NEW YORK -- Lawyers across the U.S. are recruiting clients for a potentially crippling new wave of sexual abuse lawsuits against the Boy Scouts.
Past payouts have already strained the organization's finances, and the group hasn't ruled out filing for bankruptcy. But now the threat is increasing because a number of states are moving to create a new legal window so victims of long-ago abuse can sue.
New York has passed a law that will allow such lawsuits starting in August. A similar bill in New Jersey has reached the governor's desk. Bills also are pending in Pennsylvania and California.
Plaintiffs' lawyers "recognize that this is a very unique and lucrative opportunity," said attorney Karen Bitar, who formerly handled sex-crime cases as a prosecutor in Brooklyn, N.Y., before going into private practice.
Attorney Tim Kosnoff, a veteran of sexual abuse lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Church, said Tuesday that he and his team have signed up 186 clients from dozens of states in just the past few weeks who want to be part of litigation against the Boy Scouts. Kosnoff said 166 of them identified alleged abusers who have not been named in any of the Boy Scouts files made public in past years.
Boy Scouts spokesman Effie Delimarkos said the organization continues to evaluate its financial situation, and she defended its current abuse-prevention policies. The organization serves more than 2.2 million youths.
A bankruptcy by the Boy Scouts could be unprecedented in its complexity, potentially involving plaintiffs in every state, according to several lawyers. It would be national in scope, unlike the various Catholic Church bankruptcy cases in the U.S., which have unfolded diocese by diocese.
"A Boy Scout bankruptcy would be bigger in scale than any other sex abuse bankruptcy," said Seattle-based attorney Mike Pfau, whose firm is representing more than 300 victims in New York state.
Jeffrey Schwartz, a New York-based bankruptcy expert with the firm McKool Smith, said the Boy Scouts doesn't have a particularly large flow of cash and might be forced to sell off property in bankruptcy. The Boy Scouts has extensive land holdings, including camping and hiking terrain.
"They'll play for time," Schwartz said. "If their defense costs and settlement costs are greater than their membership fees, it could be a death spiral."
However, Dallas-based trial attorney Michelle Simpson Tuegel, part of a team representing numerous sex-abuse survivors, said bankruptcy might benefit the Boy Scouts and reduce any payouts to plaintiffs.
"It can be a tool that these institutions use to shield assets and avoid having to reveal some information," she said. "In many ways, it's a disservice to victims."
Illustrating the depth of its problems, the Boy Scouts filed lawsuits last year against six of its own insurers, saying they have improperly refused to cover some of the sex-abuse liabilities incurred by the organization. The insurers say the coverage obligation is voided because the Boy Scouts failed to take effective preventive measures such as warning parents that Scouts might be abused. The suits are still pending.
The intensifying pressures on the Boy Scouts coincide with the mounting threats to the U.S. Catholic Church in regard to its own long-running sex abuse scandal. Catholic bishops will be meeting in Baltimore in June to discuss the next steps.
Both the church and the Boy Scouts kept voluminous secret files with names of suspected abusers, yet balked at sharing the information with the public.
Since the 1920s, the Boy Scouts has been compiling "ineligible files," which list adult volunteers considered to pose risks of child molestation. About 5,000 of the files have been made public as a result of court action; others remain confidential.
Delimarkos said when any Boy Scouts of America volunteers are added to the database for suspected abuse, "they are reported to law enforcement, removed entirely from any Scouting program and prohibited from re-joining anywhere."
Minnesota-based attorney Jeff Anderson, who had led many lawsuits against the Catholic Church, released a court deposition in New York on Tuesday in which an expert hired by the Boy Scouts said she tallied 7,819 individuals in the "ineligible files" as of January, as well as 12,254 victims.
Anderson expressed hope that litigation triggered by New York's new Child Victims Act would increase pressure on the Boy Scouts to make public more of the still-confidential files.
A Section on 04/25/2019