America’s Boy Scouts, struggling to stay afloat as they compensate tens of thousands of past sexual abuse survivors, on Monday pledged to provide a trust fund for victims with at least $ 300 million of their local councils and policy income. insurance and sale of a collection of oil paintings by Norman Rockwell.
The offer was detailed in a reorganization plan submitted by the Boy Scouts, who filed for bankruptcy protection last year amid a wave of new sexual abuse cases after several states, including California, New York and New Jersey, expanded. legal options for child victims to sue.
The 379-page plan, filed on Monday at the United States Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, did not give a total of how much the 111-year-old organization is willing to pay to resolve more than 85,000 complaints of sexual abuse by ex- Scouts.
The details are yet to be negotiated with the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who are unlikely to readily agree with what is in the plan, which excludes high adventure camps and other valuable real estate across the country. At the time of the bankruptcy, the national organization had assets of more than $ 1 billion, with billions more in the hands of local councils.
“It’s really shameful,” said Paul Mones, a Los Angeles attorney who won a $ 20 million historic trial against Boy Scouts in 2010 and represents hundreds of accusers in the bankruptcy over the reorganization plan.
“Considering the enormity of the problem, are they taking care of the survivors as they should? I don’t think so, ”said Mones.
The bankruptcy suspended hundreds of lawsuits to allow for the potential negotiation of a global settlement. It also required that new abuse complaints be dealt with there, rather than in state courts.
On November 16, the “cut-off date” required by the court in which the lawsuits were to be filed, more than 92,000 accusers appeared, many of them recruited through aggressive advertisements on TV and on the Internet by law firms looking for clients. Several thousand were later eliminated as duplicate records.
The massive response exceeded all expectations and led the plaintiffs’ lawyers to predict that the number of complaints and the total payments to resolve them would easily eclipse those of the sexual abuse scandal that engulfed the United States Catholic Church more than a decade ago.
A researcher hired by the Boy Scouts to analyze his internal records in 2019 identified 7,819 suspected abuse and 12,254 victims – a fraction of the number of people who have filed lawsuits.
In a statement released on the last day to file a sexual abuse complaint in the bankruptcy court, the organization called the massive response from survivors of abuse “distressing”.
“We are devastated by the number of lives affected by previous abuse in Scouting and driven by the bravery of those who have come forward,” said the document. “We are heartbroken that we cannot undo your pain. … We feel deeply. “
Although the size of the compensation fund has not yet been determined, it will benefit from the revenue of hundreds of works of art, including more than 50 paintings by Rockwell.
The fund will also receive at least $ 300 million from local councils, according to the plan. But those contributions will be voluntary, said the Boy Scout registry, and there was no breakdown of how much each council would pay.
In California alone, Scout councils have more than $ 250 million in real estate, according to Seattle attorney Michael Pfau, whose company represents more than 1,000 claimants in bankruptcy.
“It seems very clear that the Boy Scouts are trying to hide the fact that these councils are not paying a fair amount and, worse, they are trying to force survivors of the abuses to give up their claims for almost nothing,” said Pfau.
Some insurers have refused to cover payments in previous sexual abuse cases, saying that Scouts could have prevented the abuse that led to the claims, court records show.
More recently, some have questioned the validity of thousands of bankruptcy claims, claiming that they have not been properly assessed by the lawyers who filed them.
In a statement released on Monday, the Boy Scouts called the reorganization plan a “critical step” to equitably compensate abuse survivors while continuing to fulfill their mission.
“There are still many aspects of the plan that we are refining through continuous mediation, but the amended plan is an important step in demonstrating the progress that we believe will eventually lead to a final plan that the Bankruptcy Court will confirm,” said the organization. .
“We are hopeful that we can reach a resolution that serves the best interests of survivors and all parties and that we can get out of Chapter 11 this fall,” the document said.
Hundreds of lawsuits against the organization emerged in the wake of the 2012 Los Angeles Times publication of internal Scout records involving nearly 5,000 men on a black list known as “perversion files”, a well-kept treasure trove of documents detailing allegations of sexual abuse against troop leaders and others that date back a century.
A year-long examination of the Times’ archives documented hundreds of cases in which the Boy Scouts did not report the charges to the authorities, concealed the allegations from parents and the public, or urged admitted abusers to discreetly resign – then helped to cover their tracks false explanations for your Matches.