A 6-month-old lawsuit against the Boy Scouts by a man sexually abused for years by a Hot Springs troop leader known to be a child molester by the boy's club was filed too late to go forward, a Pulaski County circuit judge ruled Wednesday.
The three-year Arkansas statute of limitations means that October 2015 was the deadline for claims like William Stevens', which was filed in June, Judge Chris Piazza said, dismissing the case on the arguments of the Scouts.
"If you follow the plaintiff's reasoning ... this would do away with the statute of limitations," the judge said.
There is no dispute that Stevens was molested by Samuel C. Otts eight times over a two-year period beginning in 1979 when he was a 10-year-old Cub Scout and Otts was a Scout Master for Troop 16 and Webelos Unit 13 between 1979 and 1980.
There is also no question the Scouts national organization knew Otts had been accused of sexual abuse as early as January 1977 and had deemed him ineligible to participate in Scouting. The group's files show he'd been a Georgia teacher -- and a Scoutmaster -- when he was accused of fondling a student and was fired. He moved to Arkansas, joining the Hot Springs Scouts in May 1977.
Arkansas leaders apparently didn't know until August 1980 -- after Otts had been a Scout leader for about three years -- when a woman complained that he had molested her son and another boy, both Cub Scouts, on a camping trip.
Otts, then 50, admitted to the abuse and resigned, according to the group's own records, which describe his admission to the Arkansas program as a mistake in the club's internal vetting process. But police were never informed about what he'd done.
Otts' whereabouts -- and even if he's still alive -- are unknown. He was also affiliated with the Salvation Army in Arkansas at about the same time, according to the lawsuit.
Otts' abuses -- and the Scouts' practice of keeping secrets about child molesters among its leadership -- were revealed six years ago in an October 2012 Oregon court decision, the result of a lawsuit by news media, which forced the public disclosure of more than 1,200 of the club's "perversion files." Otts was one of two former Arkansas Scout leaders publicly exposed by the disclosure.
The revelation was front-page news across the country, including in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. And that's when Arkansas' statute of limitations comes into play, Stuart Miller, the attorney representing both the national group and the Arkansas chapter, the Quapaw Area Council, argued Wednesday.
The Quapaw council, Arkansas' largest, is the successor of the original chapter, the Ouachita Area Council, due to a 2012 merger.
Stevens' suit is based on the premise that Scouts deliberately covered up what was going on, but even taking that accusation into consideration, Arkansas law requires plaintiffs to prove that the information in question was not available through other means that could be found by "reasonable diligence," Miller told the judge, citing state Supreme Court precedent.
"The information was out there to the public in 2012. It's undisputed that they didn't file within the three years," Miller said. "It would be very simple to find under a Google search. With reasonable diligence, he should have known. This stuff was out everywhere."
Stevens never saw any news coverage about Otts or the Scouts, and he didn't know what the Scouts knew about Otts until he did a Google search for his abuser years later "on a whim," his attorneys Josh Gillespie of Little Rock and Stephen Crew of Oregon told the judge.
"My client had no reason to be searching in 2011 or 2014 or whenever," Crew said.
A single story in the newspaper does not prove that Stevens didn't do everything he was supposed to do before suing, Crew said. He said the Scouts could not prove what information would have been available and when it would have been available to Stevens over the Internet.
Piazza's ruling does not completely extinguish the case but does call its fate into question. Two more accusers, James Allen of Tennessee and Lavell Campbell of Indiana, joined the lawsuit last week after learning about the Scouts and Otts in 2017. Miller, the Scouts' attorney, said he'd be making the same arguments on their part of the litigation.
Otts was also their Scout Master in Hot Springs when he molested them numerous times about the same time as Stevens, according to the lawsuit. Allen was between 12 and 13 years old while Campbell was 10 or 11.
Metro on 12/20/2018