For many, bringing hidden trauma to light is a liberating experience, but for one Mobile County man, the decision after 50 years to finally confront the child sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a Boy Scout leader has only blown up in his face. The man, who asked not to be identified (and will be referred to as John), is nearly 70 years old now, a former local police officer who later pursued a career in radio as a host on programs serving audiences across the Gulf Coast. He allowed Lagniappe to publish details about his life.

The bankruptcy system was never designed to manage sexual abuse claims. US bankruptcy law has long been understood as a response to economic distress rather than mass torts. Built in the 1970s to address debt problems, Chapter 11 doesn’t reflect what we now know about trauma or how institutions mishandled sexual abuse cases for decades. Yet youth organizations, churches, schools, and nonprofits progressively use Chapter 11 bankruptcy to resolve thousands of revived or long buried claims. Survivors can face unparalleled barriers. Trauma often delays disclosure for many years, but bankruptcy deadlines have peculiarly short bar dates ignore that...

The Supreme Court won’t review the Boy Scouts of America’s multibillion-dollar bankruptcy plan and the broad legal protections it grants to the youth group’s insurers and nonprofit partners to resolve claims of childhood sexual abuse. The justices on Monday declined an appeal from a group of sex-abuse survivors who opposed the chapter 11 plan, leaving intact lower-court rulings that ended the largest-ever bankruptcy case involving childhood sexual abuse. The Boy Scouts emerged from bankruptcy in 2023 with a victims’ compensation trust funded with at least $2.5 billion in pledged assets, including payments from insurers to settle their coverage obligations.

The Supreme Court won’t review a bankruptcy plan for the Boy Scouts of America, keeping in place a resolution of tens of thousands of claims against the organization and compensation for sexual abuse survivors. The court on Jan. 12 rejected an appeal from one group of survivors opposed to the $2.5 billion plan, which was confirmed by a bankruptcy court in 2022. Other victims of sexual abuse and the Boy Scouts of America had urged the court not to intervene. Reopening the case would throw the future of the organization into question and be a "devastating, re-traumatizing...

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a $2.4 billion bankruptcy settlement for the Boy Scouts of America, rejecting an appeal from a group of childhood sex-abuse victims who said the deal unlawfully blocked them from suing groups that ran local scouting programs. The group of victims – 75 people out of more than 82,000 who filed claims against the Boy Scouts – argued that the justices should have reopened the settlement in light of its decision last year in a similar legal dispute in involving Purdue Pharma, the maker of the opioid pain mediciation OxyContin. In that case, a 5-4...

Five years after it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 to deal with thousands of sexual abuse claims, the Boy Scouts of America reached a significant milestone when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently rejected the most significant challenges to the organization's chapter 11 plan, which established a trust to pay the claims of abuse victims. In In re Boy Scouts of Am., 137 F.4th 126 (3d Cir. 2025), reh'g denied, Nos. 23-1664 et al. (3d Cir. June 13, 2025), the court of appeals ruled that: - An appeal filed by abuse claimants of the...

The total value of the claims billed to insurers so far exceeds more than $12 billion, while the bankruptcy plan estimated the amount to be up to $3.6 billion Tens of thousands of individuals who were sexually abused in the Boy Scouts of America are facing increasingly dim prospects for receiving the compensation they were told they would get during the youth group’s bankruptcy. The cost of fully compensating abuse survivors has ballooned, with insurers receiving bills for at least $12 billion so far from a settlement trust and with roughly 17,000 claims still needing to be reviewed.

The Supreme Court on Thursday blew up the massive bankruptcy reorganization of opioid maker Purdue Pharma, finding that the settlement inappropriately included legal protections for the Sackler family, meaning that billions of dollars secured for victims is now threatened. The court on a 5-4 vote on nonideological lines ruled that the bankruptcy court did not have the authority to release the Sackler family members from legal claims made by opioid victims. In aftermath of the decision, the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma and lawyers for the plaintiffs expressed hope that a new deal could quickly be reached. As part...