, where leaders would rather avoid lawsuits and controversy than warn others of disturbing coach behavior — especially when that coach has a record of success, child advocates say.
“If I had gotten a phone call, I would’ve spoken to what I felt was the right thing,” Brown said. “But obviously these places didn’t check references (thoroughly).
“Because it was known throughout the county.”
Denuto’s next coaching job after Sayreville was as a Monroe football assistant in the fall of 2009. He lasted one season before he was terminated.
“It was really based on our administration speaking with other administrations. So I know it was out there,” said Chris Beagan, the former Monroe football coach who later led the Sayreville football program for eight seasons. “How he continued to get hired, you’d have to ask them.”
NJ Advance Media reached out to officials at each of the schools where Denuto coached after his Sayreville termination. The large majority did not respond to interview requests. In many instances, the administrators charged with making the hiring decisions at the time are no longer employed or affiliated with the school.
“Administrators passing the trash, moving this guy from district to district without any concern at all about the future students that would come in contact with him, to me, they are the (problem),” said Terri Miller, president of Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct Exploitation (SESAME), a Nevada-based organization committed to preventing sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment of students by school employees.
“I’m not surprised. It enrages me the lack of regard for child safety, which is any school employee’s first duty of care — to protect the children, keep them safe.”
Sex abuse scandals have plagued institutions from schools to churches to the Boy Scouts for decades. It’s such a systemic problem, New Jersey legislators crafted a law in 2018 to prevent school employees accused of sexual misconduct from moving from school to school. That law — passed after an NJ Advance Media report revealed how multiple teachers were hired at schools following allegations — might have snared Denuto before his admitted abuse of his former student.
But the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and DYFS found the 2009 allegations were without merit, Denuto claimed in court documents. The prosecutor’s office denied an Open Public Records Act request on the grounds that Denuto had been neither arrested nor charged as part of the 2009 investigation.
And as the recent accusations against Bridgeton coach Robert A. Marino illustrate, sexual misconduct allegations often don’t come to light for years — three decades later in the case of one of Marino’s alleged victims — or only after another victim comes forward.
Thomas Rogers, Denuto’s attorney, declined comment in April and didn’t respond to an emailed interview request in June. Denuto did not respond to a letter addressed to him at South Woods State Prison.
In April, a disheveled Denuto stood inside courtroom 515 of the Middlesex County Superior Courthouse, looking nothing like the respected coach he once was. At times defiant and at others resigned, he admitted to engaging “in sexual conduct which would impair or debauch the morals of a child” and photographing or filming “a prohibited sexual act or in the simulation of such an act.” He will be sentenced in September.
Brown is still haunted by what happened after Denuto lost the Sayreville coaching job.
The educator, who retired as Sayreville War Memorial’s principal in 2018, watched in dismay as Denuto kept finding plum coaching gigs.
“Now there’s consequences,” he said.
A coaching star
John Denuto was recognized throughout the state as a wrestling tactician.
He was also a dynamic coach who engendered loyalty among many of his wrestlers — and their families.
“John just had a wow factor about him,” Union County College Athletic Director Shawn Noel told NJ Advance Media in 2019 after Denuto was named the junior college’s first wrestling coach.
His name carried gravitas in wrestling circles. Even Rutgers University head coach Scott Goodale had praised him to NJ.com.
Denuto’s rise had been years in the making.
He took over Sayreville’s floundering program in 2005 as a 28-year-old after it recorded 10 losing seasons in 11 years.
Denuto’s “enthusiasm, wrestling knowledge and connections” stood out, Sayreville Athletics Director John Kohutanycz said at the time.
And when that wasn’t enough, he turned on his charm and charisma, according to members of the New Jersey wrestling community.
“A lot of child abusers can be charming — it’s part of how they get people to trust them,” Shakeshaft said. “Really what grooming is is just trying to gain trust.”
More than 120 New Jersey educators have been arrested since 2014 for sexual abusing students, according to SESAME. Twelve of those educators were also coaches, including Denuto. About 10% of American K-12 students — or about 5 million kids — will report some type of educator sexual misconduct, according to Miller.
“Change the names, change the locations — the story’s the same,” she said.
By his third season, Denuto was considered a guiding force, leading Sayreville to a 19-3 record on the mat and helping three of his wrestlers cope with the deaths of their fathers the previous season.
Then he lost his own father, also named John, 66, to lung cancer a day after Sayreville won its first sectional championship. Just days later, his mother, Eileen Sharff Denuto, suffered a heart attack and died. She was 60.
Denuto became a front-page story in the local newspaper: The hero coach who led his program to its best season in its 50-year history despite unrelenting grief. He found a legion of support in the sports-crazed community, which would be rocked six years later by a hazing and sexual assault scandal involving the high school football program.
