LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) -- A federal judge has ordered five lawsuits pertaining to the sexual abuse allegations in the Louisville Metro Police Department's Youth Explorer program to be unsealed.
U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings's order identifies Matthew Gelhausen, Paul Brandon Paris, Julie Schmidt and Casey Scott as the four additional police officers as defendants in the lawsuits. Unlike Officers Brandon Wood and Kenneth Betts, these four officers are not accused of sexual abuse.
Wednesday afternoon, special investigator Kerry Harvey met with the Louisville Metro Council's Public Safety Committee, answering questions for about an hour about his investigation into the Explorer program. During the meeting, he repeated multiple times there was no massive cover-up in LMPD, but there were many serious mistakes that need to be remedied.
"That just doesn't comport with the way people normally act, and we didn't find any evidence that would indicate that they behaved in that way, and we found a lot of evidence that they didn't," Harvey told the committee.
But the former U.S. attorney's answers and his investigation's conclusions did not satisfy several members of the committee, including Council President David James, who pointed out the difference between Harvey's use of "massive cover-up" versus "cover-up."
"If one person does anything to protect anybody from any accountability from this situation, that's a cover-up," he said. "The police officers involved who had the answers to the questions were not interviewed by whom we had a contract with. And so that is not a complete investigation."
"Do I feel like this investigation was an independent, thorough investigation? No, I do not. BUt $140,000 later, here we sit," Public Safety Committee Chair Jessica Green said.
Among the issues raised during the meeting was the cost of Harvey's investigation. According to documents, the city's original contract with Dickinson Wright capped the cost at $50,000. The city later amended the contract, upping the cap to $70,000. Harvey said as of Wednesday, his firm has billed the city for more than $140,000 in services.
"We are going to be asked to use taxpayer dollars to spend that to pay for a half-investigation that is halfway complete that really cannot come to the conclusion it came to because you don't have the information," James said. "That is concerning."
Green asked Harvey during the meeting whether there were other officers involved in the abuse allegations that came up during his investigation. Harvey confirmed that there were, but never mentioned their role.
"Within a smaller nucleus of people, there was a very disturbing, completely unacceptable ongoing course of misconduct," he said, again denying there was an organizational cover-up of sexual abuse and misconduct.
"There are other officers that have been named outside of the two that have been indicted," Green said after the meeting. "That sounds like pervasive abuse to me. He was reluctant to say that and I'm not quite sure why."
The council was given subpoena powers last year. According to James and Green, the council members will discuss possible courses of action before making a decision on the next step in this case.
►Contact reporter Dennis Ting at dting@whas11.com. Follow him on Twitter (@DennisJTing) and Facebook.