A court settlement has been reached in a “ghoulish class-action” lawsuit over the sale of body parts – from bodies donated for medical research – by a former morgue manager at Harvard.
And it has the school paying out $53 million to the families of the deceased.
A report from the New York Post explains a state court judge in Boston has preliminarily approved the deal in the legal action that resulted from the schemes of Cedric Lodge, the disgraced former Harvard morgue manager.
He was arrested back in 2023 and later was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling organs and body parts of cadavers donated to the school.
“As far back as 2018, Lodge had been stealing body parts — including ‘heads, faces, brains, skin and hands’ — which he’d then bring to his home in New Hampshire and sell with his wife, prosecutors said, shipping them to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” the report explained.
His wife, Denise, was given a year in jail for her role.
School officials called Lodge’s actions “despicable abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community.”
Harvard to pay $53M in suit over selling donated corpses on black market https://t.co/EmwYWUrMIq pic.twitter.com/JESjGATcKg
— New York Post (@nypost) August 19, 2026
Harvard agreed Monday to a $53 million settlement to resolve lawsuits accusing them of negligence in handling donated human remains, after a former morgue manager stole and sold body parts from as many as 400 cadavers.@RiyaShah233 reports.https://t.co/AAjpzv2Itf
— The Harvard Crimson (@thecrimson) August 18, 2026
The report cited “one horrifying example” documented during Lodge’s trial was that he “provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book,” the report said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin called that a “deeply horrifying reality.”
Martin charged, “In another, Cedric and Denise Lodge sold a man’s face — perhaps to be kept on a shelf, perhaps to be used for something even more disturbing.”
The lawsuit was by dozens of family members who accused the school of being negligent, claiming officials knew of the actions but ignored them.
The school also was required to provide a statement to the impacted families to confirm Lodge’s criminal acts were “morally reprehensible.”
A report at Not the Bee said, “Reports tell us these buyers were allowed to enter the morgue and pick out things they wanted to buy.”