And then 15 months later, Denuto fell from grace. Sort of.
He was honored for recording his 100th career victory in March 2009 following a 21-5 campaign. But a month later, the Kean University alum received notice that he would not be rehired as the wrestling coach.
It started with a complaint from a parent and a couple of athletes about his coaching tactics, Brown told NJ Advance Media. They accused Denuto of instructing injured wrestlers to compete and faking hydration tests, interviews and court records revealed.
“I just don’t want kids treated that way. So I did not renew him,” Brown said.
Denuto retained counsel through the Sayreville Education Association and demanded a hearing with the board of education.
Battle lines were drawn. The parents of the wrestlers who came forward spoke out. But so did the Sayreville wrestling booster club president and a parade of other supporters who remained “100% behind Coach Denuto,” calling him “the best coach they’ve ever had,” according to the Home News Tribune.
The marathon June meeting ended after 11 p.m. with the board approving Denuto for the 2009-10 season at a stipend of $8,398.
But more allegations soon surfaced. This time, parents accused Denuto of forcing his wrestlers to get naked while he conducted skin checks, looking for signs of ringworm and other skin diseases common in a sport that demands skin-on-skin contact.
In his lawsuit, Denuto acknowledged he conducted skin checks, but denied doing “strip searches,” claiming he had developed an “accepted” health and safety procedure.
Once a common practice at some high schools, naked weigh-ins and skin checks had long been controversial by the time they were banned in 2010 by the National Federation of State High School Associations.
All seven board members who attended an emergency meeting in July 2009 voted to terminate Denuto as wrestling coach and transfer him from his high school teaching position to Sayreville Middle School.
Then-Sayreville superintendent Frank Alfano and school board president Michael Macagnone declined comment at the time in the only news coverage of the hearing. Attempts to reach both officials for this story were unsuccessful.
“We’re not permitted to discuss matters pertaining to current or previous employees,” current Sayreville superintendent Richard Labbe told NJ Advance Media.
Brown admits he was satisfied with the outcome at the time. He had ousted Denuto from the high school as both a teacher and coach.
Why was he content when Denuto still worked as a Sayreville teacher?
“There’s a human side to this,” Brown said. “Both his parents passed. You already took him out of coaching. Do you (proverbially) kill him?
“Hindsight is 20-20, but I felt like I did what I needed to do in removing him from the high school.”
In March 2010, Denuto filed his lawsuit against the Sayreville school board, multiple school officials — including Brown — and the parents who came forward with the allegations. He claimed that his right to due process was violated because he was not notified of the July 2009 hearing and had no chance to defend himself. He also claimed the parents of four wrestlers made defamatory and false statements against him.
The parents of four wrestlers filed a counterclaim against Denuto, alleging a pattern of behavior that endangered their children. It characterized his skin check actions as strip searches and contended he sent sexually explicit text messages, instructed wrestlers to hide skin diseases, and verbally and physically assaulted his wrestlers, the lawsuit said.
Two months before Denuto’s lawsuit was scheduled for trial, the case was settled with all the defendants except for one set of parents, court records indicate. Denuto was paid a $25,000 settlement from the Sayreville Board of Education, according to a document obtained by NJ Advance Media.
By the time of the settlement, Denuto had already rejoined the ranks of high school head coaches.
Short-lived jobs
Monroe school officials suspended Denuto and launched an investigation upon learning he had been fired as Sayreville’s wrestling coach.
But Denuto — who had been hired by the Middlesex County school as a football assistant a few months before the 2009 controversy — was on the sidelines that fall as its defensive coordinator, according to Beagan. He drew rave reviews that fall in helping it capture the NJSIAA Central Jersey Group III state championship.
But the district fired him after the season.
“I didn’t know at that time what (he was fired) for. It was done by our administration,” said Beagan, who had considered Denuto a friend.
The only explanation Beagan received was, “Listen, we’re protecting our students, and we’re protecting you as well,” he said.
Denuto had also been hired as Plainfield’s wrestling coach after his termination at Sayreville, according to his civil lawsuit. But the Union County district opted to fire him two weeks later without explanation.
Yet a series of coaching positions and private clinic jobs followed. Denuto remained a coveted coach, landing jobs at increasingly prestigious wrestling programs — even if many lasted only a season before he quietly quit or was terminated.
In May 2010, Denuto was back inside a high school wrestling room, highlighted as one of the instructors at St. John Vianney’s third annual summer wrestling club.
The Holmdel parochial power also hired Denuto as an assistant wrestling coach for the 2010-11 season. He then led the John Denuto Clinic at Raritan High School in May 2011.
Denuto then climbed back into the head coaching ranks, hired by Spotswood for the 2011-12 season — but coached at the Middlesex County school for only one season.
