The state of New York opened a one-year filing period for sex abuse claims on Wednesday, and lawsuits against the Boy Scouts, the Catholic church, public schools and other high-profile defendants flooded state courthouses.
At close of the business day, state officials said 429 lawsuits had been filed under the Child Victims Act, including nearly 170 cases in New York City.
The Child Victims Act, which was enacted earlier this year, allows new lawsuits by victims of child sex abuse whose claims previously were barred by New York’s statute of limitations, which required suits be brought before victims turn 23 years old. The new statute of limitations for sex abuse claims gives victims until age 55 to file lawsuits and until age 28 to seek criminal charges.
Many organizations, such as New York’s Catholic bishops, had opposed the so-called “look back” law, calling the legislation an attack on the faith.
Others noted that legal costs could bankrupt the Catholic church. The bill cleared the state Assembly after the legislation was amended to include all victims of abuse, not just those harmed by the church.
“The fiscal impact on the Catholic Conference and other organizations won’t become clear for weeks or months,” Dennis Poust, spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, said Wednesday in an email to The Washington Times. “Today, though, is a day for survivors to tell their stories and to take an important step on their long journey toward healing.”
The Boy Scouts of America said Wednesday in a statement that it supported eliminating the criminal statute of limitations for child abuse, but noted “concerns with reforms” that would impose retroactive liability on organizations that lacked “actual knowledge of the specific misconduct underlying an allegation of abuse.”
Jessica Hanna, senior vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, which staunchly opposed to the bill, said victims “deserve to see justice served,” but called for stricter criminal penalties.
“Unfortunately, retroactive changes to civil remedies may have unintended impacts on institutions and insurance contracts,” Ms. Hanna said.
Among the lawsuits filed Wednesday, 45 former patients of Rockefeller University Hospital accuse a renowned endocrinologist of molesting hundreds of boys over more than three decades.
Hundreds of people sued the Catholic church or one of its several New York dioceses. Among them is Peter Vajda, who said a religious brother molested him when he attended a Catholic boarding school in the Bronx in the early 1950s.
Mr. Vajda, now 75, filed a lawsuit naming the Archdiocese of New York as a defendant.
“Now it’s their turn. Now it’s their time,” he said of church officials who allowed the abuse to go on. “And I want them to get everything they deserve in the way of punishment.”
Another lawsuit was filed by attorneys representing Jennifer Araoz, who says the late financier Jeffrey Epstein raped her at 15, forcing her to drop out of her specialty high school to avoid further contact from Epstein and his associates. (Epstein apparently killed himself last week in Metropolitan Correctional Center as he was awaiting legal proceedings on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges.)
The lawsuit also names Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite closely linked to Epstein, and three “Jane Does,” who recruited girls from New York high schools and facilitated payments to Ms. Araoz of $300 per visit to Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.
The New York State Unified Court System announced Tuesday that it had designated 45 judges statewide — including 12 in New York City’s five boroughs — to prepare for a deluge of lawsuits.
“The revived Child Victims Act cases are critically important cases, raising numerous challenging legal issues, that must be adjudicated as consistently and expeditiously as possible across the State,” said Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence K. Marks.
• Christopher Vondracek can be reached at cvondracek@washingtontimes.com.
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