The shapely aide to St. Patrick’s Cathedral’s alleged randy rector has contacted a lawyer specializing in sex discrimination and harassment after learning she may get the boot amid claims she’s having an affair with him, The Post has learned.
Leggy Laura DeFilippo’s $100,000-a-year job came into the crosshairs of archdiocese bigwigs after photos surfaced of her and her dapper, 79-year-old boss, Msgr. Eugene Clark, entering and leaving a cozy Hamptons motel together, sources said.
Clark wound up quitting his top spot at the famed Manhattan church Thursday after thumbing his nose at efforts to boot DeFilippo from her secretarial post, sources said.
Now, DeFilippo wants to make sure she isn’t cast onto the unemployment line over what she says are phony allegations of trysts with the priest, a source close to the case said.
New York Archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling declined to comment on the issue yesterday.
Through her divorce lawyer, Michael Berger, DeFilippo again ripped reports about the alleged affair.
“Out of concern for her children, my client Laura DeFilippo is taking the high road and not commenting on the distorted, false and sensa tionalized statements being made about her in the press and court papers,” Berger said. “We are just not going to get into all that.”
DeFilippo, a 46-year- old mom of two from East chester, is ac cused of having an affair with Clark in court papers filed by her hus band in their bit ter divorce case. Her 14-year-old daughter says she saw her mom smooching with the priest and sitting on his lap in his hot tub.
Clark – an erudite theologian whose dissertation at Notre Dame was about an obscure period in English Catholic church history in the 1800s – was thought to be holed up in his Amagansett hideaway with family and friends yesterday. Several adults and children could be seen lounging around the pool. The alleged frisky father – who in 2002 called the United States “probably the most immoral country in the Western Hemisphere” – was photographed with DeFilippo on July 21 outside a motel in Amagansett, in the Hamptons.
The private detectives who shot the footage said the couple wore different clothes when they went in and out of the hotel.
Clark and DeFilippo have denied doing anything wrong, and Clark said the incident has been portrayed in such a “false and sensational manner” that he was unable to continue his job as rector of St. Patrick’s.
Even without his job, the elderly monsignor – who Zwilling said earns $18,000 a year from the archdiocese – will remain a man of means.
For 45 years, he’s owned a home in Amagansett that sits on 1.3 acres of land just a short walk from the beach at Gardiners Bay. Public records indicate that for local property tax purposes, it’s worth about $400,000 – but its market value is likely $1 million or more, a local real estate expert said.
Meanwhile, the Catholic TV network that once aired Clark’s sermons in a TV series called “Relationships” has yanked the 5-year-old shows from its repeat schedule and scrubbed all traces of them off its Web site.
Additional reporting by Susan Edelman