In 2013, the Hazlet school board approved a $7,136 stipend for Denuto to serve as assistant wrestling coach.
The following year, Denuto became Pennsville’s head wrestling coach. He worked at the Salem County school for only one year before landing what he called his “destination job” as head coach at Camden Catholic, a perennial state power.
“Sometimes a job comes along, it’s just right time, right place,” Denuto told NJ Advance Media in 2015.
He led the Irish to the second round of the sectional tournament, but school officials announced his resignation in a terse email on the morning of April 23, 2016.
As it turned out, it was a termination for breaking safety rules, former Camden Catholic athletics director Joe Galliera told NJ Advance Media.
“You couldn’t use a rubber suit (and other) methods to make a kid lose weight quickly, and I had pretty good proof that he had done that kind of stuff,” he said. “He basically out and out lied to me.”
(Galliera told NJ Advance Media he hadn’t heard any allegations of sexual impropriety at the time.)
Denuto then went to work for another parochial school in 2016, landing an assistant coaching position at St. Joseph Regional in Montvale. He was at the Bergen County powerhouse for three years before being named the first head coach of the fledgling Union County College wrestling program.
The junior college fired Denuto immediately after he was arrested in 2020. Noel, now the athletic director at North Idaho College, didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment or a voice mail message.
Passing the trash?
Denuto had no criminal record until the 2020 arrest.
But the warning signs had been there for years, education experts say.
The Sayreville accusations. His eventual termination as its wrestling coach. The 2010 civil lawsuit revelations. His lone season with the Monroe football team. And his quick exit at subsequent schools, including Camden Catholic.
The allegations and short tenures alone should’ve given school officials pause, according to Shakeshaft, the Virginia Commonwealth University professor and author of the forthcoming book, “Organizational Betrayal: How Schools Enable Employee Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It.”
“Regardless of whether he was cleared of any criminal behavior, a more thorough check of whether he abused students through his coaching methods should’ve been done,” she said.
Miller, the president of SESAME, pointed to another red flag.
“The fact that this guy could not last in one school for any length of time, that should’ve been a red flag for any employer,” she said. “The school hopping, or whatever you want to call it, is a huge red flag that he worked in that many high schools over that short period of time.
“So the hiring practices were abysmal. The reference checks were abysmal. And the transparency of information sharing between administrator to administrator was abysmal. And this is how this guy got away with it.”
Denuto’s coaching success also played a role, experts say. So did the culture of silence that pervades some school administrations, which remain tight-lipped about teachers under investigation to avoid lawsuits like the one Denuto pursued after Sayreville terminated him as a coach.
New Jersey’s 2018 “passing the trash” law might have prevented Denuto from resurfacing at schools throughout the state after his initial firing, Miller said.
The measure was designed to ensure school employees accused of sexual misconduct or child abuse have a tougher time moving from school to school, by — among other things — banning negotiated separation and confidentiality agreements and requiring schools to review the employment history of candidates to ensure they never faced allegations of sexual misconduct.
“It requires the hiring school districts ask all of his previous employers the same questions,” said state Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Morris), who co-wrote the legislation. “And so an applicant can lie. But the school districts who hired him after Sayreville would all have to contact Sayreville.”
However, exploitable loopholes might remain. For instance, under the “passing the trash” law, a job applicant would have to note in a written statement that he was under investigation for sexual misconduct when applying for subsequent jobs, as would the district that employed him. Yet, if those allegations were dismissed or deemed unsubstantiated, it would not have to be noted, according to the New Jersey School Boards Association.
“In general, there has to be some kind of finding of abuse by an entity, agency or court, etc. or some employment action taken as a result of a finding or pending investigation...” said Janet Bamford, chief public affairs officer for the New Jersey School Boards Association, in a statement. “If there is an investigation that yields a finding that the accusation was false or unfounded, it generally falls outside of the requirements.”
In addition, Sayreville continued to employ Denuto as a teacher, and he subsequently sued the district after his termination as coach — and secured a settlement.
Still, justice finally found Denuto in 2020.
Denuto’s former student came forward after telling a friend, who convinced him to tell his mother about the sexual abuse, according to prosecutors. The student then told police the encounters continued on multiple occasions and Denuto recorded them.
Wearing prison-issued tan garb over his 5-foot-10 frame, Denuto’s hair was disheveled and his bearded face looked unkempt in April as he pleaded guilty to three charges.
“Do you understand that doing so would impair or debauch the morals of a child?” Middlesex County Prosecutor Thomas Carver asked during the hearing.
“I did not at the time,” Denuto said, “but now I do, yes.”
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Keith Sargeant may be reached at ksargeant@njadvancemedia.com.
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