Boy Scouts’ Sex Abuse Survivors Must Wait as Trust Goes Active

Thousands of former Boy Scouts poised to be compensated for sex abuse they suffered as children are likely to be waiting for months, or even years, to collect from a $2.4 billion bankruptcy settlement plan.

The Boy Scouts of America recently announced that its sex abuse settlement—the largest in US history—went into effect following the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit’s refusal to pause the 113-year-old youth organization’s bankruptcy plan. But payments aren’t making their way to abuse survivors just yet.

The process of transferring that amount of money to a victims’ trust and administering 82,000 claims, using complex formulas to determine the value of each, is expected to be cumbersome and time-consuming.

“How much and when? That’s what a survivor wants to know” in this case, said Chris Meidl, a claimant who was abused as a scout in the 1970s. “Hopefully the settlement trust process will move forward relatively quickly.”

“I think survivors need to brace for a long, tedious process,” he added.

The answers to Meidl’s questions are elusive. Appointed professionals waited for authorization just to begin implementing the trust distribution procedures. That initial work will take several weeks or months, and the trust will operate for the next few years, according to Barbara Houser, a retired bankruptcy judge selected to serve as settlement trustee.

“We ask those survivors to be patient with us as we begin our very important jobs of assisting them in telling us about their claims so that we may evaluate them fairly, consistently and as efficiently as possible,” Houser said in an online letter April 19, acknowledging that claimants have been “waiting decades for recognition.”

The Boy Scouts’ Chapter 11 took three years to complete. Plaintiffs’ attorney Ed Neiger of ASK LLP said he’s now able to tell clients that the plan going into effect is “good news.”

“It makes the chance of getting money sooner rather than later more likely,” he said. “A lot of clients were abused a long time ago and they’re now far along in years and are worried about getting the money in their lifetime.”

Massive Undertaking

Even though the bankruptcy plan can move forward immediately, getting money to survivors is still going to take time due to the structure of the plan payment scheme and the staggering number of claims filed against the organization.

The trust won’t be fully funded right away because some settlement contributions are on hold until the appeals process is finished, Neiger said.

Under the trust distribution procedures, the majority of claimants will have their recoveries determined through an intricate process overseen by Houser. Administrators will evaluate the strength of claims based on submitted answers to questionnaires, determining allocations based on the harm each person endured and the state in which the abuse occurred.

Depending on the state and corresponding statute of limitations policy, a penetration claim could be valued at up to $1.7 million if the abuse occurred in states such as Arizona or New York, but as little as $94,000 if it happened in states such as Kansas or Alabama that haven’t passed abuse claim revival measures.

Settling with tens of thousands of sex abuse survivors is “very unique” and requires enhanced measures to ensure funds are distributed correctly and thoughtfully, said Sam Dolce, an attorney whose firm specializes in delivering settlement funds to plaintiffs.

“This is one of the most complicated claims processes I’ve honestly seen around a personal injury case,” Dolce said.

Dolce anticipates his company, Milestone, will be doing distributions for dozens of plaintiffs’ firms. If everything plays out as committee lawyers have said, distributions could be made by the end of the year, “but it’s more likely they would go out around the beginning of next year,” he said.

Twice Appealed

The Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy in February 2020 amid a surge in sex abuse cases following the passage of state laws lifting statutory time restraints to file claims from decades ago. Through thousands of hours of mediated negotiations, the nonprofit pieced together a plan of reorganization that was supported by about 85% of claimants.

The plan relies on a series of heavily negotiated deals with the Boy Scouts’ primary insurers, a nationwide network of local councils, and organizations that traditionally sponsored scouting activities. In exchange for multimillion-dollar contributions to the trust, settlement parties received releases from future lawsuits.

Some insurance companies and two groups of abuse survivors opposed the plan, but Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein of the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware approved the accord in September. Judge Richard Andrews of the US District Court for the District of Delaware affirmed Silverstein’s decision on March 28.

The Third Circuit declined to stay the bankruptcy proceedings while it hears ongoing appeals.

“Our hope is that our Plan of Reorganization will bring some measure of peace to survivors of past abuse in Scouting, whose bravery, patience and willingness to share their experiences has moved us beyond words,” Roger Mosby, the Boy Scouts’ CEO, said in a statement.

The organization also announced the appointment of Glen Pounder, a founding board member of a nonprofit dedicated to combating the exploitation of children, to oversee new youth protection initiatives and safeguards.

Acknowledging Harm

While many abused scouts are “keenly interested” in knowing how much they’ll recover from the trust, said Meidl, some are agonizing about filling out another abuse questionnaire after already filing a proof of claim in the Chapter 11 case.

Meidl said he felt manic at times filling out paperwork detailing the abuse he suffered as a youth at the hands of a scoutmaster. “That was an intense process,” he said.

Additionally, some survivors “will more or less be penalized by where they were born and abused,” Meidl said, noting many “feel terrible” about the geographical disparities.

The settlement trust plan includes a provision that allows victims to defer the determination of claims for up to 12 months to see if statute of limitation revival legislation is passed in additional states. But that could have little effect on individual decision-making, said Bridie Farrell, an advocate for sex abuse survivors and founder of the nonprofit America Loves Kids.

While a handful of states are closer than others to passing laws that open up abuse claim filing windows, “people don’t come forward for the money, anyway,” she said. “The lawyer might call and you might have to talk about the worst days of your life at any moment.”

Neiger said the majority of questions he gets from clients are focused on when funds will be disbursed—but not necessarily on how much.

“I think for a lot of survivors it’s not about the money, it’s about justice,” he said. “The recovery they will get is an acknowledgment that they were harmed.”